Source: The Daily Economy
by Peter C Earle

“Elon Musk recently put forth a bold vision: that within two decades, AI will automate virtually all productive activity, work will be optional, and money will lose meaning. Coming from Musk, such pronouncements carry gravitas. And noticeably, the expressed vision unsurprisingly dovetails neatly with Musk’s admittedly exciting entrepreneurial visions. Yet variants of those claims have circulated for years, usually without reference to economic theory, institutional constraints, or political risk. Rigorously examining those assertions is essential to decouple technological optimism from the practical realities that will shape the next two decades.” (01/02/26)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/even-elons-techno-utopia-wont-make-money-meaningless/

Source: Common Dreams
by Medea Benjamin & Michelle Ellner

“Overnight, the United States government bombed civilian and military sites across Venezuela and illegally kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. These are blatant and illegal acts of war by the Trump Administration. This act of aggression is a continuation of US attempts to seize and plunder Venezuela’s natural resources and undermine Venezuela’s sovereignty as well as the sovereignty of other countries in Latin America. This war also does not reflect the will of the people. Nearly 70% of Americans oppose another war and reject the endless cycle of military interventions carried out in their name. … The U.S. now claims Maduro will face ‘criminal charges’ in a US court. This sham proceeding will be done under the auspices of ‘drug trafficking’ — but we know it has nothing to do with that, and everything to do with Trump’s policy of regime change.” (01/03/25)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-venezuela-2674845101

Source: The UnPopulist
by Daniel M Rothschild

“Both extremes are recycling old ideologies, but liberalism has a far stronger hand to counter them before they cause the death and destruction of the last century.” (01/02/26)

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/fortunately-liberals-can-more-easily

Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Sven Beckert

“It is impossible to pinpoint an exact place or moment when capitalism began. Capitalism is a process, not a discrete historical event with a beginning and an end, and it did not drop fully formed into a particular location. Even today, no society is organised along fully capitalist lines, and some have argued that a fully capitalist world is a theoretical impossibility. Efforts to isolate one patch of soil as capitalism’s place of origin — Florence, Barbados, Amsterdam, Baghdad, the southern English countryside, or Manchester, for example — have all proved insufficient. That is because the capitalist revolution had always been a process that drew energy from myriad sources.” (01/02/26)

https://fee.org/articles/where-did-capitalism-really-begin/

Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey

“I am not sure if you caught Zohran Mamdani’s swearing in ceremony and his speech as he became New York City’s new mayor, but it was an eye opener for sure. I am going to leave his notion that the collective is better than the individual comment aside as I want to focus on a gesture he did during the event, that was precisely the same as Elon Musk made during a similar event almost a year ago. Yet, the mainstream media has taken two dramatically different views to create a false narrative that the public happily ate up.” (01/02/26)

https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/musk-vs-mamdani-unmasking-the-medias