POWER ... a 2026 Poem by Anne Selden Annab

                  POWER

Billionaires hoard wealth in part, 

by deploying a small fraction 

of their ginormous wealth to persuade-

persuading leaders to vote for data centers 

and shape public policies 

that build Billionaire wealth 

and increasing political influence:

The VORTEX spins...

Erasing democracy.

Erasing equality.

Erasing justice.

Erasing security for most people, 

excluding, of course, the Billionaires' own personal empires-

the influencers they train, the puppets they prop up, 

the politicians they own,

the armies they build to bully US.

Massive Data Centers

hide Billionaire corruption 

and cover up Billionaire greed

in a trillion different ways...

Human history online is rewritten

bit by bit, to empower

and reward Billionaires even further.

A bloodless coup d'état

to impoverish We The People 

individually and collectively.

A global game of get get get

more wage slaves

to cook the food and clean the toilets

on the mega-yachts and in the McMansions

More wage slaves

for whatever whims and itches

the Billionaires and their

calculating Data Centers might feel.

 

 poem copyright ©2026 Anne Selden Annab

A.I. Is Now a Major Election Issue: As Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s newly elected Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, put it, “People really effing hate data centers.”

The New Yorker Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Getty

Story by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

August 9, 2026

This summer, as the ideologically fractious Democratic primaries begin to recede and the politically pivotal midterm elections edge nearer, candidates and voters alike have had their attention drawn by vast, humming edifices newly constructed on the outskirts of towns. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public-health official who finished a deft insurgent campaign by becoming Michigan’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, sounded a theme that helped decide primaries in his state and in Kansas last week. “People really effing hate data centers,” he said.

That kind of consensus is rare in politics right now. About seventy per cent of Americans, including sixty-three per cent of Republicans, oppose building the hyper-scale centers that power the A.I. boom in their area, according to Gallup, but more than four thousand centers have been built across the country, and about four thousand more are planned. Politicians, first from the left and then from the center and the right, have spent the past few months hastily distancing themselves from them. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a federal moratorium on new data centers in March, and the pragmatic governor Kathy Hochul enacted the first statewide one in New York in July. The rallying cries against A.I. can themselves sound a bit as if ChatGPT wrote them. “It’s time to press control-alt-delete to put a stop to this A.I.-data-center crisis,” a closing ad for Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who is the front-runner in this Tuesday’s primary for Wisconsin governor, announced. Still, when something is this unpopular, blunt talk can work... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/17/ai-is-now-a-major-election-issue

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"Given the way things are going in the US, corporations seem to have more freedom of speech than university students. And it might not be long before datacenters have more rights than women."

 The Week in Patriarchy  AI (artificial intelligence)

Pity the poor AI datacenters facing ‘discrimination’

The centers are diverting much-needed resources from regular people. Local resistance has the industry playing defense 

 

by Arwa Mahdawi 

 

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/may/16/pity-the-poor-ai-datacenters-facing-discrimination

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‘The people getting filthy rich from AI will never have to live next door to their moneymaking creations.’ Photograph: Mark Hertzberg/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

"The parallels between the Germany of the 1930s and the United States of America today are frightening." A Holocaust teacher’s warning: Will ‘good Americans’ speak up this time? | PennLive letters

Photo Credit: The Nazi concentration camp at Dachau was liberated by American soldiers of the 45th Infantry Division, Seventh Army, on April 30, 1945. Prisoners who were able to stand and to comprehend that the hour of deliverance had come cheered the liberators just days before the final collapse of the Third Reich.

Published: Mar. 23, 2026

As a former Social Studies teacher who taught a 30-day unit on the Holocaust, I had the good fortune to have had several Holocaust survivors and numerous college professors speak to my classes over the years.

As we discussed how Germany, a country with a constitution, an elected government, and a system of law was taken over by an ego-maniac (Hitler, and the Nazis), the lyrics of the song from the musical South Pacific, a”You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught," were offered as one of the explanations.

When asked by the students if there weren’t any “good Germans” who stood up to the Nazis, the poem “First They Came” by Pastor Martin Niemöller was introduced.

The parallels between the Germany of the 1930s and the United States of America today are frightening.

We have a government today that violates the Constitution, refuses to obey the decisions of the courts, and kills American citizens... READ MORE   https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2026/03/a-holocaust-teachers-warning-will-good-americans-speak-up-this-time-pennlive-letters.html?gift=6cf2e016-c23b-421b-b8fd-e1b2d895a4ba 

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Mark S. Singel: "This war is illegal and unconstitutional. It is raining death and destruction on countless innocent civilians who are simply in the way. The war is draining America of resources and costing families billions of dollars in higher prices and declining pension accounts. ​But it may be worse than that. It may be the beginning of a cycle of destruction caused by the deranged vision of one man. "

"... This war is illegal and unconstitutional. It is raining death and destruction on countless innocent civilians who are simply in the way. The war is draining America of resources and costing families billions of dollars in higher prices and declining pension accounts.

​But it may be worse than that. It may be the beginning of a cycle of destruction caused by the deranged vision of one man.

In a stunning article featured in The Guardian, some commanders are carrying an “end-of-times” message into the fray. One officer reported that his commander “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan … that President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”

​Even the most ardent MAGA supporters must know that it has never been the policy of America to initiate wars.

Yes, there have been clandestine operations that presidents have undertaken in the past.

Yes, we have engaged in conflicts that bogged down in the jungles of Vietnam or the deserts of Afghanistan. But we have never boasted about kidnapping foreign leaders or decapitating regimes just because we had the ability to do so.

​The real cost of Trump’s adventurism in the Mideast is that it validates behaviors that were, until now, reserved for the worst blood-thirsty leaders in history."

Trump’s war on Iran is an unconstitutional assault on American democracy | Opinion

• Published: Mar. 14, 2026

• Guest Editorial

By Mark S. Singel

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https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2026/03/trumps-war-on-iran-is-an-unconstitutional-assault-on-american-democracy-opinion.html?gift=d437e2df-540e-4bbd-87f7-bfa1f787eaf6 

So the State Department used an emergency authority to give Israel $650 million in 500lb, 1000lb, and Small Diameter bombs. What happens next?

A New Policy

 

@anewpolicyorg

 

So the State Department used an emergency authority to give Israel $650 million in 500lb, 1000lb, and Small Diameter bombs. What happens next?

 

BREAKING: Late on a Friday evening, when public attention is at its lowest, the Administration is once again blowing up the Congressional review process to notify a major arms sale to Israel. Details to follow.

 

With U.S. munitions stockpiles under strain, tonight @SecRubio is invoking emergency authority to expedite the sale to Israel of 20,000 munitions worth over $650 million.

 

The sale includes 12,000 BLU-110 1,000lb bombs made by Turkish firm @Repkon_Inc 's US subsidiary. Some of the bombs will be transferred directly *from U.S. stocks* per @StateDeptPM

The BLU-110 is the base bomb for the MK-83, which has been cited by the UN as having been used in strikes in Gaza including on hospitals. See   https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/12/pattern-israeli-attacks-gaza-hospitals-raises-grave-concerns-report

The remainder of the transfers, including 10,000 BLU-111s (the component bomb for the MK-82 500lb bomb) will not be publicly posted because they are an expansion of a previously notified case - such expansions are sent to Congress, but not publicly posted. 

https://x.com/anewpolicyorg/status/2030073081130021083

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https://anewpolicypac.org/ 

A New Policy

@anewpolicyorg

 

America’s lobby for a new U.S. policy toward the Middle East that advances our interests and aligns with our values.

Washington, D.C.

Americans who believe in a U.S. policy toward the Middle East that advances American interests and reflects American values of freedom, equality and human rights. 

What We Do

Provide supporters with the critical information and resources needed to determine which candidates for Congress support a new policy toward the Middle East. 

Who We Support

Candidates for federal office who seek to support a new U.S. policy toward the Middle East that serves American interests, reflects American values, and complies with American law.

US politics: After years spent documenting state terror, I know it when I see it. And I see it now in the US and Israel. It’s chilling to watch as Trump and Netanyahu adopt the methods of regimes their countries once condemned

 Janine di Giovanni is a war correspondent and the executive director of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza

"The true irony is, state terror does not make a state safer. When democratic states adopt the methods of tyrannies, they become weaker. Their global credibility frays. They sacrifice the legitimacy they once held that distinguishes them from the regimes they claim to oppose." 

'WE CAN'T TRUST YOU' witness protest sign as Officers arrest an anti-ICE protester in Minneapolis Minnesota, 30 January 2026. Photograph: Craig Lassig/UPI/Shutterstock

In Syria, where I worked during the years of Bashar al-Assad’s terror, people were often taken away to torture cells before dawn by masked men. The timing was deliberate. It disoriented them at their most vulnerable, ensuring the torture to come would be even more agonising. The testimonies I recorded from survivors almost always contained the same phrase: “The morning they came for me.” One young woman, shattered by rape and violence, later told me that her life had split in two – before and after the masked men came for her.

In Iraq, those who spoke against Saddam Hussein – even abroad, even casually – were punished in cruel ways by a vengeful leader determined to crush any hint of dissent.

In Egypt in 2016, Giulio Regeni, a 28-year-old Italian academic researching labour unions, was abducted, beaten and tortured to death, it is thought, by president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi’s security services. His own mother had difficulty recognising his mutilated body.

During the second Chechen war, I met the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Chechnya. She repeatedly attacked Vladimir Putin’s policies, documenting human rights abuses during Russia’s military campaigns. To punish her, a bullet was put in her brain on Putin’s birthday – a warning to other truth-seekers. Stay silent or die.

In the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli soldiers, masked and unmasked, kill, torture and imprison Palestinian doctors, journalists, teachers, activists and scholars not for what they have done – but because of who they are.

After decades of documenting state terror, I know how it starts. Governments begin to use words like security, order, deterrence. Every excuse for Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct in Gaza is framed as “security”. ICE agents are trained in a language of order in which violence becomes procedure.

What happens when democratic states adopt the methods of the regimes they once condemned? Terror is not only masked men and arbitrary detention. It also operates through fear. Policies are designed to make people more compliant, more submissive. As the historian Timothy Snyder warned in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, this is how societies slide into danger: people obey in advance.

In Donald Trump’s US, I have watched CEOs, academics, journalists and government officials allow fear to override decency and moral authority. I have seen this pattern before. It begins with... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/08/state-terror-us-israel-donald-trump-benjamin-netanyahu

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