The Big Picture

While diplomats in Islamabad negotiate a ceasefire that neither side is honoring, the Pentagon is asking for $1.5 trillion — a 42% year-over-year increase — and defense contractors are lining up to collect. The Iran war is already repricing fuel for ordinary travelers, gutting Patriot missile stockpiles, and threatening a global recession the IMF quietly modeled while everyone watched oil futures. The bill for this conflict is being handed to working people, and the profiteers are already cashing in.

Today's Stories

The Pentagon Just Handed Contractors a $1.5 Trillion Wish List — While Workers Pay $104 More Per Plane Ticket

The Pentagon unveiled a $1.5 trillion FY2027 budget proposal — a 42% jump over last year — with drone spending tripling to $74 billion and Tomahawk cruise missile purchases jumping 14-fold. The single most staggering line: the Drone Autonomous Warfare Group is requesting $54.6 billion, up from $225.9 million last year — a 24,070% increase. Meanwhile, ordinary people are absorbing the war's real costs. Jet fuel above $100 a barrel since February has added $104 per passenger to European long-haul flights. The EU is preparing fuel-rationing guidelines for summer. The IMF's April 2026 World Economic Outlook models a 1.3 percentage-point hit to global growth and inflation at 5.8% if oil stays elevated. The defense industry is being handed a generational windfall. The rest of us are getting a recession. Ask yourself who lobbied for this war, and who is paying for it.

Meta Is Keylogging Its Own Workers to Build AI — Your Workplace Could Be Next

Meta is installing tracking software on U.S.-based employees' computers to capture mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and occasional screenshots. The program is called the "Model Capability Initiative." CTO Andrew Bosworth has framed the goal as building systems where "agents primarily do the work." This is surveillance capitalism turned inward — a corporation treating its own workforce as raw data to be harvested and replaced. The endgame, per Meta's own framing, is AI agents that handle the work while humans merely "direct, review and help them improve." Meta already holds a 49% stake in Scale AI, whose former CEO now runs Meta's AI superintelligence labs. In the EU, this kind of collection requires explicit consent and demonstrated necessity. In the U.S., workers have almost no such protection. If this becomes the template — and it will — every Fortune 500 with AI ambitions will quietly roll out identical programs. Labor organizers: this is the terrain of the next contract fight.

DOJ Charges the SPLC While Iran War Profiteers Escape Scrutiny

The Justice Department, under Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on fraud charges. The SPLC called the case politically motivated. This is the same DOJ that has not opened a single publicly known investigation into the over $1 billion in "perfectly timed" Iran war bets now drawing insider-trading scrutiny across oil markets and prediction platforms, per reporting circulating in trading circles. The CFTC and DOJ have yet to file anything. The pattern is clarifying: the government's prosecutorial muscle is being deployed against a civil rights organization while the people who apparently knew a war was coming — and positioned accordingly — face no public accountability whatsoever. Blanche defended the SPLC action publicly. He has said nothing about the war bets.

America's Cyber Defenses Are Being Hollowed Out During an Active Shooting War

A War on the Rocks analysis published this week argues the White House's new cyber strategy is structurally incoherent: it demands hardened critical infrastructure and robust response capacity while simultaneously gutting the agencies responsible — CISA and NSA. This is not a theoretical vulnerability. The Iran conflict has demonstrated that kinetic and cyber operations run in parallel. The strategy offloads more defensive burden onto private telecom and cloud companies that own the infrastructure but answer to shareholders, not the public. The Bureau of Industry and Security this week also imposed a $95 million penalty on Cadence Design Systems for illegal chip-design software exports — the largest EDA enforcement action on record — signaling that the technology cold war is accelerating even as domestic cyber capacity erodes. A Colonial Pipeline-scale incident during an active war, with no federal capacity to respond, is not a hypothetical. It is the logical outcome of these budget decisions.

Texas Ten Commandments Ruling Clears Path to Supreme Court — Religious Imposition in Public Schools Advances

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that Texas can require public-school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. The ruling sets up a likely Supreme Court fight over the separation of church and state in public education. This is a direct consequence of a decade of deliberate judicial appointments designed to reshape constitutional interpretation in favor of Christian nationalist priorities. The students who will sit under those displays — Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, atheist, Indigenous — had no say. Their families, many of them working-class and without resources to relocate or pay for private schooling, will bear the cost of a culture war being waged by people with lifetime appointments and no accountability to the communities they are reshaping.

What to Watch

• [CONFIRMED] If the naval blockade of Iran's ports remains in place while Iranian gunboats continue firing on commercial shipping, then insurance and routing costs will keep climbing regardless of diplomatic statements — and those costs will be passed directly to consumers. (Confirmed: gunboat incident reported inside the ceasefire window; blockade confirmed ongoing)
• [ASSESSED] If Samsung's unions follow through on an 18-day strike from May 21 to June 7, then global HBM memory supply for AI data centers tightens significantly — and the workers whose labor underpins the entire AI boom will have finally found their leverage point. (Assessed: rally scheduled April 23, strike dates announced, negotiations ongoing)
• [ASSESSED] If the $1 billion in "perfectly timed" Iran war bets produces no CFTC or DOJ filings within 30 days, then the two-tier justice system — aggressive prosecution of civil society organizations, immunity for financial actors — will be confirmed in plain sight. (Assessed: story confirmed circulating in trading circles; no public filings reported)
• [SPECULATIVE] If Meta's employee keylogging program faces no EU data protection authority challenge, then the surveillance of workers as AI training data becomes a normalized corporate practice with no meaningful legal constraint anywhere in the world. (Speculative: EU inquiry possible but not confirmed)

The Closer

A $1.5 trillion defense budget, a DOJ targeting civil rights organizations, and corporations harvesting their own workers' keystrokes to build the machines that will replace them — this is not a series of disconnected news events. It is a coherent transfer of power: upward, away from workers and communities, toward the contractors, platforms, and financial actors who positioned themselves to profit from every crisis they helped create. The IMF is modeling a global recession in all but name. The question is not whether ordinary people will pay for this war. They already are.