This and that for your Tuesday reading.

– Gabriel Zucman discusses the dangers of an era of trillionaires, as well as the option available to rein in obscene wealth and power. Robert Reich notes that the key point in common between the wealthiest few people on earth lies in obvious assholery rather than any merit or accomplishment. Wajahat Ali talks to Gil Duran about the billionaire heist of wealth in the U.S., while Harold Meyerson writes about the desperate need for the U.S.’ working class to start standing its ground in an ongoing class war even as both political parties seek to cede the field to the plutocrats. And Tim Bousquet rightly notes that there’s precious little difference between Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre in their utter subservience to capital. 

– Adam Rogers laments that the Trump regime has turned U.S. public policy firmly against science and research. 

– Mitchell Beer writes that Ontario’s latest power contract award shows that there’s no justification for putting public money toward fossil gas rather than clean energy and battery storage. Lior Kahana notes that new modeling confirms that in Austria (among other countries) there’s immense potential to make both power production and agriculture more efficient by integrating their operations. And Auke Hoekstra points out that the affordability of solar panels makes them a potential solution to extreme poverty (in contrast to the false promise of capital-focused extraction). 

– Finally, Dan Cohen and and Dillon Mahmoudi point out how surveillance pricing is already the norm in Canada. Carl Anthony discusses how our cars are regularly spying on us – as even the large cost of a vehicle doesn’t make us any less the product whose data is being collected and sold. And Michael Geist warns that the Carney Libs are slashing the minimal privacy enforcement which currently exists in Canada, with the bare promise of starting a new regulator from scratch as an afterthought in a digital policy regime fixated on AI hype.