The November midterm elections are shaping up to be a real barnburner. On one side, Team Evil is going in hard for the coup-attempting child-trafficking-linked delusional fascist dismantling anything that ever did any good for anyone. Real hard.

Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political strategists from both parties. [...]

U.S. companies have spent an unprecedented $517 million on the 2026 U.S. House and Senate races in the 15 months through the end of the first quarter, exceeding the record $461 million in corporate spending over two years for the 2024 elections, data compiled by corporate accountability nonprofit group Public Citizen shows.

Public Citizen reports that of that half billion, nearly $300 million was from those three industries alone, and that's just spending from 2026's first quarter. Nearly $200 million was from crypto companies alone, and given that the two major use cases for crypto company products are organized crime and slightly less organized crime, there's a case to be made that the 2026 midterms will be the first House and Senate races sponsored by Drug Money.

Drug Money: It's What Runs The World™

And speaking of drugs and money, there's now word that Elon Musk is once again getting back into politics after swearing off politics—who coulda figured, right—and plans to spend up to $200 million by himself to prop up Republicanism's criminal wing, including Texas' remarkably crooked Ken Paxton.

Musk is probably smart enough to know not to give the money to Paxton directly, since Paxton would almost certainly just steal it and head off to a new life in Mexico. And that's a shame, because (a) convincing Ken Paxton to leave the country is probably worth a lot more than $200 million and (b) there's nobody who needs $200 million less than Robot Tunnel Rocket Car Brainchip Nonconsensual Nudes Generator Race War Nazi Guy.

It's now just presumed, in America, that the wealthiest Americans will attempt to buy their own government. The Supreme Court said they are allowed to, because money is freer speech than speech itself is, and you know it's true because when non-rich Americans try to use their free speech rights they're kettled into fenced-off "free speech zones" but the Roberts Court invariably gets very, very mad if you suggest that maybe money should have a fence around it too. So this is how we live, now. In a year and a half, the second Trump "presidency" has created disaster after disaster, engaged in rampant illegality for funsies, and put the economy, oil supplies, food infrastructure, weather forecasting, military readiness, public safety, and U.S. international standing all in crisis at the same time.

To the people who've most benefited from the Republican Party's collapse into scoundrelism, though, none of this matters because what's really important is that their own sources of wealth go unregulated. Completely unregulated. As in, even the slightest hint of regulation will send all these billionaires immediately into Nazism, if they think those are the only available choices. And you'd think that was overstating the case, except a half a billion dollars likely headed to a billion dollars worth of midterm campaign spending pretty much proves it.

As long as American billionaires can sell people money laundering tokens they can use to generate nudes of neighborhood children while placing bets on the damage suspiciously set fires might do, they'll do fine. Who cares which aircraft carriers get poop-flooded, or which international trading partners pack up and fk right off, or whether the midwest has power or drinking water on any given day.

We all understand that election spending is going to take place. What's impressive about this newest round is that I'm not sure it has ever been so cleanly divided into Team Evil vs everybody else. Take a look at that Reuters line again:

Crypto companies, artificial intelligence firms and online betting have emerged as the biggest industries shaping the 2026 midterm races, driving a record amount of business spending on congressional contests, according to campaign finance watchdogs and interviews with more than a dozen political strategists from both parties.

Huh, would you look at that. The biggest campaign spenders in the midterm elections are:

"Crypto companies," which have been desperately trying to find a use case for their product that does not involve money laundering, online extortion schemes, or industrial-scale scam factories.

"Artificial intelligence firms," which are desperately trying to avoid an almost-certain industry collapse driven by astronomic and still-increasing debt loads papered over with Enron-level accounting shenanigans.

"Online betting," an industry that connects the wallets of compulsive gamblers to those of anonymous insider traders, leaving 94% of their "customers" worse off.

We've got the man who bought Twitter, turned it into a site for extremists, and is now staking future success on a chatbot that pumps out disinformation, hoaxes, and A.I. nudes of anyone you might happen to have a picture of. We've got the billionaires behind mass surveillance, memecoins, and speculative arson all lined up to shake Trump's hand and throw money at him.

All these guys want very, very much for Trump to continue his fascist project. The industries most associated with law-dodging and outright theft are going hard for the demented criminal and his efforts to turn the country into a Russian-styled kleptocracy.

And it's a perfectly reasonable reaction, to be honest. Because at this point, America is divided into two camps. There are the billionaires heading up nation-wrecking levels of wealth transfer, much of it premised on cheating people outright, and on the other side are Americans who think maybe it's about time we just eat these people and be done with it.

Not literally "eat" them, of course. I'm speaking figuratively.(1)

The American mood right now is, in a word, angry. Furious, even. The reason Republican lawmakers have been avoiding their constituents for eighteen months running is because so many of the town halls they do dare to have devolve into screaming as ticked-off voters ask their leaders just what the hell they've been doing, as Trump dismantles whole sections of government that turn out to be pretty damn important if you don't want explosive diarrhea and do want to keep your business afloat.

The leaders of Team Evil, though, the ones who've already dumped half a billion dollars into propping up the diarrhea, measles and Epstein caucus, are infinitely more hated than mere lawmakers are. Team Evil's leaders are also so allergic to criticism that they simply do not Allow it to exist in their presence.

Not only will you never see any of the Team Evil leaders doing a non-staged non-toady-infested town hall, they have entire teams of people devoted to making sure you rabble can't so much as make eye contact with them. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg is apparently now buying an Irish castle, buying castles being something that the members of Team Evil seem do with some regularity; while this has caused some consternation among nearby residents, the plain fact of the matter is that none of them will ever so much as notice whether Zuckerberg is at his "castle" or not.

He's not going to drop into town to do some antiquing. He's not going to pop down to the local pub. He's going to hole up in his castle like Nerd Dracula—for all the locals know he'll be down in the basement lying in a wooden coffin, wearing the latest virtual reality headset and waiting for the apocalypse to take us all.

At this point, the people building the data centers, and pushing the crypto coins, and taking advantage of your grandfather's gambling addiction to bleed him dry know full well that the rest of us all hate them. And they have a pretty good suspicion that if Team Evil does not somehow manage to win not just the next election, but every single election from here on in, the dam is going to break, the walls are going to come down, and the public, fed up and out for vengeance, is going to eat them.

Again, not really eat them.(2) Just "seize their wealth" or "pass new regulations," but to someone like Musk or Zuckerberg or Andreessen that's pretty much the same thing.

That's the problem with extortionate, exploitative, furiously antisocial behavior. It may allow you to hoover up great sums of money, but the more people in the general public you hurt the more resentment builds up and the more you have to spend to convince the people on the other side of your gate that you don't deserve to be eaten. Once you've gotten to the point where the whole world economy is in danger of toppling if you can't bullshit your way through the next press release—hello, Sam Altman—that half billion dollars per election becomes a necessary expense if you don't want to be snacked on.

Metaphorically. None of us are cannibals, we're just talking raising tax rates back to previous levels.(3) Get a grip.

What we're seeing right now is an even bigger version of Donald Trump's own post-coup ploy. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, was caught hoarding a mountain of national security secrets in his spy-infested country club, was suspected of cheating on his taxes to the tune of $100 million, and was facing possible legal repercussions for that whole attempted insurrection thing until John Roberts rode to his rescue, sweating and panting from the effort. Facing a dizzying array of possible prison sentences, Trump smartly ran for reelection under the also Supreme Court-backed theory that nobody could put him in jail while he was a candidate—and if he did win he would have the power to make all his legal troubles go away while doing whole new sets of crimes that would make the first look like parking tickets. It worked, because reasons.

The collected forces of Team Evil are now attempting their own version of exactly that, but on an economy-wide, nationwide, even global scale. The crypto and "prediction market" companies are having to defend against growing allegations that their whole damned existence is nothing but an elaborate scam, and the artificial intelligence-slash-data-center industry is facing collapse unless world governments swoop in to save their sorry money-hemorrhaging asses.

Having gotten to the point where their industries can't survive if they're regulated into having to do slightly less active harm to society, they're hoping that they can throw enough money into the Team Evil pot to be able to buy society outright. Or, if not society, at least the government.

Because the government comes with a military, and at this point it may take the U.S. military to protect billionaires from the threat of their neighbors losing their last thread of patience, breaking down their security fences, and eating them.(4)

This is not, however, sustainable for very long. Many variations of sociopaths have tried it during many, many points in history, and eventually each such government collapses because there's no amount of money that will absolutely guarantee a wealthy person's safety if the rest of the country decides it's time for a gold-leaf sociopath barbecue.(5) Every government founded not on the public good but instead solely on the premise of keeping the rabble away from the forks is doomed to fall, and the only variation is how long it takes.

I am no historian, but in general it seems that the more money a nation's wealthy sociopaths cumulatively spend to prevent getting eaten, the hungrier the public gets and more lavish the eventual buffet becomes.

Not that that would happen here, of course.(6) America is exceptional, for reasons laid out in those history textbooks schools can no longer afford to buy.

My point is this, then: Nobody should be too shocked that the most corrupt set of leaders America has ever had are now being flooded with more campaign dollars than companies have ever before spent. There are a large number of industries that depend on corruption for their very survival, and if there is ever a serious risk of America moving to universal health insurance you will see ten times this much pour into Team Evil's coffers.

In past generations, America's richest and most sociopathic tycoons knew that the most cost-effective way to keep the public from gnawing on your shinbones was to put their name on libraries, on auditoriums, on hospitals, and on other monuments to the public good. It amounted to pennies, given their overall wealth, and delivered just enough public goodwill to dull the public mind to scandals elsewhere. And, in general, it proved shockingly effective.

This generation of wealth, however, has been unable to part with those pennies. Our current captains of industry are much stupider and much greedier than those who came before them. They cheaped out on building museums and libraries, and on even the premise of contributing to society somewhat, and went through several variations of that "greed is good" phrase before giving up on trying to justify themselves and going home to hoard wealth like weird and paranoid dragons. The Supreme Court instead told them they could buy individual House and Senate seats outright, rather than going through far more convoluted means of winning public favor; the moment the Court said so, the wealthy rushed to do it.

But it is a year-by-year thing. Once wealth decides to remove itself from society, go full Team Evil mode and control the nation mostly through waves of campaign propaganda, it can't stop doing it. You live your life as a prey animal, not a predator: If you don't want to be eaten, you can't stop running.

So that is where we are, now. The architects of most of the world's worst woes have no problem throwing a half a billion dollars out their windows if it will distract the angry mobs below. Nobody wants to be eaten, and nobody thinks they deserve to be eaten.

Their problem, though, is that Donald Trump's maladministration has made a very good case that nothing has any hope of going back to normal unless at least a few of these people get put on a spit. (7)

(1) I am not speaking figuratively. I mean we ought to consider literally eating them.

(2) We could try eating just one or two of them to see what happens. An experiment, if you will.

(3) Look, we all know cannibalism is bad but if eating some guy's severed thumb would give you no-hassle health insurance for the rest of your life you'd probably do it, right? You'd at least think about doing it.

(4) Honestly, the biggest problem might be toxicity. A lot of these guys seem blasted out of their gourds a good chunk of the time, and I can't imagine it'd be safe to ingest much of that.

(5) America is the land of barbecue. We're the nation that turned "potluck" into a religion. I think people are underestimating how into this some Americans could get.

(6) Buddy, our top government health guy boasts about eating roadkill. It absolutely can happen here.

(7) Circling back to the religion thing, in fact, I can see evangelicals turning this into a whole tent revival-ish movement. Music, chanting, everyone gathered 'round the pit watching the meat cook and praising Jesus. Evangelicals seem like they'd be more open to eating people than almost anyone else, right? All those evangelical groups have at least a little of that we-like-eating-people vibe going on. Even if the rest of us were grossed out, I think they'd go for it.

Best-selling author Thom Hartmann wrote an article last year (June, 2025) where he laid out fourteen steps to “autocratic breakthrough,” which he went on to define:

“Autocratic breakthrough” is a phrase you’ll be hearing more and more about in coming months. It refers to the moment in time when a wannabe dictator and the oligarchy that supports him push a democratic country toward authoritarianism so far that its political systems “break through” into full-blown autocracy/dictatorship.

I would encourage you to read the entire article. Today, I want to go through Hartmann’s list and give you my take on just where our country stands on each of the steps.

You may disagree – you may think I am being alarmist, or you may think we’re even closer to a Trump/GOP dictatorship. If so, please leave your take in the comments below; this is a subject we need to discuss openly and often.

Stage One: Democratic Erosion

(1) Demonization of political opponents

Obviously, this has been the norm since even before Trump’s first term. If you are opposed to him, you get attacked, vilified, and called every name in the book, including “traitor” and “scum.”

(2) Attacks on the press

This, too, has been present for the past decade. “Fake news” turned out to be the lightest of the attacks. “Enemy of the people” made its appearance early on, and continues to this day. Attacking individual reporters, suing news networks that actually dare to report the truth, and barring certain news outlets from press conferences and even from the building. And if that’s not enough, get your rich buddies to buy the news organizations that shape the news, so you can get them on your side.

(3) Politicization of law enforcement and intelligence agencies

The Department of Justice is now Trump’s personal attack law firm, that he sics on whomever he perceives as his enemies. The rule of law has been replaced by the Rule of Trump. Customs and Border Protection has stopped being about the border; instead, with their billion-dollar American Gestapo called ICE, they are focused on deporting thousands of people, even citizens, in order to make Trump look tough.

(4) Elevation of the executive above co-equal branches of government

Once upon a time, we had three equal branches of government, each with powers that provided the term we’ve heard since grade-school: “Checks and balances.”

No more. The Trump executive branch is the only game in town. Congress does what it is told, and the courts are ignored.

(5) Election manipulation

You may think my answer to this would be “we’ll have to wait and see.” Instead, my analysis is “already happening.”

The Trump administration has seized ballots from Georgia, Arizona, and Michigan. The federal agency tasked with protecting the security of our elections is instead attacking secretaries of state in various states, and refusing to say if it can guarantee support for the upcoming midterms.

There are multiple efforts underway to limit citizens’ access to the ballot, from the SAVE Act, to insisting that states provide voter data, to requiring (by executive order) that all voters must show a birth certificate or passport in order to vote.

The Center for American Progress has identified 15 tactics that the Trump administration is using to manipulate and control the midterm elections. I won’t list them all here, but if you read the list you can see all 15 in action now.

Stage Two: Democratic Breakdown

(6) Judicial capture

From the Supreme Court on down, the Republican party and the Trump administration have been focused on getting “their people” on the bench. Mitch McConnell has worked hard at this, and has called getting the six Federalist judges on the Supreme Court one of the achievements he is most proud of.

Of course, if you either ignore or abuse the judicial system, that is another form of judicial capture. Failing to respond to court orders, manipulating grand juries, even perjury by government lawyers – it’s all happening now.

(7) Criminalization of the opposition

It’s one thing to call your opponents “scum”; it’s another to charge them with actual crimes. And yet, that is what is happening.

In September of 2025, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) which named “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization,” and proceeded to outline a collection of ideologies as “falling under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’” These include “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Do you see yourself in any of those supposedly criminal beliefs or actions? (And yes, we are now in the Orwellian world of “thought crimes.”) I’m sure that many of my statements and actions could be twisted to fit that list. So can the statements and actions of almost all persons opposing the fascist takeover of our country.

We’ve already seen anti-ICE protestors in Texas arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison. In Minnesota, 15 members of a group called Direct Action Minnesota were indicted on conspiracy and assault charges. As noted in an article in The Conversation, “a 94-page indictment cited behavior such as wearing an ‘I’m Antifa!’ sweatshirt, possessing a bullhorn, or including a devil emoji in a Signal message.”

(8) Militarization of domestic law enforcement

This begins with giving law enforcement agencies actual military equipment, a process already underway. It moves to having law enforcement agencies actually occupy an area, like an invading army. In its final stage, it involves the actual military being politicized with rallies demonizing the political opposition, and paramilitary groups being given semi-official or official approval for a campaign of terror against “dissidents.”

(9) Fusion of party and state

There are two signs of this step being reached: membership in and loyalty to the ruling party are necessary for state employment and state contracts, and government media becomes government propaganda.

Stage Three: Full Autocratic Breakthrough

(10) Abolition or nullification of meaningful elections

Let’s be clear: in this step, elections still occur, but they are basically for show. The winners are almost always chosen by the ruling party, and barriers are put up to prevent any opposition party from winning the election or even receiving votes.

(11) Loss of civil liberties, including freedom of assembly, speech, and movement

From Hartmann’s article: “All such liberties are either suspended or heavily restricted (typically with an ‘emergency’ justification). Protesters are jailed, beaten, and disappeared.”

(12) Constitutional overhaul or emergency rule

Again, from Hartmann: “This signals the end of a truly constitutional order as new constitutions are written and laws are passed to entrench autocratic power. Term limits are removed and elections become a mere formality as their outcomes are predetermined.”

(13) Exile, imprisonment, or assassination of opposition

Opposition to the ruling party becomes actually dangerous and life-threatening. Persons openly opposed to — or sometimes, even questioning — the policies and direction of the rulers are charged with crimes, forced to flee the country, or just simply murdered.

(14) Strongman cult of personality replaces institutional legitimacy

The “Dear Leader” is touted as the actual representation of the nation in human form. Loyalty to the leader is the same as loyalty to the nation, and thus, dissent is treason.

So where are we now?

Obviously, the following is just my read of the situation. But if you read the descriptions above, I think you may come to agree with me.

We have passed through all five steps of Stage One (Democratic Erosion), and are well on our way to completing all four steps of Stage Two (Democratic Breakdown). The question now is, Will we complete the process by going through all five steps in Stage Three?

The midterms will tell us a lot. Assuming the Democrats take back the House and even the Senate, what follows next will tell us even more. Will the Democrats take concrete action to reverse the steps already completed? Will they do anything about guaranteeing free and fair elections? Will they establish clear rules to prevent abuse of the Department of Justice? Will they get serious about ethics rules for all three branches of government, including themselves? And will they prosecute those who have broken the law, to make sure everyone understands these actions are out of bounds?

I am also heavily focused on the steps in Stage Three (Full Autocratic Breakthrough). Will we begin losing our First Amendment rights? Will Trump institute emergency rule in order to deal with “antifa”? Will we see opposition leaders indicted, arrested, and jailed?

I believe we are seeing a growing backlash to Trump, and to autocracy itself. The more we can share these 14 steps with others, and the more we can talk about the threat of authoritarian takeover of our country and the loss of our democracy, the more that resistance will grow.

Share this article on social media. Forward it to your friends and family. And if you are worried it is too long for that, then share the image file below. It lists the 14 steps as noted by Thom Hartmann, and would be a good way to start the conversation.

Let us hope that we can stop this slide into fascism, and begin to recover and rebuild our democracy.

--30--

The neon flying squid can fly in formation.

The shoal of about 100 squid rose unexpectedly from a patch of the Pacific Ocean around 370 miles from Tokyo and glided near the boat for about 30 metres. The astonished researchers were the first to capture photographs of such a thing, which looked like the early stages of an alien invasion.

They were probably neon flying squid (Ommastrephes bartramii), the subsequent study states, a species that is part of a 20-strong flying squid family that was known to leap from the water but, until then, was only rumoured to also be able to glide above it.

The neon flying squid was able to gain such elevation by using the hyponome, a funnel-like muscular organ also present in other cephalopods, such as octopuses. The organ is able to force water out in a jet, propelling the body along both in and out of the sea. Photographs of the gliding squid show them with their arms (they have 10 limbs in all) splayed outwards.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

There are all kinds of enormous, impressive and, frankly, noisy machines at work across the 20,000 square meters of industrial warehouses at the headquarters of Fagor Arrasate, a manufacturing company in Spain’s northern Basque Country.

Here, a team of engineers is constructing machines that can put together household appliances like refrigerators and washing machines, hydraulic presses to make parts for electric vehicles and airplanes, and forges to make metal components. There are drills the size of human thighs and metal coils large enough to be a giant’s necklace.

Yet order reigns. It is a sophisticated, slick and profit-making process. Fagor Arrasate belongs to the larger Mondragón Corporation, which in 2025 had a revenue of €11.3 billion ($12.8 billion U.S.) and aggregate profits of more than €600 million.

But these considerable earnings do not go into the pockets of a wealthy few at the top of the pyramid. Fagor Arrasate is a cooperative — like every other business within Mondragón — and it is owned by its workers, who share profits between them.

“I grew up with this way, it makes sense,” says Iker Aranburu, a 46-year-old member of the cooperative, which has about 650 employees, mostly in the Basque region but also in China, Mexico and Germany. “It’s fairer. It’s more appealing for me.”

Founded by five coworkers in 1956 as a small stove factory, Mondragón Corporation is today the largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives in the world. It employs more than 70,000 workers across 92 cooperatives, many based in the town of the same name, making it the largest employer in the Basque Country and the fifth-largest private employer in Spain. The range of sectors it spans is remarkable: its grocery-store chain, Eroski, has hundreds of outlets across the nation; the Mondragón University offers college degrees; it includes Spain’s only producer of defibrillators and its largest producer of bicycles; and according to Mondragón’s estimates, more than a third of Europe’s solar panels use its tech and 60 percent of the world’s trains contain its parts.

Mondragón’s model is not socialism, it is keen to stress. The group, despite being owned by its workers, admits that it is capitalist: It is for-profit. Yet Mondragón’s model has social good and humanism — rather than profit-maximizing — at its heart. In an era when the rich are getting richer, and inequality is rising, supporters say that Mondragón is showing — on an unparalleled scale — a better way to do business, where profits might not be as high, but society benefits. Others question whether the model could work elsewhere or if it can survive increasing globalization.

“All the ways to govern a company are bad, but the best is a cooperative model,” says Ander Etxeberria Otadui, one of two full-time staff tasked with welcoming the two to three thousand visitors – from academics to politicians, students and tourists – who come to visit the cooperatives each year. “We have to make money, to create jobs. But workers are going to get more than a decent salary.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of Mondragón’s model is worker equality.

Strikingly, for example, Mondragón’s cooperatives cap the difference in income between the highest- and lowest-paid employees at six to one. (By comparison, in Spain the average is about 110 to 1 and in the US, 280 to 1.) That does not mean executives are badly paid, but rather those at the bottom are better-paid: The base salary for a Mondragón worker is on average 40 percent higher than Spain’s minimum wage.

On top of that, company profits are shared. From annual earnings, 60 percent is reinvested in the business, 30 percent goes to employees (as capital that can only be claimed once they retire or leave the group), and 10 percent is invested in the local community. In 2025, Mondragón allocated more than €49 million for projects spanning social inclusion, poverty reduction, education, culture, sports, preservation of the Basque language and environmental sustainability. If a cooperative sustains a loss, it is supported by a solidarity fund that all 92 cooperatives pay into.

Iker Gonzalez, 48, joined Mondragón in 2019 to work on solar panel production. The job was closer to his home and offered a better salary than his previous job working on railways in the city of Bilbao. The group’s community spending also pays for a program that sees his children walk to school accompanied by a childcare provider. “We invest in our community,” says Gonzalez.

Another key tenet of Mondragón’s system is direct democracy. Everyone, from floor workers to leading executives, has the same voting power at annual general assemblies: one worker, one vote. No matter their position, they can have a voice and influence company strategy and policy. 

“Workers, we make decisions,” adds Aranburu, clad in a luminous orange safety jacket, steel-protected boots and with a wrench in hand. “We have the choice to decide. We can elect representatives. That doesn’t happen in other companies.”

And it’s more than simply theory. Aranburu, who joined the cooperative in 2006, said that years ago during a general assembly, the governing council proposed a big international expansion. But the workers, he says, “didn’t see the need.” They voted against it, the council was forced to resign, and new representatives were elected.

Mondragón’s worker-owned, multi-cooperative model, the largest of its kind in the world (other cooperatives are larger but not worker-owned), also brings job security. Under its rules, no member can be laid off for financial reasons (and if they happen to be under-performing for whatever reason, they receive training). If one of its companies goes bust, which rarely happens, its employees are paid up to two years of salary at 80 percent, and they are prioritized for posts at other cooperatives. 

In 2013, Igor Herrate and his wife lost their jobs when the household appliances cooperative they were working for went bankrupt. But within two months, after several interviews, they were both working again.

“You feel protected for life here,” says Herrate.

And when the going gets tough, while some companies don’t hesitate to lay off workers, Mondragón’s workforce adapts. During the pandemic, some factories were forced to close, but workers at many cooperatives voted to temporarily reduce their own wages until the crisis lessened.

The result of this 70-year-old heritage of pay equality, labor rights and democracy is impressive. The Alto Debo region, which is home to the majority of Mondragón’s cooperatives, has the highest family incomes in the Basque Country, among the lowest unemployment rates in Spain, and some of the lowest levels of inequality in the world. The model continues to make money: In 2025, net profits were €618 million, and in 2024, they hit a record €632 million.

In fact, while cooperative governance may slow business decision-making, studies have found that cooperatives can make as much profit as companies under conventional systems. A Rutgers University study concluded that there is “substantial evidence that they at least equal, and probably exceed, the productivity of their conventional counterparts.”

Nick Romeo, author of the book The Alternative: How To Build a Just Economy, believes the Mondragón model of employee ownership and economic egalitarianism is as salient as ever amid growing recognition of the flaws of free market economics.

“It’s an impressive institution, or set of institutions,” he says. “And it questions the dominant paradigm that we have in America. I think a lot of people are aware that the current environment is unsustainable. That recognition is increasing.”

Meanwhile, Betsy Bowman, president and research associate at the Center for Global Justice, a Texas-based research group, argues that business models like Mondragón’s could even address social divides and plummeting trust in democratic institutions.

“Worker ownership and collective, democratic self-management are the solutions to not only the effective running of enterprises, the emotional health of workers, and the benefit of communities but are also a solution to the growing wealth disparities in the world,” she says. 

“It could maybe even rekindle faith in one’s own agency and the power of democratic decision-making. Maybe it can turn discord and disgruntled workers into finding a means to cooperation and happiness.”

Yet for all its success, Mondragón’s ethos has been diluted over the years.

While at its creation everyone who worked for Mondragón was a member, that is far from the case today. Of Mondragón’s 71,000 current workers, only around 30,000 are members. To become a member of a cooperative, a worker must invest up to €17,000, usually paid over a few years, and after an initial trial period. And workers outside of the Basque Country are not eligible to become members.

Similarly, while the pay ratio cap for cooperatives was at first three to one, it was raised to six to one in the 1980s.

“In the 1960s Mondragón was more radical, but nowadays it’s quite practical,” says Anjel Errasti, a researcher at the University of the Basque Country, who grew up and studied in Mondragón. 

Errasti, who authored a 2025 paper analyzing the Mondragón model, describes it as “Cooptalist” — with a cooperative center and a capitalist periphery.

“There are many many positive aspects,” he elaborates. “I think that locally, it works perfectly. There’s good working conditions, the power of decision making. It’s difficult to find a better model.”

But Errasti points to the fact that Mondragón has production facilities in over 30 countries, outsourcing due to cheaper labor costs, yet its workers overseas cannot become members. Is Mondragón simply exporting capitalism while preserving cooperatives at home? “We have to talk about Mondragón’s internationalization and how it should extend the cooperative philosophy to its subsidiaries abroad,” he says.

Another gnawing inequality is when it comes to gender: The cooperatives’ elected governing councils are rarely 50/50. While the total workforce is split 44.5 percent men to 55.5 percent women, the latter make up only 39 percent of governing councils. Otadui says that this is partly down to the fact that while many women work in the retail sector, there are fewer female engineers to hire. Mondragón is investing in programs to promote women to study engineering as part of efforts to improve equality. Nonetheless, as in the rest of society, men dominate the positions of power at Mondragón.

“It is not a perfect company, far from it, but we are having an important positive impact,” adds Otadui.

The system isn’t bulletproof either. While there largely hasn’t been a “brain drain” of the best talent away to better-paid roles in conventional companies, it can happen. In 2022, two large cooperatives, Orona, an elevator manufacturer, and the ULMA Group, which covered multiple markets including greenhouses and packaging, voted by majority to leave Mondragón during special general assembly meetings, reportedly over issues related to autonomy in decision-making and an unwillingness to transfer so much money to the central Mondragón group.

Like any other business, Mondragón also faces competition. In industry, above all, the might of the Chinese economy is difficult to compete with. It’s a serious threat: Fagor Electrodomésticos, Mondragón’s oldest cooperative and previously an employer of more than 5,000 workers, went bankrupt in 2013 after the group eventually decided that it could not afford to pour more more into the loss-maker.

“That’s probably the most significant challenge today,” says Otadui.

But the cooperatives pool together financing to invest in research to compete with the largest companies. Over the last five years, Mondragón has spent €1.8 billion on R&D.

At Fagor Arrasate — which was created in 1956, making it the second-oldest cooperative in the group — efforts to innovate are in sharp focus. More than 30 professionals are working in R&D on its team alone, and by the end of 2027, it will have begun production on one of its new sectors: humanoid robots.

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But could this worker-owned industry model succeed in the U.S., home of low-paying gig economy behemoths like Uber and Amazon? 

Small-scale projects like the six worker-owned Arizmendi bakeries in the Bay Area do exist, according to Romeo, and employee stock ownership plans (ESOP) are popular, even if they lack the component of political power for workers. But the decline of workers’ unions in the U.S. has made the emergence of cooperatives more difficult, he adds.

“Is it going to look exactly like Mondragón?” says Romeo. “No, is my prediction. There will be different forms and flavors. There’s historical and cultural specificity. But I do think there is potential for it.”

The post The Spanish Town Doing Capitalism Better appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

You are not who you think you are. You’re not even what you think you are.

Let's start with a story that should be at least somewhat familiar.

One upon a time, when we all lived in Africa and no one lived anywhere else, a people we now call Homo erectus struck into the world. Over the next million years, they spread through the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. They were tall. They were clever. They made sophisticated tools, found their way to isolated islands miles over the horizon, and created the oldest art that came from human hands.

Near the end of that million years, another species, Homo heidelbergensis, developed from an isolated group of H. erectus. We don't know quite where this happened, but in the following half a million years, this species followed their predecessors into Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

From H. heidelbergensis, other species developed. Around 400,000 years ago, there was Homo neanderthalensis and another species that is alternatively called Homo longi or Denisovans*. (Some analysis had suggested that there was another species in between: Homo antecessor, which is known largely from remains found in Western Europe, but this now looks more like just another offshoot in our bushy family tree.)

Finally, in Africa, another group of H. heidelbergensis produced individuals that appear to be the earliest known examples of Homo sapiens. The oldest we know of came from a place called Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. They are thought to date from around 315,000 years ago.

There were a few false starts, but finally, around 50,000 years ago, H. sapiens successfully followed their relatives out of Africa and into the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. And from there ...

But this is where the story gets strange. Because we–are not those people. You are not those people.

When those last-out-of-Africa hominin strangers, H. sapiens, finally stumbled onto the world stage, they were moving into a place that was practically rife with other humans. We're so used to a world when "human" means just one thing. Over the last three million years, that's seldom been the case.

Those first wandering H. sapiens had a lot of neighbors. Our old ancestor H. erectus had left behind several descendants, such as Homo luzonensis in the Philippines and the diminutive Homo floresiensis in Indonesia. There were probably others we still haven't found. There may even have been groups of plain old H. erectus itself still hanging around to greet the first H. sapiens that came to their neighborhoods.

In both the Middle East and Europe, there was groups of Neanderthals. In Asia, there were Denisovans. We know they met, not just because some sites have been found that share tools, bones, or burials from more than one species. We know, because they are still with us.

You're probably familiar with the fact that many modern people got between 1% and 4% of their genes from Neanderthals. This is so well known that most commercial DNA tests will happily report on your Neandertal-ity along with telling you whether your ancestors are from Denmark or Dalmatia. If it happens that your ancestors all came from Sub-Saharan Africa, your percentage of Neanderthal DNA is much lower. However, there is still a trace, likely resulting from sharing genes with some H. sapiens who had wandered into Neanderthal territory, only to return some generations later.

After two centuries of arguing about it, a pretty good case can be made that, far from murdering or displacing Neanderthals, H. sapiens simply absorbed them. From what we've been able to find, it appears that Neanderthals never existed in great numbers. The percentage of Neanderthal genes we see today may simply reflect the relative sizes of the populations when the two came together.

As multiple scientists and authors have pointed out, there is more Neanderthal DNA today than at any point in history. That's a strange kind of extinction.

From this, you might believe that modern people today take their genes largely from those H. sapiens who developed around Jebel Irhoud, with a dash of Neandertal thrown in. But this story isn't that simple.

Those other descendants of H. heidelbergensis, the ones we call Denisovans (which are probably, probably a part of H. longi) also got into the big ... let's just say "group hug." Many people carry only a trace amount of Denisovan DNA, but if your ancestors came from some areas of Asia or South Pacific islands, you may be carrying as much as 4% of Denisovan DNA with you today.

We know these people from only a handful of fossils, but with numbers like that, they must have been pretty numerous — and friendly — when H. sapiens arrived at their camp fires.

So, humans on the planet today are a mixture of H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, and H. longi. In a world where people so often worry about races, we are, all of us, hybrids that span multiple species.

But wait! That's not the big news. All of this is just the build up to a research paper that came out last month in the journal Science.

A group of scientists, from the University of California Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University developed a system they named TRACE (TRacking Archaic Contributions via ARG Estimation ... because it's not science with an acronym) that "uses features of ancestral recombination graphs to identify archaic ancestry" in the DNA of modern humans.

Using examples of complete genomes from over 500 people from around the planet, they went fishing through the code to see which genes were shared, which had diverged over time, and which came from ancestors with "profound" differences from modern humans.

With this tool, they confirmed previous research identifying DNA sequences gleaned from Neanderthals and Denisovans (though their numbers for the percentage of each were a bit more conservative than previous studies). However, that was only the warm up for the big discovery.

In our DNA are at least two "ghost lineages;" fragments of human species who are our ancestors, but whom we have never met.

One of these ghosts lies far back, perhaps as far as two million years. This is the echo of a shared union that doesn't just precede H. sapiens, it may have occurred before H. erectus. (In fact, though the authors don't suggest this, the date opens the possibility that this cross played a large role in creating H. erectus from the base clay of its known ancestor, Homo habilis, and an unknown partner.)

The other ghost in our cells is much more recent. Sometime before H. sapiens left Africa, there appears to have been interbreeding with another species, perhaps an unknown descendant of H. heidelbergensis, because the genes we took from them have a resemblance to those of Neanderthals and Denisovans. It may have been a distinct population of H. heidelbergensis itself, since the youngest specimens of this species overlap with the oldest known H. sapiens by around 15,000 years. If that sounds like our ancestors mated with their own parents, no it's just ... Hey, what's a little genetic incest between species?

Most humans alive today appear to get from 0.2% to 1% of their genomes from this mystery union.

These aren't the only ghosts.

In individuals from Oceania, TRACE found an average of 0.73% Neanderthal, 0.66% Denisovan, and 0.33% ghost ancestry. Those numbers for the first two are lower than previous studies, but the TRACE data also shows something else interesting—hints of another unknown ancient hominin dating back to 1.8 million years ago. Because these traces were highest in the groups that had more Denisovan ancestors, the researchers suspect that it was the Denisovans who carried these "super-archaic" genes.

We find a significantly higher proportion of super-deep lineages in Denisovan than in Neanderthal segments. Simulations show that this pattern is inconsistent with a model lacking super-archaic introgression but is recapitulated by a model including super-archaic introgression into Denisovans. Furthermore, super-archaic fragments within introgressed Denisovan segments exhibit distinct genetic features that differentiate them from the background Denisovan ancestry, including much deeper coalescence times with modern humans, longer genomic lengths than mean ILS length from Neanderthal deep lineages, and low affinity to both Neanderthal and Denisovan reference genomes.

How Denisovans might have preserved these ancient genetic traces if they branched from H. heidelbergensis at about the same time as Neandertals isn't clear. All of us probably share in this ancient mixing, but because our percentage of Denisovan DNA is so low, for most of us it's barely a genetic whisper.

We've known for some time that the "march of progress" image from the 1960s—the one that shows a chimp-like ancestor on the left following by a series of brutish, slouching intermediaries leading to a modern (European) man on the right–is horribly wrong. In fact, paleontologists knew that idea was wrong before it was ever published. But it's only in the last two decades that we've learned just how wrong it is.

The story of modern humans and our hominin ancestors is complex. The tree of our ancestors is filled with limbs that went nowhere, and branches that confound expectations. And, unlike most actual trees, some of those branches seem to have merged as well as split.

We who survive are hybrid humans, carrying in every cell the story of ancient travels and forgotten people. Those H. sapiens at Jebel Irhoud are some of our ancestors, but they're far from the only ones. We each contain multitudes. None of us is "pure," and we should be glad of it.

There's one more twist to this story.

In a 2025 paper in Nature, a group of scientists from the University of Cambridge used their own tool (COBRAA) to sift the human genome for markers that indicated major events and population size changes.

What they found was that humans today are not descended from one group of ancestors, but two. These groups became separated from each other around 1.5 million years ago, possibly around the time some H. erectus migrated out of Africa and went off into the broader world. Soon after they split, one of these groups – "Population A" fell on hard times. It faced a population bottleneck that left it with only a few survivors, limiting their genetic diversity. Still, it was Population A that eventually produced H. heidelbergensis, Neandertals, and Denisovans.

Meanwhile, Population B flourished. They kept their genetic diversity and their population was more stable.

Whatever the reason for the separation, the genetic markers indicate that around 300,000 years ago, these two groups met up again. Whoever they were by then. Whatever they were. They came together with all the differences they had accumulated over a million years of being apart. After all their wandering and all they had seen.

We're not Population A or Population B. We're both.

Using cobraa, we present evidence for an extended period of structure in the history of all modern humans, in which two ancestral populations that diverged ~1.5 million years ago came together in an admixture event ~300 thousand years ago, in a ratio of ~80:20%.

Those people who appeared in Morocco came directly from this merger of two long-separated groups. When they left Africa again, they gathered into themselves all the scattered forms of human that they met. We're all of them now. We're all of them. We're all the eggs, and the basket.

You are 80% the people of Population A, who went through a terrible time, but survived. You are 20% the people of Population B, who flourished in their time, before welcoming their long-long-long-lost relations.

You're part Neanderthal, part Denisovan, and part ghost. You're 100% human. So are we all.