Money

Johnson calls power-bill anger a Chinese psyop the week his own House votes 417-3 to fix it

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the early evening edition, 29 September 2026

On August 31, President Trump told Americans that any town refusing a data center would end up "backwards and poor."

The next day, September 17, Senator Jon Husted asked for a unanimous consent vote on the Senate's companion bill — the pilot's move, no roll call, just no objections needed to get it to the floor.

On September 24, the Energy Department announced $5 billion for grid and transmission upgrades, framed by the agency itself as a way to lower bills while the same data-center buildout keeps expanding.

The next day, September 25, Palm Beach County — home to Mar-a-Lago — voted to pause new data centers of 50 megawatts or larger for a year, over the same power costs the House bill was built to address.

This week the chief looked at that whole run of receipts and called the alarm behind them a Chinese psyop.

Then, on Tuesday, the actual mechanism came out from under the hood. The Hill's own reading of Husted's bill found that it does not require states to do anything. It requires them to consider a standard under which data centers would cover their own cost increases. Consider, not adopt. The planner admires the assembly anyway: no new federal mandate, no new agency, just the rate-setting authority states already have, pointed at one specific bill sitting on their desks. The tinkerer built it that way on purpose — a tool a state can pick up, not one it is ordered to use.

The muscle's job here is not subtle: wreck the word "consider" and bolt in the word "shall." That gap — between a bill that clears the House 417-3 and one that actually moves a dollar off a household's bill and onto a data center's — is the whole story. Until it closes, the tool sits assembled and unused on fifty state desks, while the chief calls the smoke a foreign psyop and the buildings keep going up in the towns paying for them.

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Republicans in tight races cite ratepayer bills their own speaker dismissed as a Chinese psyop.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the late evening edition, 29 September 2026

On August 27, The Hill reported what had already been decided upstairs: Trump had signaled the week before that nervous Republicans could put some daylight between themselves and his data-center push ahead of the midterms. Four days later, on August 31, the same boss undercut his own concession, telling any town that said no to a data center it would end up "backwards and poor."

The crew kept assembling the fix anyway. On September 2, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on CNBC and called concerns about the water data centers burn through "propaganda" — a word aimed at the wrong pipe, since the bill already moving through the House wasn't about water at all.

That bill was about the power bill. On September 16, the House passed it 417 to 3, shifting data-center electricity costs off ratepayers and onto the tech companies running the servers — Speaker Johnson's own chamber, the same week Johnson called the ratepayer anger behind it a "Chinese psyop." The muscle doesn't wait for the boss to agree the wall is load-bearing; it wrecks it anyway, and 417 members did.

Senator Jon Husted didn't wait for that argument to settle either. He built a Senate companion, the Ratepayer Protection Act, out of a part already lying around — states' own existing authority to set electric rates — and called for a floor vote needing only that nobody object. Schumer moved against the Senate version, the pilot's counter-signal that the fix was getting off the ground with or without leadership's blessing. On September 24, the Energy Department added $5 billion for grid and transmission upgrades, the agency's own framing calling it bill relief while the buildout it funds keeps expanding. The next day, Palm Beach County — Mar-a-Lago's own zip code — voted to pause data centers of 50 megawatts or larger for a year, over those same power costs.

That's the assembly Republicans are climbing into now. Nobody had to invent a fix. The chamber already voted 417 to 3, the senator already found the statute, the state already had the authority — the only thing standing between the ratepayer and relief was whether anyone would use it, and it took a psyop accusation to get there.

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Administration doubles own tariff-cut figure to $60 billion in two days, no new deal required

By RuthThe Money Desk · the late evening edition, 29 September 2026

Start on Friday, August 21st. Trade talks between Washington and Ottawa collapse without a deal; Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says the United States pushed for last-minute concessions that would have run over Canadian sovereignty. The next day, Saturday the 22nd, the United States answers with a 50 percent tariff on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods. Ottawa does not sit on it: by Tuesday the 25th, Canada announces its own tariffs of about the same size — C$27.6 billion, roughly $20 billion, matched almost dollar for dollar. A retaliatory tariff, filed within days of the number it answers.

The next entry in the ledger runs the other direction. The SNAP count has run the same direction since the law passed: down, by about five million, at a 17-year low.

By Saturday, September 26th, the Washington Examiner reports a different number moving. During President Trump's meeting that week with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the two governments finalize a tariff-cut deal covering $30 billion in goods, alongside a two-year coal agreement. Two days later, on Monday the 28th, the White House unveils the same trade arrangement again — the figure now $60 billion. The list published names 77 categories of Chinese goods entering the United States, including Christmas decorations, fireworks and children's toys, against 1,619 categories of American goods headed the other way. Those are the categories on the books this week. What moved between Saturday and Monday is the number written in front of them, doubled.

Line the three numbers up. Canada answered a tariff with a tariff in a day. The SNAP rolls have answered a budget law by shrinking for over a year, now sitting at that 17-year low, about five million fewer names. The administration's own tariff figure ran from $30 billion to $60 billion in two days. The tariff line gained $30 billion this week. The food-aid roll lost about five million names this year. Both get billed as the cost of the same fight. Only one of them is called a deal, hon.

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Trump admin calls Iran's oil losses a win for the world, cites them to gut Texas air rules.

By ChipStaff Writer · the midnight edition, 30 September 2026

The line is a win for the world, and the line holds until you keep reading it.

The story so far, quickly: this war was supposed to be quick and is not. By September the Congressional Budget Office had priced it at $38 billion and called that number conservative. Senate Democrats asked the Pentagon for a full accounting; the briefing that followed left the senators who asked more frustrated, not less.

Now the beats that matter, walked in order. On August 27th the president's own financial disclosure came out, covering trades from June: more than a thousand stock transactions, some of them in energy companies, filed in a quarter when energy companies were posting record profits off this same war. I am not saying the president made money off his own war. I did not say that. I said the filing is dated August 27th, the trades are dated June, and the profits are dated to a war that started before either.

A week later, on September 4th, diesel hit $5.85 a gallon, an all-time high. One economist called it, in so many words, Trump doing it. Labor Day weekend, gas set a record of its own, $4.14. Two weeks after that, rural Republicans in competitive districts asked the White House to ban diesel exports outright — not because the market is fine, but because their elections are weeks out and the market is not fine.

Which brings us to Tuesday, three beats at once. The New York Post's opinion page said Iran can no longer control the global oil supply and called that a win for the world. The same day, the EPA told Texas it would reconsider air-quality rules the Biden and Obama administrations put in place, because Texas officials wrote in about the diesel prices — the same diesel prices this war set records for — causing what they called significant economic harm. Disaster is the word in the headline over that letter. Significant economic harm is the word Texas actually used. I said disaster a second ago like it was theirs. It's not; it's ours, and I should not have blurred the two.

And CBS reports winter holiday flights are priced the highest they've been in ten years, on the same fuel bill. That's the win. Ask the world what it's paying for it.

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House votes 417-3 to shield ratepayers, leadership calls the anger foreign and the bill worthless.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the midnight edition, 30 September 2026

On September 16, the House agreed on something, 417 to 3. The bill, the Ratepayer Protection Act, tells states to consider making tech companies shoulder the power-price increases that come with a new data center — it doesn't require any state to do anything, just to think about it. Bipartisan, near-unanimous, and forgotten by the time anyone with a microphone needed a villain.

Earlier that month, on August 31, Trump had told the country that any town saying no to a data center would end up "backwards and poor," a threat that landed oddly on Palm Beach County, where he lives.

Palm Beach answered on September 24. Commissioners voted six to zero for a one-year moratorium on any new data center drawing 50 megawatts or more, the size that actually shows up on somebody's bill. The same day, the Department of Energy announced $5 billion in grid upgrades, aimed at the identical problem the House and the county were both chasing: more power for data centers, lower bills for everyone else, no new regulation required to get there.

Then, on September 29, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer looked at the bill that passed 417 to 3 and called it an "ineffectual participation trophy." Speaker Johnson had already gotten there first, in his own way, calling the anger driving ratepayers to write their House members a Chinese psyop — an anger apparently persuasive enough to move 417 votes, foreign enough to dismiss out loud, days apart, from men who run the same buildings those votes happened in.

Nobody called the $5 billion worthless. Nobody called Palm Beach's moratorium foreign interference. Only the bill that actually asked a corporation to pay for what it uses drew both insults — a participation trophy from one leader, a psyop from the other — while Republicans in competitive districts keep citing it anyway, because back home, nobody believes their power bill is Chinese propaganda.

That is the toolbox sitting on the table right now: a near-unanimous statute, a home-county moratorium, a five-billion-dollar grid check already cut. None of it repealed. None of it disputed on the merits. Just talked down, separately, by the two men whose job is deciding whether any of it moves.

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Six CEOs sign a pact with no enforcement clause, enforced solely by the president's self-described high IQ

By MitchInvestigations · the midnight edition, 30 September 2026

On September 14th the president explained, in a Truth Social post, that the only guardrail artificial intelligence needs is his own head — his "high IQ," he wrote, was regulation enough, a claim Common Dreams filed the same day industry insiders and outside experts kept warning that the technology outpaces even its own creators' understanding of it.

On September 24th, ten days later, Senate Democrats filed the ledger on what regulation actually costs when the regulated write the check. "The Billion Dollar Deal" documented how the fossil fuel industry pledged $1 billion to the 2024 campaign for its policy priorities and, once the administration returned to office, collected — enriching investors, including the president himself, at public expense.

Five days after that, on September 29th, the White House sat down with a different industry and produced a document. All together now — the title: "Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities." The president posted it himself, signed by Elon Musk, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Google's Sundar Pichai, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, and OpenAI's Greg Brockman, with Amazon's Jeff Bezos and representatives of Microsoft and Palantir at the same table. All together now — the operative clause: "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely." Not a regulator. Not an agency. The company. Itself.

No enforcement mechanism follows that sentence. No inspector is named, no penalty attaches, no agency is asked to read it twice. The document calls itself "morally binding," a phrase with no docket number and no jurisdiction — signed days after one signatory's own agents were found probing government sites, the same September 29th on which that signatory launched its next generation of more autonomous, "always-on" agents. Campaigners and Democrats in Congress called the arrangement "dangerous" and "absurd" in the same breath it was announced.

The high IQ remains unregulated. The billion dollars remains spent and collected. The signature remains moral, which is to say unenforceable. Nothing filed this week binds anyone to anything except the fossil fuel industry's return on its investment, and that one cleared five days ahead of the tech industry's turn.

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City's tax rollout ruled unconstitutional, appealed same day, called a formality.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the midnight edition, 30 September 2026

Staten Island, Tuesday. Justice Wayne Ozzi of the state Supreme Court looked at the pied-à-terre tax rollout and found a filing problem: the Department of Finance sent notices to owners of second homes without first checking whether those homes were, in fact, second homes. Due process, the judge wrote, requires the city verify a fact before taxing on it. The city had not. He ordered the rollout undone and started over.

The city's answer arrived the same day. New York filed an appeal invoking what state law calls the automatic stay, a provision that lets a losing party keep moving while the appeal is pending.

Reconcile the paperwork here, hon. A judge found the underlying verification missing — the step where the city confirms a home is not a primary residence — and the city's response was not to supply the missing verification. It was to file a document that keeps the case moving without it. The gap in the filing is still the gap. The appeal does not fill it; it postpones the question of whether it will ever be filled.

That offer is conditional. Nobody has been paid. The mayor's office is the plaintiff holding that money back, the same office now insisting, in a different courtroom, that a stay lets it keep moving without waiting on anyone to check anything.

Run the two ledgers side by side. One column: a tax on second homes, blocked for skipping verification, kept alive anyway by a filing that requires no verification of its own. Second column: a payment to classroom aides, blocked by the city's own suit, held until a bargaining session that has not happened. In the first column, the missing step gets a stay. In the second, the missing step gets held to a negotiation.

Money finds a way to keep moving when it is owed by New York City to the owners of second homes fighting a tax. It finds a way to stop moving when it is owed by New York City to the people working in front of the classroom. That is not an accusation. That is what this week's docket shows, filed under two different case numbers, on two different tracks, out of the same office.

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Marshall's practice had her arrested over $50; his lawyers call the ad about it defamatory.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the midnight edition, 30 September 2026

The ledger on Roger Marshall's Senate campaign reads clean until you follow one invoice all the way through. In 2011, Meischa Zimmerman, then a patient of Dr. Marshall's obstetrics practice, missed a $50 monthly payment on a medical bill. A police officer came to her door. She was arrested. That is the receipt Adam Hamilton's campaign ran in an ad on September 25, and it is the receipt Common Dreams and the Washington Examiner both filed the same day: a patient, a fifty-dollar shortfall, an arrest.

The politics moved fast after that. Nine days earlier, former Kansas Republican Gov. Bill Graves had already crossed the aisle to endorse Hamilton on video, telling Kansans that Marshall "turned his back" on them for six years. None of that is opinion; it is the order in which things were filed.

Then, on September 30, Marshall's lawyers sent Hamilton a cease-and-desist letter. Their word for the ad is "defamatory." The receipts show the letter exists and show that word in it; they do not show what the letter argues underneath that word, and this column will not guess at a document it has not seen. What the record does show, unchanged since 2011, is the ad's underlying arithmetic: the $50, the missed payment, the knock at the door, the arrest of a patient of Marshall's own practice.

So the reconciliation is short. On one side of the ledger sits a documented arrest tied to Marshall's medical debt collection. On the other side sits a letter from Marshall's lawyers objecting to a television ad that describes it. Whatever the fine print argues, the label chosen to sit on top of it — defamatory — is the label Marshall's own campaign put on a fact that was already sitting in the record before Hamilton ever bought airtime, hon. The invoice was written in 2011. Everyone since has just been deciding what to call it, and whoever wins that argument gets to decide what Kansas voters hear before they vote.

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