Money

Feds stop second Hamas fundraising scheme this year, this one three times the size of the last.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the wee small hours edition, 2 October 2026

The indictment in Louisiana runs to $1.7 million, and it says upfront what the money was supposed to be: humanitarian aid for Gaza. Two Louisiana brothers collected it, some of it from donors in the United States, according to federal prosecutors. That is the filing: humanitarian aid in, Hamas out.

Run that number against the month before. On September 2, federal agents seized a little over $560,000 in cryptocurrency the New York Post described as tied to an ongoing Hamas scheme built to finance operations and recruit supporters. A month later the second filing lands, and it is roughly three times the size of the first. If the September seizure stopped anything, it stopped $560,000 worth. By October the next scheme had already collected more than that before anyone filed charges.

What connects the two filings is not geography. The indictment does not say the $1.7 million crossed state lines, or which city it moved through, or whether it moved through one at all. What connects them is the vocabulary. The September seizure is described as part of an ongoing scheme. The October indictment describes a scheme disguised as aid. Same noun, two separate balance sheets, one calendar year, a month apart.

The Post credits the NYPD with helping expose the October scheme. The indictment itself does not say what the department contributed, in dollars or in evidence, only that help was given. That is a column with no number filled in yet. Put it next to the $1.7 million and the $560,000 and the ledger has three entries: one large, one smaller, and one the record has not priced.

None of this needs decoration. The arithmetic in the filings does the work on its own: a $560,000 seizure in September did not keep a $1.7 million operation from running by October. Two busts, a month apart, the same year, the same cover story for money whose route the indictment has not yet specified. The paperwork says disguise. It does not yet say destination.

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Treasury, having driven U.S. diesel to a record high, orders Europe's price down immediately instead.

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the wee small hours edition, 2 October 2026

Today we are making an instruction, which is not a dish you can get over here: a recipe for your neighbor's fire, the one you lit on your own stove. You will need a war with Iran, a record price with a date, and a social media post telling Europe to bring that price down "immediately."

THE POET: An instruction. I have been drafting one in verse; it will not need a second posting.

THE PUNK: Won't need a second posting. I'll have a window out before you've found your rhyme.

Begin on 4 September, when American diesel reached $5.85 a gallon, the highest the pump had shown, and an economist named Dean Baker posted online that "Trump did it," only half joking.

THE HIPPIE: Fretting, is it. This house has fretted since the boiler went, and called it something else.

THE FIXER: Something else. The boiler could use a sponsor, if the Hippie stopped meditating near the stopcock.

It kept climbing. By 11 September it stood at $6.06, fourteen percent above the month before and sixty-four percent above the year before that, the highest the American Automobile Association had recorded, the war with Iran still unresolved. Patrick De Haan, who tracks the pump for a living, said only that it "is not slowing down."

THE PUNK: Sponsored, is it. Sponsorship won't stop it climbing; a door might, and I'm removing one.

By 29 September, Texas and Georgia had stopped waiting on Washington and announced their own emergency measures, while the White House, the Washington Examiner noted, was still only weighing measures of its own.

THE HIPPIE: Weighing, is it. This house has weighed the rota for a year, and it's still on the fridge.

Then on Thursday, Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, posted that "our European partners should accelerate delivery on their existing commitments and make additional supplies immediately available to address ongoing disruptions." Le Monde printed it as Washington telling Europe to act "immediately" to lower diesel prices; at home the same post reads only as a suggestion. Only the verb moves.

You will be looking for the part where Washington turns the same instruction on itself and lowers its own price. There is no such part; the instruction only goes out, never in. Take the post by both ends: a government that set its own record now tells somebody else's market to bring theirs down, with no date for its own.

THE FIXER: Immediately, is it. The rota could be sponsored immediately too, provided whoever's asking pays the same day.

This serves the price Americans already paid in full, handed to Europe as an instruction rather than an example. Europe pays in diesel it must now find elsewhere; Washington's own bill went out in September, and nothing further is due from it.

THE POET: Paid in full. I'll put that in the verse, right after asking someone else to tidy what's already spent.

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Becerra ducks debates for weeks, then defends ICE policy days after an ex-aide's 'Juanitos' claim.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 2 October 2026

By September 4th, Becerra had been accused of ducking eight debate invitations.

The poll that came out September 25th explains the quiet better than any press release could. Becerra led Hilton by enough that the race looked settled, but the same poll found voters disliked him even as they planned to vote for him. A frontrunner winning that way has one incentive: stay off the stage as long as the math allows, then show up once the math says you can survive it.

Four days after that poll, on September 29th, a former Biden administration official said Becerra had mocked migrant children in private as "little Juanitos and Juanitas." The account surfaced inside his own campaign as something that sparked concern.

Then Wednesday came, and with it the debate: Becerra and Hilton faced off over whether California should cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, Becerra defending the state's refusal, on a stage where the Juanitos account was already public.

The payroll tells its own version of the same stretch. Becerra's campaign paid more than $17,000 to his adult daughter, Clarisa Reyes-Becerra, an immigration attorney, to work on the campaign. Immigration enforcement was the subject of the debate she is being paid, this cycle, to help run. That is not against any rule; campaigns hire family members, and the filing discloses the payment the same as any other vendor's. What it does is sit beside the rest of the month and ask the same question the debate stage asked out loud: who this campaign is protecting, and who it keeps on the payroll while it decides how loud to say so.

None of these facts touch each other by law. A debate invitation is not a payroll filing. A payroll filing is not an anonymous aide's account of a private remark. But they sit in the same six weeks, on the same campaign, about the same subject, and the gap between what Becerra said on stage Wednesday and what his own payroll and his own silence said about who he was protecting is the only gap this column is in business to measure, hon.

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Trump's $400 million PAC pays for ads the White House insists are patriotism, not partisan.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 2 October 2026

The 30-second spot that ran on Fox and Newsmax the week of September 22 opens with Air Force One and closes with a stadium crowd, and nowhere in between does it list a budget line. The White House supplied one anyway, on September 25, filing the ad under "patriotism isn't partisan" — a description, not an appropriation, because something still has to say which account paid for the airtime.

That something turned up the same Friday, from the Campaign Legal Center, which ran the money forward instead of back. Trump's "stated control over spending decisions" at MAGA Inc., the watchdog found, sits on top of a $400 million war chest — the kind of control a sitting officeholder is barred by decades of precedent from exercising over a super PAC. The watchdog's word for that arrangement was "clear-cut violation"; the White House's word for the ad it funds was "patriotism." Both words describe the same thirty seconds of airtime.

By October 1, CBS News had brought on legal contributor Jessica Levinson to share her analysis of how the Hatch Act — the 1939 law restricting partisan use of federal resources — could apply to a government-aired ad five weeks before a midterm.

Run the filing against the calendar and the gap is not a rounding error: 32 days of campaign travel, one ad defended as patriotism, one war chest called a violation, and 33 days left before voters decide the Texas seat that ad was aired ahead of. No public figure has yet been attached to what the spot itself cost to produce or air — the receipts name the $400 million fund behind it, not a line-item price — and that's a gap that's easier to notice than it is to total.

The account the ad draws on and the account the campaign draws on keep turning out to be adjacent columns in the same ledger. That's not a coincidence to solve. That's just where the spending was filed, hon.

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LA County sells $200-a-year tax hike as 'affordability,' spends $10 million convincing you

By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 2 October 2026

The charge showed up Thursday the way these charges show up: half a cent added to every taxable dollar spent in Los Angeles County, no cashier required to explain it, no auditor required to sign off before the register rings it up. Voters approved Measure ER back in June. The half-cent took effect October 1. One click past the ad is the number the ad was built to soften: a typical Los Angeles County family's annual bill goes up by about $200.

Half a cent does not sound like a program. Two hundred dollars does. And the word attached to the measure before the vote was "affordability" — the same word Sacramento and Los Angeles reach for whenever the bill is a tax increase rather than a tax cut. Run that word against the actual mechanism and the two stop matching. A half-cent surcharge on every dollar a family spends at the register is not relief and it is not a subsidy. It moves money in one direction only, out of the household and into the county's account, at the exact moment the household is buying groceries, school supplies, or a car part.

Six days before Thursday's new charge, on September 25, a different outlet ran a different number entirely. The Washington Examiner put a family's annual "hidden tax" from civil lawsuits at $5,579 — its own figure, its own sourcing, aimed at trial lawyers rather than county supervisors, and not the same claim as the Post's "deceitful," which belongs to the sales-tax campaign alone. Set the two pieces side by side and what holds steady is not the dollar amount but the delivery method: a number assigned to "a typical family," attached to no family in particular, arriving in print days before anyone with a green eyeshade gets a look at it. One number was built to argue for a lawsuit cap. The other was built to describe a tax increase already signed, sealed, and charged at the register. Different papers, different causes, same shape.

Los Angeles County's version is the simpler of the two to check, because the receipt is dated and the rate is public: half a cent per dollar, roughly $200 a year per family, $10 million spent on the campaign that got the measure past voters in June. The county starts collecting the half-cent now. The $10 million the union spent is already spent. The $200 a year the family owes starts Thursday and keeps going, with "affordability" doing the work the ballot language itself never had to do.

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Iowa votes to raise the subsidy cap voters in Missouri just recalled a councilman over

By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 2 October 2026

Iowa lawmakers return to the Statehouse Friday for one item on the calendar: raising the state's cap on tax incentives, the ceiling now standing between the state and the $15 billion steel plant the president announced from the Oval Office the previous Monday. The announcement came with Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Ashley Hinson standing in frame, both facing a difficult November, and with the plant described as the largest steel project in U.S. history, running by 2030. What it buys is room enough for a deal already announced to fit under a cap sized before the deal existed.

On September 2, residents of Independence, Missouri, held a different kind of vote on a similar line item. Councilman John Perkins had approved tax incentives for an artificial intelligence data center in his district. The ballot that followed did not ask voters about the data center. It asked whether Perkins should keep the council seat Perkins had been elected to hold through June 2028. Sixty-eight percent said no. Thirty-two percent said let Perkins finish the term. The receipts do not carry a dollar figure for that incentive package; the recall ran on the vote itself, not the sum attached to it.

That is the reconciliation, hon: one state is widening the opening for a subsidy before the deal closes, and one city already held the only vote available to it after the deal had closed, which turned out to be a vote on the person who signed it. Iowa's Friday session does not put the steel plant's incentive number in front of Iowa voters; it puts the ceiling in front of the lawmakers already elected to raise it. Independence's ballot never reached the data center contract either. It reached the man who voted for it, with two years left on the term he'd been elected to serve.

The filing in Des Moines and the filing in Independence are the same kind of document: a public subsidy for private capital, cleared by officials the public did not get to approve in the same motion as the deal itself. Iowa's lawmakers take theirs up Friday. Missouri's voters already took theirs up, 68 to 32, over a councilman with two years still on the clock. The receipts give no indication Friday's session includes a line for what happens if the vote runs the other way.

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Billionaires fund ad blitz against tax Nobel economists call democracy's turning point, support falls under 50.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the sunrise edition, 2 October 2026

On August 25, Building a Better California and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes opened their advertising campaign against Proposition 40, the one-time 5 percent tax on net worth over $1 billion that would reach roughly 200 Californians. The money behind the two committees traces to Google co-founder Sergey Brin and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, among other mega-billionaires who would write the checks the measure describes.

On September 21, a group of Nobel-winning economists called the measure "a turning point in the battle between democracy and oligarchy" and reported the initiative remained popular, putting support at 52 percent.

Seven points separate the two counts of the same electorate on the same question, taken one day apart. The number that actually passes a California ballot measure is fifty.

On September 29, Senator Bernie Sanders announced he would return to California to campaign for Proposition 40 with Representatives Ro Khanna and Aisha Wahab, as the measure entered what the reporting called its final weeks before the vote.

This week, the Washington Examiner described Proposition 40 as something larger than a California question: the first state-level wealth tax in the country, and a measure whose backers — among them socialists — hope a win here opens the door to similar votes in other states. The ad committees funded by Brin, Thiel, and other mega-billionaires are fighting to keep that door shut at the first state in line.

Here is the reconciliation, hon. One column holds the money: two ad committees, funded by men whose own fortunes the tax was written to reach, running ads through the campaign's final weeks. Another column holds the prestige: Nobel laureates, a sitting U.S. senator, two members of Congress, lending their names to the other side. Neither column decides Proposition 40. The column that decides it is the one the pollsters keep measuring, and the last time anyone measured it, it had not yet cleared fifty.

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Two UC law schools found guilty of race bias in three weeks, money already gone.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the sunrise edition, 2 October 2026

On September 9th, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education found that the University of California, Berkeley's law school discriminated against white and Asian applicants, the finding resting on admissions essays investigators said worked as a stand-in for race. Six days later, on September 15th, the New York Post ran an op-ed asking why California's universities "continue to discriminate" after state voters barred the practice at the ballot box, twice. Ten days after that, on September 25th, the administration ordered a $810 million pocket rescission, the second such maneuver in 49 years, canceling congressionally appropriated funds that covered, among other things, "race-focused programs." Six days after that, on October 1st, the Department of Justice found that UCLA's law school had done what Berkeley's had: illegally used race in admissions against white and Asian students. Two University of California law schools, the same finding, three weeks apart.

I ran the ledger. Here is the gap. The $810 million rescission is dated September 25th. The Berkeley finding is dated September 9th, sixteen days before it. The UCLA finding is dated October 1st, six days after it. It was canceled in bulk, the way a lender forecloses on a street before it has inspected every house on it.

The finding on Berkeley and the finding on UCLA sit in the same drawer, under the same two agency letterheads, three weeks apart. The rescission sits in a different drawer, dated between them, and nobody at either department has produced the invoice connecting the two drawers: which of UCLA's dollars, if any, came out of that $810 million, or whether UCLA had any dollars in it at all. The Hill reports the same allegation has already been made against UCLA's medical school and the law schools at Duke and the University of Michigan.

Hon, when the bill gets paid before the audit is finished, the audit was never really the point. The money moved September 25th. The second campus got its finding October 1st. A reader with a calendar can see which one came first, and which one still owes the explanation.

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