I just finished an important new book by two of my favorite authors, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. The book, Muskism, is directly relevant to understanding the contemporary dynamics of corporate power and the military-industrial complex. The authors make the case that multi-billionaire oligarch Elon Musk has long embraced “technocracy” as an all-encompassing system of corporate power that aspires to merge private ownership of technology with a militarized techno-state underpinned by white supremacy, xenophobic border restrictions and a (futher) deregulation of capitalist accumulation facilitated by heightened surveillance and repression of labor and social movements. The influences that shaped Musk are traced extensively in the book, from his childhood in South Africa and the system of racial apartheid to his fascination with science fiction novels such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, from which Musk identifies with the efforts of mathematician Hari Seldon to create a Second Empire inside the decay of the Galactic Empire.
In fact, Musk’s ambitions to secure and expand his power by destroying and recreating a government that is more accountable to himself has echoes of the science fiction characters he most admires. Musk sees himself as leading the creation of a new empire of technocracy, where capitalist power and state power will be more intertwined to facilitate the path to a technocratic society governed by the owners of big tech. As the authors explain, Musk’s pivot toward the far right and in support of the Trump presidential campaign was a direct outgrowth of his perceptions of “wokism” as a “mind virus” and a threat to the capitalist ambitions of big tech oligarchs like himself. Toward that end, in the aftermath of the pandemic, when the profits of big tech were threatened by societal protections and regulations, Musk railed against the so-called enemies of advanced civilization, embodied by government regulators, labor unions, BlackLivesMatter protestors, and transgender activists. He memed in favor of a “workerist” ethos, a society in which the “virus” of “wokism” would be eliminated in favor of a social order predicated on accelerating capitalist profit making, subsuming labor to the dictates of the technocracy, disciplining social movements by declaring war on Black Lives Matter, MeToo and civil rights.
Musk purchased Twitter as part of a larger effort to use its data and its social media infrastructure to facilitate the further development and testing of Grok AI, an “anti-woke” AI assistant built by Musk’s xAI and since incorporated into SpaceX. Grok AI intersects with Musk attempts to integrate artificial intelligence into a mind-body ecosystem dominated by far right ideology. To those on the left that somehow think that the culture wars were simply a distraction for the left, this book, Muskism, has plenty of ammunition against that notion. Musk and other big tech leaders have long seen any social movements fighting for labor rights, civil rights and human rights as a product of a kind of “woke” mind virus. The belief in natural racial and gender hierachies as a conduit to unfettered capitalist accumulation has taken root politically in the big-tech alliance with Trump in his second term.
This relates directly to the alliance between big tech and the longstanding military-industrial complex in the U.S. As recently as May 1 of this year, “the Pentagon announced an agreement with eight leading artificial intelligence companies: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon Web Services. As part of this pact, the U.S. Department of Defense budgeted tens of billions of dollars for purchasing technologies from these firms related to intelligence, drone warfare, classified and unclassified information networks, and $54 billion for the development of autonomous weapons systems” (The Guardian, May 1, 2026). This is on top of the expansion of big tech militarization that was already being subsidized by the U.S. Department of Defense over the past decade, totaling at least $53 billion between 2019 and 2022 alone (Costs of War Project 2024). This level of integration of big tech with militarized capital accumulation is perceived by the tech industry as a backstop to their unsustainable stock market valuations.
The problem is that this level of government subsidization is nowhere close to the massive investments being made in the private sector by a few dominant firms whose revenues will not be able to cover their colossal cost overruns. J.P. Morgan Chase analysts anticipate $5 trillion of spending on AI infrastructure between now and 2030. “This year alone, four tech companies–Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft–have plans to invest $670 billion on AI infrastructure. When measured by U.S. GDP, this is more than the Apollo space program, the U.S. interstate highway system, railroads, and every other major capital spending program in U.S. history, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yet OpenAI and Anthropic have annualized revenues of about $25 billion and $19 billion, respectively. Unless AI revenues grow by orders of magnitude soon, there’s a Grand Canyon-sized gap that will be hard to cross (Time, March 26, 2026).”
What makes this dramatic overleveraging especially dangerous to the public is that this investment money is coming from a wide range of sources, impacting most financial markets including 401ks that house life insurance and pension plans, alongside “the record levels of corporate bonds, leveraged private credit, junk bonds, structured financed, asset-backed securities and more” (Time, March 26, 2026). This overleveraging feeds the aggressive lobbying of the big tech sector to increase their cash flow with more aggressive military subsidies and a push for more deregulation to expedite a radical expansion of big data centers. Large segments of the public oppose these data centers and will lose from the kind of hyper-militarism being proposed by the Trump Administration in its latest discretionary budget proposal, which sets military spending at 80 percent of the budget allocation, up from between 50 and 60 percent in recent years.
The clash between an emerging economic populist current in U.S. politics and an entrenched big tech oligarchy is evident in analyzing campaign expenditures by big tech, especially the flows of wealthy dark money donations to the Super PAC “Majority Democrats” that is coming disproportionately from big tech donors (The Lever Podcast, “The Democratic Party’s New Dark Money Machine,” May 21, 2026). These tech oligarchs are attempting to use their wealth and power to defeat populist Democrats pledging to regulate AI data center expansion (even modest regulation is opposed by the tech titans). The fact that economic populists are gaining ground is epitomized by efforts of corporate Democrat groups like Third Way to fund an upcoming campaign, backed by billionaire money, to target the Democratic Socialists of America as “enemy number one.” The big tech oligarchs already are working with Trump to further deconstruct and demobilize an already gravely weakened regulatory state. Their overleveraged bets on the future profits of AI have put us on the ledge of another economic crisis. Financial investors who see this crisis coming are already preparing to leverage the crisis as an opportunity for enrichment at public expense. The political battles ahead will determine who will pay for the crisis and on what terms.
I have been re-reading a book by sociologist C. Wright Mills from 1958 titled The Causes of World War III. Mills is famous for developing the power elite theory of U.S. politics. Mills identified three pillars of elite power concentrated in the political, economic and military spheres of U.S. society. Driven by what Mills called a “permanent war economy,” this elite power structure reinforced a “march to war” as a central feature of its existence. The linkages between the political, corporate and military elites were solidified within the U.S. during World War II, reducing politics to a hollow shell game of unaccountability with the growth of corporate power, the imperial presidency and a globalized military-industrial complex.
There is much to learn from Mills in assessing today’s military-industrial complex. An important caveat is that the power elite identified by Mills has always been more fractured and divided than his framework would allow for. I have been part of a group of scholars that have advanced a business conflict or, more recently, a transnational interest bloc conflict theory of capitalist power. This perspective argues that transnational corporations compete with each other based on on their sectoral and territorial location within global capitalism, a framework closely tied to the investment theory of political parties developed by Tom Ferguson, and advanced in various iterations by me and my frequent co-author Daniel Skidmore-Hess, as well as David Gibbs and James H. Nolt, to name a few. During Mills time, there was certainly an interdependency between the profits of dominant global corporations and the expansion of the military-industrial complex, but there was also business conflict around the extent, scope and purposes of military spending. This became especially evident with the Vietnam War escalation from 1965 to 1968, which fractured corporate blocs between those advocating for military escalation and those advocating for deescalation. The former were concentrated within sectors producing for the military or sectors benefiting directly from war spending versus financial sectors that had come to view the escalation of the Vietnam War as damaging to their portfolios.
My caveats aside: Mills did understand the exent to which the elite power structure served to drive the U.S. toward a permanent war economy. The accelerating growth of the military-industrial-intelligence-surveillance complex and the imperial presidency in recent decades has served to highlight the relevance of Mills’ power elite theory long after his passing in 1962. The ascendancy of the permanent war economy has reached new heights in current U.S. politics. Today the U.S. is spending more on global militarization than it did at the height of the Cold War, a trend enabled by a bipartisan political elite, a big tech investment bloc, an acceleration of private equity investment, and a highly consolidated bloc of military contractors that has globalized production and sales of military weapons with the support of powerful institutional investors such as BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, who collectively hold stakes as high as 17 to 25 percent in the top five U.S. defense contractors. As William Robinson has noted, there is a push toward militarized capital accumulation on a global scale that transcends the old contours of the military-industrial complex analyzed by C. Wright Mills.
The permanent war economy has become even more central to capitalist accumulation of profits. This is especially evident when examining the extent to which the big tech sector in the U.S., Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Anduril Industries, have become heavily invested within the military-industrial-intelligence-surveillance complex. As was the case during the Cold War, U.S. military spending is used to subsidize leading sectors of the global capitalist economy, providing sources of finance for big tech firms whose militarization of capital accumulation is providing them with greater concentration of power and privilege. It’s here that we see the clearest relevance of the work of C. Wright Mills to the present global expansion of U.S. militarism. As Mills would have expected, absent guardrails of popular dissent, this current system of militarized accumulation is driven by a constellation of elite interests whose positions within the hierarchy of state and capitalist power structures contribute to unchecked wars and genocide.
In my next blog post, I will talk about the political and economic instability of this global system of militarized accumulation, which rests on a shaky foundation of imperial overreach, rising domestic and global opposition to U.S. empire, and an unsustainable balance sheet of overvalued stocks that portend a market crash of the big tech sector that has been so central to the hyper-growth of the stock market. Once this economic crisis manifests itself as a deepening political and social crisis, the battle over who will pick up the costs and who will seize distressed assets will shape the political fights ahead. As Mills would have understood, the role of intellectuals here is not to engage in “business as usual” but to use their positions as advocates for the public good, positioning us with popular struggles capable of checking corporate power and securing more resources and political/economic capital for the vast majority that have been exploited and oppressed by this global capitalist system.
Here are just a few thoughts about what it’s like for those of us in the U.S. to be in a country that is literally being led by the equivalent of a stupefying and mind-numbing infantile asshole. How can anyone doubt that Trump the Idiot’s rule is both an extension of a system that has long been plutocratic, corrupt, venal and self-destructive and one that has degenerated into an Onion-like parody of its historically most rapacious, uncaring and venomous tendencies. Even attempts at rational analysis, such as I have tried with my blog, fail to capture the full amount of the head-slapping, cringe inducing headlines that reflect the priorities of a deranged lunatic whose proclivities for self-enrichment are aided and abetted by Nazi symbols and music being deployed by a domestic occupying army whose activities of death and destruction are being celebrated by inside the beltway grifters and propagandists. Meanwhile, some Democrats look at this and only call for better training?
Regarding the so-called “ruling class,” they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the tech billionaire sector whose wealth and power far exceeds any other coherent expression of unified interests. Therefore any analyst has to recognize that the marriage of Trump gangster capitalism and big tech gangsterism has taken ludicrous turns, illustrated by the economic and military threats to take Greenland. Reuters News reported during the 2024 Presidential campaign that Trump addressed his corporate donors about his Greenland plans, supported by members of the billionaire venture capitalist and big tech profiteers, as a way to expand their zones for super wealthy capitalist enrichment as a kind of plutocratic paradise free of any regulation or accountability. Grifters everywhere who want to shield their wealth from public scrutiny applaud this as a victory for global con men and mafioso elites who now have their closest friend in the White House.
The historian Quinn Slobodian has long chronicled the rise of the anarcho-capitalist big tech billionaires in the U.S. whose plans for tech monarchy freed from democratic accountability has a lengthy history. Trump’s alliance with these big tech billionaires has been starkly evident in his administration’s global threats to U.S. state governors and foreign leaders that there will be consequences if regulation blocks unbridled tech expansion of energy guzzling data centers. Rachel Adams in The New Empire of AI and Karen Hao in Empire of AI both detail the neo-colonial domination of the tech billionaire class, leveraging its wealth and resources to force concessions on taxation, regulation and subsidies on governments and localities around the world.
Meanwhile capitalist political parties in the U.S. and elsewhere, who have long lost much of their power of the purse to become heavily dependent on capitalist financiers to finance government debts and carry out government programs, channel public money through the big tech sector without asking much in return. Whether Democrat or Republican in the U.S., the answer is not accountability of big tech to the public, but instead how can the government lavish big tech with resources to be even more dominant, under the guise of global competition with China. This is competition that allows the already super rich to get richer still, and take down the globe with them, fueling climate degradation, increased militarism and resource grabbing imperialism.
The “left”, to the extent we exist, have to be as nimble as possible in maneuvering through a corporate-dominated system by broadening the tent to include all activities that have a chance to shine a spotlight on the costs and consequences of this corporate plutocracy: diminishing living and working conditions, environmental devastation, and even larger gaps between rich and poor. We need to work with everyone fighting back against this, but not with politicians aiding and abetting a neo-fascist party whose rhetoric of “populism” is merely a cover for their rapacious and authoritarian political project.
To fully understand what is happening in Venezuela, analysts should watch the Venezuelan bond markets, as they’ve soared in the past few days, as U.S. investors close to Trump are expecting deferential treatment in collecting on debts that they have held for a long time. That’s where the real action is, and the oil markets are connected to this, but not with the goal of owning Venezuela oil production—there’s little interest in that right now. But instead, wealthy bondholders in the U.S., several very close to the Trump administration, hope to benefit in the long term from revenues generated by increased production, which some U.S. oil companies would help service. Remember that all of the big global oil corporations make money in a lot of different ways, partly by placing derivative bets on oil markets, rather than owning facilities that produce oil.
Trump is an extension of a longtime U.S. tradition when it comes to protecting massively wealthy U.S. bondholders who are looking for the best political solution for extracting payments on debts held: authoritarian rulers who agree to cooperate in paying bondholders and increasing accessibility and protection for foreign investors. At the same time, the Trump Administration is accelerating and expanding the close relationship between the U.S. state and the U.S. oil sector by leveraging the U.S. military to appropriate assets that will be delivered to private U.S. oil corporations, investors and service companies at taxpayers’ expense. This follows existing power dynamics whereby the U.S. government has long subsidized the costs of foreign direct investments by the U.S. oil corporation supermajors. What many analysts miss when they reference oil executives’ verbal hesitancy in investing in Venezuela, due to the expense, uncertainty and long-term payback for their investment, is the way that the oil sector continues to rely on U.S. tax breaks and state subsidies to underwrite their costs and expand their short- and long-term profit margins. The return of a more militarized and interventionist U.S. imperialism is designed to expand U.S. state and corporate power, discourage and reverse oil nationalizations and displace Chinese and Russian investments in favor of preferred U.S. investments. The Venezuelan bond markets are a useful starting point for understanding how this imperialism is operationalized.
At the time of the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the Trump Administration, there were as many as nine corporate lawsuits pending against the Venezuelan government alleging damages owed to U.S. corporations from the instability and termination of their operations in Venezuela. Several prominent investment firms that had stakes in extractive industries in Venezuela, including oil, natural gas and mining, are included in the list of litigants. Other corporate parties had previously sued Venezuela through the World Bank’s International Settlement of Investment Disputes, such as ConocoPhillips, which won nearly $9 billion dollars from the World Bank arbitration court. ExxonMobil has filed multiple claims against Venezuela, claiming $20 billion in payments owed by the Venezuelan state. Oil services firms such as Halliburton have also filed claims that are based on what the firm describes as instability that forced them to abandon investments in Venezuela. Halliburton’s litigation claimed that both U.S. sanctions and the Venezuelan government were to blame for the firms losses, but are currently suing only the Venezuelan government. Multi-billionaire investor Paul Singer, founder, President and Co-CEO of Elliott Management, is attempting to buy an ownership stake in Citgo, the downstream petroleum firm that was fully acquired by Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA in 1990.
Collectively, these investors hope to leverage the U.S. intervention to collect billions of dollars in claims from U.S. acquisition of Venezuelan assets. In turn, the Trump Administration would provide these firms with a potential avenue to expand profit-making opportunities in Venezuela. This could involve Elliott Management’s energy firm Amber Energy purchasing CITGO, which owns an oil refinery in Lake Charles, Louisiana that is equipped to refine Venezuelan oil. This could also involve a return to Venezuela of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, alongside service companies such as Halliburton who would be in line for infrastructure projects. Chevron, which is the one U.S. oil firm that stayed in Venezuela and has been allowed to export to the U.S., also could emerge as a long-term winner.
The Venezuelan bond market brings together the interests of U.S. investment firms, U.S. oil corporations and the U.S. state in an imperialist project, designed to expand the power of the U.S. throughout the Western Hemisphere at the expense of China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. U.S. intervention would be directed at protecting and expanding the role of U.S. investors and crowding out/excluding Chinese investors. The Trump Administration would also leverage a direct appropriation of oil from Venezuela as a piggybank for crony capitalist allies, whose riches would expand based on accelerated control and leverage of oil reserves. This brazen expansion of U.S. imperialism in its most overt and militaristic form would intensify the climate crisis, increase inequality between rich and poor throughout the Hemisphere and subject any government that wants to exercise control over its own resources to mafia-like extortion.
Following this playbook, what the Trump administration is doing now is attempting to cut a political deal on mafia terms with the Venezuelan state. The reason that Trump’s advisers have decided to keep the current Venezuelan regime intact is they think the Venezuelan military is a necessary precondition for ensuring stability and protection for any financial and investment deal they can negotiate. The outlines of any political deal would be: agreement by the Venezuelan regime to pay debts owed to bondholders, though percentages and who would be favored would have to be worked out (here the U.S. hopes to crowd out Chinese investors); opening Venezuela to more foreign investment across a range of productive and portfolio type investment options; oil concessions to the U.S. government; and commitments by the Venezuelan military to provide investment guarantees through security, police and contractual provisions. In return, the Trump administration would lower sanctions.
It’s a mafia state attempting to cut a deal with another mafia state: the Trump Administration with the Venezuelan military, which has been identified by Trump as the most powerful institution in Venezuelan politics. Indeed, the Venezuelan military cannot easily be dislodged without triggering a large-scale civil war, according to a CIA report which concluded that retention of the Venezuelan military, alongside senior Maduro loyalists, offered the best option for governing the country. Trump is currently pressuring Venezuelan officials to offer oil concessions to the U.S., reported to involve as much as $2 billion of Venezuelan oil concessions. If the U.S. acquires such quantities cheaply, at below market rates, profits from sales would likely be distributed to U.S. creditors, many of whom have ongoing lawsuits against the regime.
U.S. imperialism is designed to enrich wealthy investors, who are hopeful of being bailed out by U.S. militarism. The Trump Administration is the latest manifestation of brazen illegality in the expansive use of military force in the Western Hemisphere, intervening in ways reminiscent of late 19th and early 20th century U.S. military invasions, which at the time were concentrated in Central America and the Caribbean. The use of militarized violence on a large-scale is a symptom of an empire in decline, gasping at lowest-common denominator tactics to extract wealth by force, without bothering to address the larger systematic reasons for its decay.
My annual favorites list is posted here as part of my yearly ritual. What has stood out for the past several years is how many of my favorite films are made outside of the United States and/or by foreign directors. The films that topped my list this year were by Brazilian, Belgian, Palestinian-Danish, Spainard, Palestinian, Israeli and Greek directors. These were also the best political films that I saw in 2025. This raises some larger questions that I will start examining in this post, but will continue as part of a series of posts devoted to the politics of film.
My top six films: The Secret Agent, Soundtrack to a Coup d’ Etat, To a Land Unknown, Close Your Eyes, No Other Land, and Bugonia, were all committed to large-scale canvases which interrogated big themes of history, memory, the cost and consequences of power, and characters whose search for meaning and survival is tied to a broader engagement with society. In short, for me, the best political films have a societal and historical perspective. They are not centered on individuals, or if they are, they locate individuals within a broader societal context. The way directors and screenwriters frame images and words on the screen often reflects judgments that are inherently political. What distinguishes the top six films on my list is that they all have a strong sense of place that is grounded in social interaction and a profound interrogation of the way that circumstances are the product of choices constrained by power and by time.
The film that topped my list, The Secret Agent, is directed by Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonca Filho. Of all my favorite films this year, The Secret Agent operates on the most expansive political canvas, incorporating fully all the elements I have previously listed as characterizing the best political films. The Secret Agent traces the saga of the protagonist, widower Armando (Wagner Moura), as he returns to his hometown of Recife to reunite with his young son. Set in 1977, the film teems with vivid images of working class Brazil in the midst of a military dictatorship. The viewer is immersed from the outset in seeing Recife from the eyes of Armando, a political dissident who had been forced to flee Brazil after his confrontation with a businessman whose wealth and power are closely tied to the repressive apparatus of the Brazilian state. Within this outline of power, repression and defiance, the director frames historical memory and societal power structures within the lived experiences of Brazilian communities. The viewer is immersed in collective networks of working class dissidents whose own histories are conveyed through their interactions with Armando.The shared experiences of these communities are powerfully brought to life by a wonderful array of characters and personalities—the film has an Altmanesque flavor in capturing both society and place though idiosyncratic characters. There is also a strong sense of historical memory through references to movies as a shared experience of remembering, from the fact that Armando’s father-in-law works at a local cinema in Recife at the time of Armando’s return, continuing through the memory of Armando’s son having seen Jaws at that local theatre, and from the use of myth and metaphor when a man eaten by a shark becoming a mythical one-legged creature who haunts Recife and engages in grisly murders.
The best aspects of political cinema are represented by the directorial choices in The Secret Agent: a big canvas that incorporates history, a critical interrogation of power, and a societal context that is framed by the director in a way that challenges the viewer to understand and empathize with characters that have very little power and control, but are finding ways to fight back and preserve their humanity. These qualities were also present, in varying degrees, among my other favorite films of the year. Soundtrack to a Coup d’ Etat, directed by Johan Grimonprez, uses documentary footage with only a jazz soundtrack, no voiceover narration, to tell the story of how the forces of imperial power, through the U.S. and the United Nations, conspired, often with the unwitting assistance of jazz artists who were deployed as CIA-funded U.S. “ambassadors” to the Congo, in the 1961 assassination of democratically elected President Patrice Lumumba. The genius of the film lies in its powerful cinematic editing of both documentary images of events as they were unfolding in real time, combined with how the political attacks on Lumumba had escalated as part of a broader war between colonial powers and decolonial liberation movements, the U.S. and Soviet Union, and within the context of divisions within the cultural and jazz worlds during the time the assassination was being plotted, with several jazz artists protesting the vilification of Lumumba at U.N. meetings prior to his assassination. Director Johan Grimonperez manages to craft a political film that is grounded in the consequences and costs of imperial power, layered though striking visual images, and that movingly captures a struggle between opposing forces in the battle over the future of the Congo.
My third favorite film, To a Land Unknown, directed by Palestinian-Danish filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel, is more focused on narratives of individual survival in a specific time and place: Palestinian immigrants who have managed to migrate to Greece but whose undocumented status puts them in daily jeopardy, from state repression to underground networks who prey on immigrant vulnerability. This film, unlike the first two, has a tighter directorial framing, less expansive and more focused on the tight spaces the two lead characters have to navigate. The filmmaking, however, uses the close-ups and the engergies of the two lead actors and a strong supporting cast to direct the viewer toward identification with their plight and an understanding of why they made the choices they did. The larger structures of history, power, circumstances and survival among the most marginalized and oppressed, are given center stage here through a discerning and powerful directorial eye, with sharp dialogue that is believable and carefully developed.
Writer and director Victor Erice works on a very large canvas in the film Close Your Eyes, which explores the long mystery of what happened to an actor that mysteriously vanished from a movie in production. The film intersperses the distant past, when the film was being made, to the present, when the former director becomes immersed in an investigation of what happened long ago to one of his actors. The search for the truth takes the director through villages, memories of place, colorful personalities whose fortunes, or misfortunes, intersect with the director’s journey, and eventual reconnection with the film’s crew. Less overtly political than the first three films on my list, the extent to which the filmmaker captures an individual journey to connect him to his own community of creative artists and their shared memories, becomes a strong message of the intersection of art, memories, and community.
No Other Land is a harrowing cinematic portrayal of the deadly costs and consequences of the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank. As Israel has continued to militarize, police and dispossess Palestinians to the point of eviscerating any realistic hope for a “two-state” solution in the West Bank, this documentary emerges as a powerful testimonial to Palestinian resistance, suffering and daily degradation by Israeli settlers backed by the full repressive weight of the reactionary Israeli state. The Palestinian co-director, Hamdan Ballal, was attacked and assaulted by masked Israeli settlers outside his home while filming settler violence. After which, the Israeli military arrested and detained him before he was eventually released. Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian community leader who was a consultant for the film, died on July 30, 2025 after being shot by an Israeli settler. The politics of this film dared to challenge very powerful forces of Israeli settler colonialism and what we have left is more carnage in response to these and other efforts at collective resistance.
Bugonia is the sixth film on my list. Directed by Yorgos Lathimos, this film also operates on a large-scale political canvas. One of the lead characters is a conspiracy theorist whose alienation and loneliness is manifested in his conviction that he has discovered the source behind the degradation of ecosystems, specifically his bee population on the farm he inhabits, as well as the destruction of the environment and lives lost due to global contamination, including what he believes is the chemical contamination of his mother, resulting in her death. The target of his obsession is the CEO of a major company (he is convinced that she is a leader of an alien conspiracy), whom he and his friend kidnap and whom he subjects to torture to try to produce a confession from her of her responsibility for the impending destruction of the earth. What makes this film a heartfelt and passionate plea for human connection in the face of dire circumstances is the way that the main characters are portrayed: all are multi- dimensional and complex, including the conspiracy theorist, his much-abused and taken advantage of autistic friend, and the CEO of the company, whose history is exposed in a way that highlights corporate responsibility for environmental destruction. The ending is a harrowing worst case scenario that is both the product of science fiction imagination and the reality that potentially confronts humanity if we fail to address the threats before us. Urgent, compelling and underrated , this film continues the already great filmmaking of Lathimos on yet another large-scale and provocative canvas.
Another film with a powerful historical, social and political message that interrogates the brutality of an authoritarian regime is It Was Just an Accident, directed and written by Jafar Panahi, whose directorial career in and outside of Iran has been focused on a critical dissection of the oppressive rule of the Iranian dictatorship. This film puts front and center an Iranian victim of government torture whose attempts to enact revenge involve an elaborate capture of the suspected perpetrator, alongside help from fellow victims to figure out what to do with the suspected perpetrator. The tones shift from the darkly comical to the deadly serious repercussions of the oppressed trying to figure out what to do with and about their oppressors. A key question that is asked: how to avoid treating “them” just like they treated you.
The U.S. film that is closest in sensibility and large-scale cinematic scope to the top foreign films on my list is One Battle After Another, directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson. This film may be Anderson’s most political film of his career, especially the riveting sequences of political solitary displayed by immigrant communities in Los Angeles as part of a political resistance to anti-immigrant raids and roundups being orchestrated by the political establishment, exemplified by a marriage of corporate power, profiteering and white supremacist leaders who cooperate to keep immigrants locked down and terrorized. The thread connecting these organized struggles against ICE-type attacks is an older historical figure who had been involved long ago in guerrilla tactics of organized violence against symbols and perpetrators of state and corporate repression. The ability to turn what seemed initially to be a cartoonish caricature of a fringe hippy into the centerpiece of a more collectively inspiring resistance to contemporary oppression is a testament to Anderson’s skill as a writer and a filmmaker. This film incorporates wildly different tones into its canvas in ways that come together by the end, which ultimately is an endorsement of social and political activism.
The exceptional Sorry Baby, directed, written and starred in by Eva Victor, is a haunting and emotionally powerful narrative of a woman victimized by sexual assault. Rather than focusing on the victimization as defining the central character, the filmmaker and writer delve into the evolving capacity of the victim to better understand and cope with the circumstances and aftermath of the assault. The fact that she is surrounded by friends and gains support for her situation in unlikely places, as well as her own ability to use humor to find pathos, resistance and healing, provide a wider context for understanding who she is as a person. This film is very focused on the story of the main character, but we are very much exposed to a wider lens in examining power relations and institutional sexism/misogyny.
Another U.S. film on my list is one that interrogates individualism by placing it at the lonely heart of U.S. culture. The film Mastermind, directed by the great Kelly Reichardt, focuses on the life of a suburban unemployed family man who decides to rob an art gallery as a project that seems designed to both alleviate boredom, provide a sense of purpose and elevate the wounded sensibility of the character. What transpires instead is a poorly executed and misfired plot to vandalize a local museum, with consequences that are dire and explosive in its affects on the man’s family, but also revealing in what the filmmaker has to say about how his acts of defiance reveal about a culture of individualism that refuses to care for others and even helps provide cover for large-scale collective atrocities such as the Vietnam War, images of which provide the background for the lead character’s unsuccessful attempt to hide from the world around him.
The much-hyped U.S. film that was a major disappointment for me, Marty Supreme, revels in an individualism that represents much of the worst of U.S. cinema. Unlike the previous Uncut Gems, co-directed by Josh Safdie (sole director of Marty Supreme), which located its central characters’ addiction to gambling within a larger ecosystem of profits and greed surrounding the cultivation and sale of rare minerals, Marty Supreme is almost entirely focused on the sports dream of its central character. Instead of giving the audience a more complex context of societal interaction with Marty that could allow us to understand the choices he has made for himself, the film surrounds an obnoxious Marty and his single-minded focus on global sports stardom (to be the best table tennis player in the world) with even more self- centered and obnoxious individuals whose crassness and barbarity make Marty look a little better only by comparison. There is also a sexism that runs through the movie: the women characters are primarily defined through their attraction to Marty, rather than being given any believable personalities of their own. Marty the individual striver is the message. And his individualism defines the film.
In fact, the perspective that the audience is confronted with in Marty Supreme is not society/ individual, but rather what kind of individualism is required given that every individual around you is greedy, selfish, hateful and uninspiring. There is no “society” here and certainly very little connection. Everyone is atomized to the point of contrivance. Marty, played by Timothy Chalamet, has a goal larger than everyone else who inhabits his rotten world. Just having a larger goal is a big part of where the film pivots. The entire film is focused on him trying to reach the goal. That means the film operates as a kind of highwire race to see how many situations and people Marty can navigate through, often with deadly consequences, to even get a (false) chance to realize his dream: which involves a rematch with the reigning Japanese world champ whom he lost to in an earlier tournament. The sports mythologies that this film traffics in are built around the individualism that the filmmakers pretend to question or mock, only to embrace the myth of a fallen hero who returns to the womb (of sorts) in a fanciful ending that leaves his character partially redeemed. It’s a crowd pleaser in a way that allows the director to avoid tough choices that Uncut Gems confronted. Its safety valve lies in its nihilistic rejection of anything resembling a society; we all have to save ourselves as individuals from the greediness we inhabit.
After the trade deadline, the Miami Marlins have a major league roster that is almost identical to the pre-deadline roster. The only major leaguers traded were OF Jesus Sanchez and C Nick Fortes. Reactions from the most sophisticated analysts from Marlins social media accounts were a combination of surprise and mild disappointment that the front office did not do more to exchange relief pitchers, or veteran starters such as Cal Quantrill or even Edward Cabrera and/or Sandy Alcantara, for prospect capital at the deadline.
However, after time had passed, many of us agreed that the overall picture is quite positive and reassuring: the new front office in just a year and a half has built the foundations of a competitive team. The timetable for the Marlins to realistically compete for a playoff spot is 2026, but the front office is rewarding the players and the coaching staff at the major league level in 2025 for the sustained success the club has had over the past two months, when the Fish have been among the best teams in major league baseball.
What often gets overlooked in discussions of rebuilds is the interplay between acquiring enough foundational talent to compete long-term and rewarding the players and coaches on the field when they do start to turn things around. It’s fair to say that the Marlins front office has more “building” to do that will likely involve major trades of veteran talent in the offseason. At the same time, this is no longer a “rebuild” given that the goal will be creating a sustainable playoff caliber team in 2026 and beyond. The vision of the new front office under Peter Bendix was to get to the point where the entire major and minor league system was revamped through a unified player development system of over one hundred new hires that would help the organization identify, acquire and develop young players at all levels of the minors (and majors) via trades, waiver wire pickups, Rule V acquisitions and the annual MLB player draft.
These aspects of the rebuild are fast-advanced, though not complete. Marlins fans that wanted to see a lot of trades at the trade deadline to continue a “rebuild” through consecutive years felt that opportunities may have been lost to add more talent to the system. I certainly felt that more trades were necessary as recently as a few weeks ago, but my attitude shifted as the Marlins kept winning games and series, including nine of the last eleven series played, which included only one tied series and one lost series.
The calculation by the Bendix-led front office was to trade key players only if the returns were high enough to help the Marlins compete in 2026 and beyond. The offers for Edward Cabrera, Sandy Alcantara and even relief pitchers such as Anthony Bender did not meet this criteria. There was another factor that often goes overlooked: the front office hired the new coaching staffs at all levels of the system, including a brand new major league coaching staff entrusted with developing the youngest roster in baseball. When the players and the coaching staff had sustained success on the field, they earned the right to continue the momentum established.
The front office, including Bendix, has used the word “culture” more than any other word when talking about sustained success. Part of what that means is rewarding the players and coaches who have successfully adopted the new player development system and “culture” to win games for a sustained period of time. Rather than block that process, the front office wants to encourage this development success and to cultivate its further growth.
To me, this is a ratification of my high expectations of this new front office. They have put themselves in a position to build strategically for both the short- and long-term. That means the Marlins are no longer the type of team that sells valuable assets to the big revenue clubs at firesale prices. When you trade with the Marlins now, you have a front office with the evaluation tools to acquire fair value back to the team, and a development system far advanced from its predecessors. For avid and casual fans, the ballpark experience is already enriched. The upcoming Yankee series will be far more entertaining with the Marlins able to field a team that has surged over the past two months, rather than having to watch a shell of a previously good product stumble to the finish line for yet another season. The hope is not 3, 4 or 5 years away—it’s there in front of our eyes right now, waiting to be built up, not torn down.
A lot has happened since my last post. Namely the Miami Marlins have been one of the hottest teams in baseball. The team set a club record with 11 straight road wins. The lineup has been bolstered ever since the switch of Otto Lopez from 2b to ss and Xavier Edwards from ss to 2b. The new front office has proven its ongoing ability to add lots of value from players released by other clubs. What many casual observers do not see are the ways that the entire infrastructure of the team is being rebuilt at every level of the system. The comments of big leaguers and top minor league prospects repeat a steady refrain: players are getting steady and sophisticated feedback that has helped them incorporate new tools to aid their own development as pitchers and hitters.
This does not mean that the team is ready to contend right now. What we are seeing is the adding of layers of good quality depth at every level of the minor league system. The major league team has a few quality starters that figure to play a long-term role in producing a winning roster for years to come. However, for that to happen, potential star players need to be added to the mix. This current system, from the majors to the minors, is producing good talent widely distributed. But the few potential stars or superstars has kept the rankings (and future ceiling) of big league competitiveness lower than it will take to challenge the top clubs in the NL East, namely the Phillies and Mets. The Braves are having a rare poor season, but I would expect them to pivot relatively quickly to a playoff caliber team again in seasons ahead. The Nationals are in a bit of chaos now, lagging behind the Marlins, especially in pitching development.
The building blocs for future Marlins playoff teams are readily identifiable: Eury Perez and Agustin Ramirez are foundational type players. These two potential stars or superstars will soon be complemented by catcher Joe Mack, who is back to dominating at AAA. Meanwhile, the good players poised to continue to produce value for the big league club: Kyle Stowers, Griffin Conine, Otto Lopez and Xavier Edwards. I love the rapid development of OF Jakob Marsee, one of the players acquired in the Luis Arraez trade, whose skills are elevating across the board at AAA Jacksonville with ongoing high on-base percentage bolstered by improved contact rates, more power, great baserunning and basestealing, and good defense at the corners. His emergence makes the trade of Jesus Sanchez even more likely–see the excellent work by the Fish on First team on this. Dane Myers remains valuable to the Fish–probably more valuable with the team rather than as a trade chip, with his ability to play CF and produce solid offensive numbers.
The pitching staff of 2026 could be poised to elevate the club to greater heights: Eury Perez, the return of Ryan Weathers, the emergence of Janson Junk (signed to a minor league deal but now posting outstanding major league numbers), the eventual callup of Robby Snelling and the potential star-in-watiting Thomas White, alongside the return of Braxton Garrett, added depth with Adam Mazur, the return of Max Myer (though likely to be a bullpen arm going forward) and an entire corps of elite relievers being developed at high levels of the minors, to complement the excellent work of standout waiver acquisition Ronny Henriquez in the majors, gives the team plenty of room for maneuver at the trade deadline this year and going foward in the offseason and for 2026.
On less encouraging news, the fact that Sandy Alcantara has performed so poorly and that the best starting pitcher of 2025, Edward Cabrera, had to exit his last start with elbow fatigue, is very bad timing for getting good trade returns for these two….it will be interesting to see what the front office does at the dealine, given these circumstances.
Despite encouraging signs for the Fish, the warning cloud that hangs over MLB is the end of the current collective bargaining agreement at the conclusion of the 2026 season. MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred is already doing battle with the Players Association in an attempt to divide the players from each other with the goal of pushing through a salary cap after 2026. That MLB owners never learn lessons from their past failures seems to be a given here. Manfred wants to convince the players that not having a salary cap has made them worse off in revenue distribution when compared to the revenues distributed to players in leagues that have salary caps. This is a false argument that conceals the extent to which the owners have taken advantage of the most restrictive reserve system in all of professional sports to drive down revenues distributed to the best young superstars. It is the 6-year waiting period for free agency and the caps on earnings through year 3 that has lowered the MLB players overall revenues in recent years, enabled by an ownership strategy of squeezing mid-level MLB free agents and relying on young, cheap, controllable players instead. I’ve written about this extensively for Just Baseball during the last owner lock out. I’m afraid my analysis will not be out of date at the end of the 2026 season, when another owner lockout looms:
Who is Peter Bendix most likely to trade before the trading deadline this year? What do I mean by a 2-3 year rebuild? And finally what outcome would indicate some level of success or failure? I’ll tackle each of these three angles below.
First, the players most likely to be dealt, based on whom is most likely to get a quality return, and I’m okay with all of these:
Anthony Bender
Ronny Henriquez
Jesus Sanchez
Edward Cabrera
Dane Myers
Liam Hicks
I am not opposed to listening on ANYONE, though as many have said: the untouchables would have to be Agustin Ramirez and Eury Perez. The key for me is to avoid a perpetual rebuild of a rebuild, the kind of churn where you fail to see much progress in wins and losses over the next two or three years. Even Bendix and Sherman made it clear, by their own admission, that another 100 loss season even this year would be disappointing—that was at this year’s fanfest, and was said outright by the owner and Bendix to kick things off.
If there is too much churn beyond the players I’m listing here, then the team is spinning its wheels. This list will already ensure another 100 loss season and that is okay as long as the return both deepens the depth in the farm system, adds a player or two that could be a star, and provides a mix of highly ranked lower level minor leaguers with major league ready pieces that complement what the Marlins have.
My definition of a short rebuild of 2 to 3 years is improvement in record and an identifiable core that we can envision as ready to be playoff competitive. I’m not being rigid or unrealistic here, just suggesting that in 2-3 years, let’s get past losing 100 games every season, or even 90-100 games.
And finally the owner needs to start spending more money in 2026. That means elevating payroll closer to what the Athletics did this year by bringing in free agents that were pricey but filled key needs. The Fish will have to do that for the starting rotation and will need to add a quality bat or two to make 2026 more interesting and productive for the club and the fan base.
A lot has happened since my last Miami Marlins post, so I wanted to provide some brief thoughts on aspects of the Marlins 2025 season, especially after the low point of losing to the historically awful Rockies twice, and before my wife and I take a road trip to see a Marlins game in Tampa on Saturday against the Rays.
My overall optimism about the new front office has not changed. I predicted 64 wins this year, and that looks about accurate, specially since there will be trades at the deadline. The Marlins should trade any and every bullpen arm that can command sufficient value—bullpen arms are the most volatile aspects of any team sport and therefore should face no restrictions in trade discussions—anyone should be available at the right price. I think that’s also true for Jesus Sanchez, whose value is as high as it’s ever going to be. These make sense as strategic trades.
However, the Marlins need to be very careful about how many of the remaining young core they part with. I’m not opposed to trading Edward Cabrera but the return for a pitcher who is controllable through 2029 would have to be very good, and would need to include major league ready talent. I’m not interested in trading young controllable major league talent for a bunch of great A ball prospects. The team’s timetable should not be 4 or 5 years, but instead 2-3 years.
To make the two to three year timetable workable, the Major League Baseball Players Association needs to keep the heat turned up on Marlins owner Bruce Sherman, who needs to spend a lot more starting in 2026. I understand not spending in 2025, because we needed to see which of these young players are part of the core over the next 2-3 years. To me, Stowers, Conine, Myers, Ramirez, Eury Perez qualify. Some are concerned with Stowers’ strikeout percentage, which is legitimate, and he will be prone to slumps, but he’s also shown an ability to make adjustments quickly and he will get better. He’s had a great year and should be a consistent 3 WAR player at least. I also like Otto Lopez at short, as early defensive metrics are good and if he can just hit close to league average, he’s good for 2 WAR a year. At the very least he’s young enough to be a capable asset for the team in a 2-3 year window, especially with the lack of SS options on the market. Xavier Edwards has been disappointing but I do like his overall value at 2B much better than at SS, and I think he will have strong second half. I wish the team would play Hicks more, but I can certainly understand trading him if the return is good, as the club has Joe Mack as the catcher of the future, and Ramirez has shown the ability to catch occasionally and be a productive DH otherwise.
The pitching staff of the next two years should include Weathers and Perez, but the rest is cloudy. Max Meyer has struggled mightily with his fastball, and that caught up to him dramatically in his last few starts. Given the thinness of Marlins pitching, even with promising Robby Snelling on the way, a struggling Alcantara is probably worth keeping rather than selling low, and Edward Cabrera may not be as easy to replace in the next two to three years as people assume. You can never have enough pitching, and most young pitchers fail. Thomas White is expected to be a front line starter but who knows and who knows when. So the team should be very cautious here when making more deals.
My criticisms:
The lineup choices and the handling of starting pitchers at times has been baffling. And the failure to trust Dane Myers against righties, even after proving himself as one of the best hitters, is frustrating. I like the bullpen management though.
Bendix needs to be more honest and upfront about direction of the team for fans. His interviews have to be among the worst I’ve seen from GMs, who are typically bad. He could learn something from how Dombrowski has always operated, even without resources.
Those are my thoughts for now, I’m always going to be a fan of this team in part because of the history of dysfunction which gives the Marlins an underdog status that will make it that much sweeter if this version of the team turns into a success story. There has been progress, but there needs to be more, and relatively soon….I’m a baseball fan, and the Marlins will always be on my radar but so will my other favorite teams like the Cardinals and Rays. I’ll end up focusing on the teams that are winning down the stretch if they are in the race….someday the Marlins need to join that group.
The clock starts this year on assessment of the new Miami Marlins front office, hired just a year and a half ago by Marlins owner Bruce Sherman. So far there are plenty of reasons to justify long-term optimism. The record this year is far less important than seeing if this first group of young players have a chance to stick with the team as it builds a solid core. The performance of position players are very encouraging.
Before he went down with a gruesome season-ending shoulder injury, Griffin Conine had picked up where he left off last year, providing perhaps the most balanced position player performance among Marlins starters: solid OBP, SLG, fielding, and baserunning. He will be ready in 2026 and should be an important part of the future. He’s proven he can hit lefties, which makes him an everyday player. The other standout is Kyle Stowers, who is mashing the ball consistently, is better at laying off the high fastball, and is drawing walks to supplement the extra base hits. He too looks to be a keeper and a solid every day starter. In addition, when Derek Hill was healthy, the outfield defense ranked near the top in all of baseball. Dane Myers is a solid contributor who has shown plus offensive skills and can play all three outfield positions.
On the infield, the situation is much more mixed. Connor Norby looks to be part of the core but still has work to do both at 3b and generating more consistent extra base production at the plate. However, at this point he’s an average MLB starter. Xavier Edwards has taken a step back and in my view is not a long-term SS. If he regains his hitting stroke, he could be viable at 2B. But it’s too early to give up on Otto Lopez, whose defense at 2B gives him value. 1B Matt Mervis is intriguing because of the power. The team needs to give him time to see if he can make adjustments to lower his high strikeout rate. It’s tended to be feast or famine for him.
Agustin Ramirez looks to be the real deal: the most exciting hitting prospect that the Marlins have on their roster in the Bruce Sherman era, and that includes Jazz, whom he was acquired for. Ramirez approach is exceptional in providing the full package of skills: good contact, on base and power—he hits the ball hard consistently. He most likely profiles as a DH/1B/part time catcher. AAA catcher Joe Mack appears to be the starting catcher of the future, as he excels in every facet of his game. Eric Wagaman was a good find, and has been a solid contributor as a 1b/3B and corner OF option, though he does have defensive limitations.
The starting pitching has been an unexpected disaster, with Sandy struggling mightily. However, reinforcements are going to help remake this rotation. Max Meyer has been stellar, mostly, and appears ready to be a top-of-the-rotation starter going forward. He will soon be complemented by Ryan Weathers and Eury Perez, both coming off injuries, and eventually Adam Mazur and high rising prospect Robby Snelling will be given their chances.
The bullpen has several high leverage relievers that have done well, paired with a group of poor performers who have tended to be used in games the Fish are losing. I have been very impressed with the way the manager and coaching staff have deployed the bullpen arms. This is a smart and very advanced group from both a coaching and analytic perspective.
Contrast how well the rebuild is going versus what is happening with the traded Marlins. With the exception of Jesus Luzardo and Tanner Scott, the rest of the former Fish have not been productive: Jake Burger is in the minors, Jazz is hurt again and is hitting below .200, Bryan de la Cruz is in the minors, Luis Arraez may have a good batting average but his overall production has not been very good, Josh Bell is hitting over 50% below league average. Yeah, the previous group was nothing to ever keep.
Overall the record for the first full year of the rebuild has been close to expectations, but the progress is evident when looking at how extensively the entire major and minor league system has been transformed. The front office should have a much better idea of what needs to be added in 2026 to make the team better and more competitive. That means Sherman needs to start spending money. It was fine to have a transition year to assess young talent, but the goal after this year should be measurable improvement of the on-field product.
I do expect things to start to take an upswing in 2026 and hopefully go higher in 2027, if the owners don’t lock out the players that year, which would be the season after the collective bargaining agreement ends after the conclusion of the 2026 season.
View From Left Field 