Hello and welcome to the Ekō newsletter. Today we’re covering US inequality, the war in Ukraine, and the climate crisis.

Dining out while the world burns

Trump gorges himself as Americans go hungry.

As lower income Americans see their benefits suspended due to the government shutdown, President Donald Trump and his wealthy friends have been partying like it’s 1791.

Last week, they threw “A Little Party Never Killed Anyone.” On Friday, attendees dined on filet mignon and held a raffle for vacations to resorts worth in the tens of thousands of dollars while listening to live opera.

The out of touch nature of the event wasn’t lost on observers. And Trump’s administration is giving more tax breaks to the richest Americans even as SNAP benefits are drying up.

“It looks like Versailles in Mar-a-Lago.”—Eugene Robinson

(MSNBC) (HuffPost) (Daily Beast) (the New York Times)

In other news

Power struggles

The war in Ukraine continues, as both sides are entrenched and attacks continue.

Strikes from Russia have led Ukraine to cut electricity for the population on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones are hitting Russian energy infrastructure as retaliation.

“These are our living conditions. It’s normal. We have fluctuations with electricity in Kyiv, like everywhere else.”—Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

(Al Jazeera) (The Guardian) (The Guardian)

Cop to it

The COP30 climate conference faces an uphill battle to get commitments for real action on the environment.

This year, the conference is being held in Brazil. The US is not sending any representatives at the federal level, though some state and local officials are attending.

An ICJ ruling that nations of the world are duty bound to deal with the existential danger of climate change is likely to drive much of the conversation at the event.

(The Guardian) (ABC News) (CNN)

Damage, done

The US has been hostile to climate action for decades, and the consequences are becoming clear.

Almost one million people fled the northwest of the Philippines over the weekend ahead of super Typhoon Fung-wong making landfall. The powerful storm follows Tino earlier this month which also hit the archipelago nation.

In countries like Indonesia, the dismantling of USAID is having deleterious effects on attempts to address the crisis.

But the Trump administration isn’t done yet. The White House has been leaning on nations to curtail their efforts to address the environment, notably last month, when a landmark deal which would have cut emissions from cargo ships was scuttled due to Trump’s involvement.

“It was like a bunch of gangsters coming into the neighborhood and smashing windows and threatening shop owners.”—Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island)

(the New York Times) (NPR) (PBS)

Here’s your campaign of the day.

From controlling nuclear weapons, to replacing millions of jobs, to creating deadly viruses—unfettered AI development could have catastrophic consequences for us all.

And it’s keeping top experts and scientists awake at night. 800 Nobel Laureates, CEOs, faith leaders and public figures have put their names behind a powerful new call to ban this advanced AI until it’s safe: the Statement on Superintelligence.

That’s the foundation. Now it’s up to us to build a people powered campaign so big that our governments have to respond.

Slow down, superintelligence

PS: In case you missed it earlier, here's the original email about this new project:

For more than a decade, we’ve kept you informed about ways we can use our collective power to push back against corporate abuse and corruption. And we’ve had a massive impact, filing shareholder resolutions, changing policies, buying and protecting forests, and more.

Now, we’re offering a different way to keep up to date on Ekō’s campaigns and mission. It’s called Ekō News, and it’s a new project on the newsletter platform Substack.

To launch it, we’re working with Eoin Higgins, a US-based journalist whose work has focused on corporate corruption and power. His book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, delves into how Silicon Valley’s conservative lean has led to a takeover of alternative media—and offers a history of characters like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others.

Ekō News will publish twice a week, giving a digest of stories we’re following about corporate (mis)behaviour, and taking a deeper dive into one story or character from the news. We’ll also interview people making change and show you the impact of our work together.

Please sign up today—we hope to see you there. (It’s free, but we’d love support for the new initiative and there will be an option for a paid subscription, too.)