Friday, October 30, 2026
Government corruption a top issue for US midterm voters, exclusive poll finds
Government corruption a top issue for US midterm voters, exclusive poll finds
“Government corruption ranks second to cost of living in the Harris poll, with 76% of voters believing officials prioritize self-enrichment. Republicans are seen as more corrupt than Democrats, and 32% favor limiting corporate influence.
Harris poll for Guardian finds 76% believe officials care more about self-enrichment than helping everyday Americans
Government corruption has emerged as a top issue in the upcoming US midterm elections, with an overwhelming majority of Americans saying US government officials use their public office for personal financial gain, according to an exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian.
Nearly nine out of 10 Americans said that government corruption, as defined as elected officials putting their own or their donors’ financial interests ahead of the public’s, is a problem, according to the survey.
Three-quarters (76%) of voters said that elected officials care more about enriching themselves than improving the economy for ordinary people. Voters were more likely to say that government corruption (65%) is more concerning than corporate power (29%). Just under 10% said that neither concerns them.
The rising cost of living is still expected to drive the election, with 36% of voters saying it is the single most important issue to how they plan to vote in the midterms. But in a slate of other issues including immigration, housing costs, abortion, crime and safety and AI, corruption was the next top issue.
The results come after nearly two years of Donald Trump’s second term, where the president has both figuratively and literally reshaped Washington.
The president demolished the historic East Wing of the White House to make way for a $400m ballroom – $335m of which he said is coming from private donors, including companies such as Apple and Nvidia. The federal government is down more than 420,000 workers after Elon Musk was given the power to introduce massive jobs cuts after donating nearly $300m to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Trump’s sons are running the family’s lucrative cryptocurrency business that has made Trump $1bnsince returning to the White House. And Trump himself accepted a $400m private jet as a gift from the Qatari royal family.
These actions have not gone unnoticed. Voters in the Harris poll were twice as likely to say that Republicans have a bigger corruption problem than Democrats. Forty percent of voters, including 29% of Republicans, said the GOP has a bigger corruption problem. A third (32%) of voters said that both parties have the problem equally, while 21% said that Democrats have the bigger problem.
Independents, whose votes will be key in swing races across the country, were much more likely to say that Republicans have more of a corruption problem, with 34% saying that Republicans have the bigger issue and 13% pointing to Democrats. Most Independents (42%) said that both parties share the problem equally.
The economy as experienced by everyday Americans has been vastly different from the portrait painted by Wall Street. The stock market has been soaring on the back of never-ending AI spending. In early October, both the S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq stock indices hit record highs.
The gains have been a boon for a relatively small group of Americans. Americans in the top 1% of wealth own half of the stock market while the bottom 50% own just over 1% of the market.
Armed with more funds than ever, America’s wealthiest people have been driving even more donations into elections. After the supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United case removed limits on campaign contributions, each election year has brought in new records of cash. The midterms have already cost $11.2bn in ads, according to NBC News, the most ever for a midterm cycle.
A chunk of these donations are coming from the ultra-rich. Just 40 donors have already contributed $2.5bn to races this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Last week, billionaire Michael Bloomberg announced he was contributing $80m in last-minute funding for Democratic candidates, while Donald Trump said he is personally contributing a total of $400m to Republicans.
For everyday Americans, this flood of cash has changed the motivations of elected officials, who many believe will ultimately prioritize themselves and their donors over their constituents. A majority of voters (78%) in the Harris Poll agreed that “elected officials care more about enriching themselves than helping people like me”.
“Government corruption has shot up to become the second most important issue in the midterms after cost of living. Americans are triggered by leaders they now see as both responsible for and profiting off their growing economic hardship,” said John Gerzema, CEO of Harris Poll.
Regardless of who ends up controlling Congress after the midterms, voters across the political spectrum are expecting solutions to address the ongoing affordability crisis that is impacting their lives.
Out of a slate of policies to address the cost of living, a third (32%) of voters said that there should be limits on the influence of companies and lobbyists on government decisions. The second most popular policy was removing tariffs (29%), followed by limiting how much companies raise prices on goods (24%).
On Tuesday, voters in California will decide on a ballot measure that could place a one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires in the state. Tech billionaires have been spending an estimated $1m a day, altogether more than $340m, to fight the measure. Half (50%) of voters in the new poll, including 56% of Independents, said that billionaires do not pay their fair share of taxes. Just 28% of Republicans said the same.
Some in corporate America are catching onto the discontent. Last week, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said in an interview that he supports a national wealth tax, a comment that got him backlash from some Republicans.
“We should have a national wealth tax – it won’t work by state because people will just move,” he said. “And I think we should have inheritance taxes that get close to 100% at some level. I would pay them.”
U.S. Oil Industry Earned Over $130 Billion in Profit During Iran War
U.S. Oil Industry Earned Over $130 Billion in Profit During Iran War
U.S. oil companies earned over $130 billion during the Iran war, nearly triple 2025 profits. Refiners like Valero Energy, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron benefited from higher fuel prices; excess cash is being used for debt reduction or dividends.
That was almost three times as much as what businesses producing and refining oil in the United States made in the same period in 2025.
Quarterly Profits for U.S. Oil Companies
Notes: Totals represent the sum of net income for the constituents of the S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production Select Industry Index. The total for the third quarter of 2026 combines actual results and estimates. Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence, FactSet (analyst estimates).
The war with Iran has been very lucrative for American oil companies, which have earned more than $130 billion in profit as people pay much higher prices for gasoline, diesel and other fuel.
That is a conservative estimate based on the performance of more than 50 large U.S. oil and gas companies, most of them producers or refiners, in the six months from April through September. It does not reflect profits earned in March, the first month of the war, or in October.
These companies earned less than $47 billion collectively during the same period in 2025, a challenging stretch when oil was cheaper and companies were navigating the early fallout from President Trump’s trade war.
The blockbuster oil profits this year highlight longstanding concerns about who gains, and who pays the price, when wars interrupt the flow of energy. As of this week, Americans had spent an extra $147 billion on gasoline and diesel since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on Feb. 28, according to an analysis by Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab. That amounts to more than $1,100 per household.
Some companies are benefiting more than others. U.S. refiners have fared especially well because fuel-making plants have been badly damaged by hostilities in the Middle East and Russia. With fewer refineries available to meet global demand, profit margins soared for those that remain online.
Refining Company Profits
Valero Energy
$6.83 billion in Q3 2026
Phillips 66
$5.62 billion in Q3 2026
Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The wartime boom has extended to American producers, most of which are reaping greater income from higher prices without having to contend with the danger or cost of operating in conflict zones. That said, their profits generally remain below 2022 levels, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused oil and natural gas prices to soar. U.S. oil prices averaged around $90 a barrel from April through September of this year, compared with roughly $100 during the same period in 2022.
Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the biggest U.S. oil companies, reported their highest third-quarter earnings in years on Friday, buoyed by their refining businesses.
“We certainly acknowledge that the higher fuel prices put pressure on families and businesses,” Neil Hansen, Exxon’s chief financial officer, said in an interview. “But this is one of those situations and type of business where you can’t invest your way out of these conditions overnight. The decisions that matter today were made years ago.”
Chevron
$9.92 billion in Q3 2026
Exxon Mobil
$15.41 billion in Q3 2026
Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence, company reports.
Exxon’s third-quarter profit more than doubled. Chevron’s almost tripled.
“The cash is going on the balance sheet,” said Eimear Bonner, Chevron’s chief financial officer. “That’s an asset that obviously we lean on in hard times and we strengthen in times when we see higher prices.”
Dozens of other U.S. oil companies will report third-quarter results in the coming weeks. The New York Times analysis relied on a combination of financial results and, if those were not yet available, analyst estimates compiled by FactSet, a financial data firm. The review did not extend to pipeline companies or service providers, whose performance has been less directly affected by the global oil shock.
For now, many companies are following a similar playbook, paying down debt and parking their extra cash rather than investing in producing more oil than they originally planned or expanding refining capacity.
“We’re not going to change our approach to capital investments just because we have a lot of cash,” Homer Bhullar, chief financial officer of the refining giant Valero Energy, told Wall Street analysts last week. Valero’s third-quarter profit soared more than sixfold.
“Over time, all the excess cash we’re accumulating will ultimately be directed toward our owners,” Mr. Bhullar said. He did not discuss specifics, but that usually involves increasing dividends or buying back company stock.
Average Monthly U.S. Refining Profit Margins
Note: Figures represent the average monthly gross profit margin, through Oct. 23, that refiners earn from turning oil into gasoline and diesel. Source: Argus Media.
U.S. refiners have performed especially well because a lot of the oil they process is delivered by pipeline, insulating them from sky-high shipping costs. These companies are a vital link between oil producers and consumers because they transform the crude oil that is pumped from the ground into usable fuels like gasoline and diesel. Some companies, such as Exxon and Chevron, produce oil and refine it, but many specialize in just one of those businesses.
Large European companies reported bumper profits, too. Shell earned $12.06 billion in the third quarter, more than doubling its profit from a year earlier, partly because refining was so lucrative. The French oil major TotalEnergies’ third-quarter profit also more than doubled, to $8.26 billion.
United Refining, a privately held fuel maker in western Pennsylvania, plans to use this year’s windfall to pay down debt, said John Catsimatidis, the company’s chief executive and a longtime Trump ally. Or, perhaps, to buy a new corporate plane.
“I am serious,” Mr. Catsimatidis said in an interview. “You know why? I’m 78 years old. If I don’t buy a new airplane now, when am I going to buy it? When I’m dead?”
Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.
Keith Collins is a Times visual reporter and editor in the Graphics department.“
Thursday, October 29, 2026
Patrick Stewart, Master of Shakespeare, ‘Star Trek’ and More, Has Died
Patrick Stewart, Master of Shakespeare, ‘Star Trek’ and More, Has Died
“Patrick Stewart, 86, died from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia in Los Angeles. A Shakespearean actor, he gained fame as Jean-Luc Picard in “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” starred in four films and “Star Trek: Picard,” and played Professor X in five “X-Men” movies.
The British actor was 86. He achieved pop-culture stardom as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
Patrick Stewart, who overcame a bleak childhood in England’s coal-mining country to find acclaim as a Shakespearean actor before making an unlikely career pivot in middle age that would bring him his greatest fame, playing a noble starship captain on the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
The death, from Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia, was announced on social media.
With a commanding baritone voice — he had shed his Yorkshire dialect as an acting student — Mr. Stewart was by his late 40s an eloquent, statesmanlike presence on the British stage. But to many American television viewers, Mr. Stewart was a new face when he made his debut in 1987 as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in “The Next Generation,” the first live-action spinoff of the original “Star Trek” series of the late 1960s.
Old and new fans embraced the balding, graying Picard and the members of his 24th-century crew, among them a pale-skinned android with deadpan comic timing; an intense, half-alien mind-reader; a gruff Klingon; and a blind human engineer wearing a vision visor. Over the show’s seven seasons, as it piled up 18 Emmys and a Peabody Award in first-run syndication, Picard became known for his preternatural calm and his trademark directives “Engage!” and “Make it so.” (Mr. Stewart titled a 2023 memoir “Making It So.”)
Mr. Stewart went on to star in four feature-film spinoffs — “Star Trek Generations” (1994), “Star Trek: First Contact” (1996), “Star Trek: Insurrection” (1998) and “Star Trek: Nemesis” (2002) — before returning to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in 2020 in a TV sequel that he could call his own, “Star Trek: Picard,” which ran for three seasons.
The Enterprise was neither Mr. Stewart’s first science-fiction home nor his last. He appeared in David Lynch’s original film version of “Dune” (1984) as the weapons teacher Gurney Halleck. Years later, he was Charles Xavier, a.k.a. Professor X, in five “X-Men” movies, playing a wealthy telepath in a wheelchair who leads other mutants with superpowers. Those films, some of which also starred Mr. Stewart’s close friend Ian McKellen, included “X-Men” (2000), “X-Men: United” (2003) and “Logan” (2017).
By the time he became a screen star, Mr. Stewart was a lauded stage veteran in Britain, where he began working with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1966. After making his first public stage appearance at 19, he performed in both classical and contemporary works alongside fellow up-and-coming actors like Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren and Glenda Jackson.
In 1986, he won the London Fringe Theater best actor award for his role as the humiliated husband, George, in the Young Vic’s production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He also won Olivier Awards (Britain’s equivalent of Broadway’s Tony) for playing Enobarbus, Mark Antony’s best friend, in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” (1979) and Claudius, opposite David Tennant’s Danish prince, in “Hamlet” (2009).
To most American film and television fans, however, he was always Picard, even after the “X-Men” movies. And though in terms of substance the character may have been light years removed from his meatier roles with the R.S.C., Mr. Stewart continued to express pride in his work as that resolute ship captain, dismissing theater-world peers who had looked askance at him when he went to Hollywood.
“They used to ask me ‘Why, why, why?’ as if I was somehow slumming it,” he said in a 2003 interview with the London newspaper The Independent.
“What snobbery!” he said, adding: “For huge numbers of people, I will always be Jean-Luc Picard, and that’s fine. I really believe we created an admirable individual.”
A Grim Upbringing
Mr. Stewart was born on July 13, 1940, in Mirfield, England, a small, industrial river town in West Yorkshire. (He was given no middle name but later invented one, Hewes, when he joined a union that already had a member named Patrick Stewart.) His father, Alfred Stewart, was a regimental sergeant major in the British Army, and his mother, Gladys (Barrowclough) Stewart, was a weaver at a textile factory. Patrick was the youngest of their three sons.
The family scraped by, living in a grim little house with no running hot water. The bathroom was outside, in a brick communal outhouse for the neighborhood, one stall to a family. Patrick used his family’s stall as a reading nook.
Much later in life, he wrote and spoke about the domestic violence that had shattered his childhood. His father was reduced to working as a semiskilled laborer after his military career, and became what Mr. Stewart described as a resentful “weekend alcoholic” who physically attacked his mother for years, sometimes in Patrick’s presence.
As Mr. Stewart recalled in a 2009 article he wrote for The Guardian, “I knew exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn.”
The family dynamic was complicated. Despite the abuse, Patrick’s mother remained with her husband until her death in 1977, and throughout his life Patrick regarded his father with a mixture of anger, fear, sadness and regret. Interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2023, after his memoir was published, he told a reporter, tapping the cover of a copy, “I wish my father could have seen this.”
Patrick was 12 when an English teacher, Cecil Dormand, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship, handed out scripts for “The Merchant of Venice” and instructed him to read the part of Shylock. Patrick went on to work with local drama groups.
Graduating from secondary school at 15, he took a job as a junior reporter with the local newspaper but quit after a year; his editor had complained that he was spending too much time on his theater avocation. After that, he worked for a year as a furniture salesman to save money for drama school, though a local arts council ended up giving him a full scholarship so that he could enroll in the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theater School, which accepted him in 1957, when he was 17.
Two years later, he made his professional acting debut, as the marooned pirate Tom Morgan in “Treasure Island,” with the Lincoln Repertory Company in Lincoln, England. In other early appearances, he took the title roles in Shakespeare’s “Henry V” (1963), at the Manchester Library Theater, and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Life of Galileo” (1965), at the Bristol Old Vic.
As part of the R.S.C., Mr. Stewart played more than a dozen roles, mostly supporting, in Stratford-upon-Avon and London between 1966 and 1969. He was the Player King in “Hamlet,” Grumio in “The Taming of the Shrew,” Cornwall in “King Lear” and Hector in “Troilus and Cressida.”
A Working Actor
By the age of 19, Mr. Stewart was already balding, a result of hereditary alopecia. (He wore wigs for many screen and stage roles.) And he was already frequently hearing the prediction familiar to many young character actors: The first 20 years of your career will be difficult; true fame, if it ever comes, may take a while. It was a forecast that was largely borne out.
Mr. Stewart continued to find work, including on British television series like “Coronation Street” and “Story Parade.” By the 1970s, he was winning substantial roles in BBC TV movies and mini-series.
He portrayed Lenin in “Fall of Eagles” (1974); the postwar prime minister Clement Attlee in “The Gathering Storm” (1974); John Thornton, a brainy mill owner, in “North and South” (1975); Sejanus, head of the Praetorian Guard, in “I, Claudius” (1976, seen in the United States on “Masterpiece Theater” in 1977); and the Soviet spymaster Karla in brief, nonspeaking appearances in two John le Carré adaptations, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1979) and “Smiley’s People” (1982).
Mr. Stewart made his Broadway debut in 1971 in Peter Brook’s acclaimed production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He was Snout, the tinker who portrays the wall between Pyramus and Thisbe in the comedy’s lowbrow play-within-a-play. It would be 20 years before Mr. Stewart appeared on Broadway again, in a 1991 run of a solo production of “A Christmas Carol” he had developed a few years before. The holiday-season show, which he repeated on Broadway in 1992, 1994 and 2001, received a Drama Desk Award for outstanding solo performance.
He was largely considered an unknown when the “Star Trek” offer came along. At the invitation of a friend, a university professor, Mr. Stewart had been in Los Angeles conducting master classes on Shakespeare when, one evening, he gave a lecture and performed some bits of the plays in a program that was open to the public.
A TV producer who was involved in developing a new “Star Trek” series happened to attend and soon persuaded Mr. Stewart to audition — even though, as Mr. Stewart later wrote, he knew “next to nothing” about the franchise.
Surprised to get the part — the “Star Trek” creator, Gene Roddenberry, who was overseeing the new series, had not been keen to hire him at first — Mr. Stewart expected the project to be a short-term commitment. How, he remembered thinking, could the show possibly succeed with a middle-aged pacifist captain with a French name and a British accent?
After its run ended, Mr. Stewart continued his stage and television career, now with the power of Hollywood fame behind him. Between 1995 and 2013, he starred in a handful of Broadway productions, two of them Shakespearean: He was Prospero in “The Tempest” in 1995 and, in 2008, the title character in “Macbeth,” for which he was nominated for a Tony.
He also played a self-satisfied bigamist in Arthur Miller’s “The Ride Down Mount Morgan” (2000); a desperate, possibly dangerous homeless man in Harold Pinter’s “The Caretaker” (2003); and a veteran actor who has seen it all in David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theater” (2010).
In 2013, Mr. Stewart and Mr. McKellen co-starred in two plays in repertory, an offering that the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called “absurdly enjoyable.” Mr. Stewart was Vladimir, the cerebral one, in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” and the wealthy man of letters in Pinter’s “No Man’s Land.”
On American television, he portrayed a restless 17th-century spirit in “The Canterville Ghost” (1996); Captain Ahab in “Moby Dick” (1998); Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol” (1999), this time with a cast of 50 or so; a wealthy rancher pointedly named Lear in “King of Texas” (2002); and Henry II, opposite Glenn Close, in “The Lion in Winter” (2003).
‘Being Silly’
Though his rock-steady Picard only rarely seemed to lighten up, Mr. Stewart was, in fact, no stranger to comedy.
He “got rather good at being silly,” The Sydney Morning Herald wrote. He played King Richard in Mel Brooks’s 1993 film spoof “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” parodying Sean Connery with a thick Scottish accent. He appeared in about 120 episodes of the animated series “American Dad!” as Avery Bullock, a C.I.A. deputy director with too many character flaws to count.
When asked to name the most distinguished moments of his career, Mr. Stewart often mentioned — not altogether facetiously — his appearances on “The Simpsons,” in 1995 and 2013, and “Sesame Street” (1996), on which he performed the soliloquy “B or Not a B.”
When he hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1994, one of his sketch characters was an erotic-cake baker with a fetish even his customers couldn’t deal with. And the legion of projects for which he served as narrator included “Ted,” Seth MacFarlane’s 2012 movie comedy about a teddy bear with the soul of a frat boy.
After hundreds of screen and stage roles, Mr. Stewart — Sir Patrick since his 2010 knighthood — gave one of his final performances in the “The Sheep Detectives” (2026), in which he was the voice of Sir Richfield, a wise old Boreray Blackface ram in a flock of crime solvers.
Mr. Stewart and Sheila Falconer, a choreographer, married in 1966, had two children, and divorced, almost a quarter-century later, in 1990. His marriage to Wendy Neuss, an American producer, also ended in divorce. The trigger in each divorce, he acknowledged in his memoir, was an affair with a younger woman. “In a life chockablock with joy and success,” he wrote, “my two failed marriages are my greatest regret.”
In 2013, he married Sunny Ozell, an American singer 38 years his junior, in a makeshift ceremony in a Mexican restaurant after a performance of “No Man’s Land” in Berkeley, Calif. His co-star Mr. McKellen, donning a cloak for the occasion, officiated, having been licensed by the Universal Life Church.
Mr. Stewart’s survivors include Ms. Ozell; his son, Daniel, who is also an actor; and his daughter, Sophie.
For Mr. Stewart, acting was a compulsion, he said, something he was driven to do. In 2011, a BBC interviewer asked him to describe the experience of being onstage. Mr. Stewart answered, “It feels like being a giant.”
And he saw no reason to quit, even in his later years.
“Acting was the thing that made me happy when I was 13 years old,” he wrote in his memoir, “and that is still the case 70 years later. I have so much more work to do. I am not done with the stage. I still want to try another TV comedy. I still have so many characters inside me that I need to let out.”
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