Ian Welsh

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 25, 2026
by Tony Wikrent

A Blue Wave Won’t Wash Away Our Oligarchy Problem

New Republic

War on voting

Ballot Rejections Soared in Rural Counties After USPS Reduced Mail Service

Ken B. Morales, Jen Fifield and Misty Harris, [ProPublica]

Trump’s Last-Ditch Election Lawsuits, Explained

Joyce Vance, October 24, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

How the GOP Is Working to Steal the Midterms (w/ Joel McCleary and Mark Medish)

Chris Hedges, Oct 21, 2026

U.S. officials privately advise states fearing Trump election meddling – Their private efforts have reached governors, election stewards and lawmakers from both parties who are increasingly alarmed that the administration may interfere in the midterms.

Noah Robertson, Oct 20, 2026 [The Washington Post]

Their efforts are motivated not by political bias, they say, but a growing sense of alarm that President Donald Trump will harm American democracy by undermining the integrity of the vote to keep the Republican Party in power.

Over the past several months, the group has consulted with officials from 10 states, including governors, election officials and members of the House and Senate from both political parties who share a fear of federal intervention, two people involved in the effort said.

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [Mediaite]

The Secret Terms of Trump’s Venezuelan Oil Deal

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2026]

TRUMP PARDONED VENEZUELAN BILLIONAIRE AFTER FAMILY OFFERED ALINA HABBA $50 MILLION DEAL

[Law Commentary, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2026]

Pentagon Installs New Economic Spying And Sabotage Units

[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2026]

There was some grumbling in Congress when the Trump administration installed Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire from New York, as the second man in the Pentagon. Feinberg had previously led Cerberus Capital Management which has various financial interests in Pentagon purveyors. He had also been chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board from 2018 to 2021, during the first Trump administration.

Feinberg first made headlines when the Pentagon invested billions to take equity stakes in more than a dozen private businesses. There are serious concerns that Feinberg is directing money to businesses he himself and/or Donald Trump’s family are interested in.

His newest endeavors though seem to be less concerned with business. They look like attempts to duplicate the Central Intelligence Agency within the Defense Department….

A Texas Cop Signed on to Help ICE Deport His Neighbors. It Tore the Town Apart.

Francesca D’Annunzio and McKenzie Funk, October 25, 2026 [propublica.org]

Ingram, Texas, was just rebuilding from a devastating flood when its tiny police department enrolled in ICE’s 287(g) deportation program. Within a year, cops would hand over the equivalent of 10% of the town.

“This Is Not What the Founders Envisioned”

Joyce Vance, October 24, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

As his lawyers prepared to return to court this morning in the legal battle over the East Potomac links, Donald Trump was up early, posting on Truth Social about U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes. He called her a “crazed lunatic” and suggested she “may be insane.” ….

It’s easy to lose sight of how commonplace that has become. And how devastating it is. It used to be that threats against federal judges came from unhappy litigants, as with three of the four federal judges who have been murdered in the last 50 years. The fourth, Judge John Roll, was killed in the shooting involving Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. In 2020, Judge Esther Salas faced an attack in her own home that led to the murder of her son, by a lawyer in a case in front of her who was a self-described “anti-feminist” and “men’s rights” lawyer. But those events didn’t come from inside of the house.

PBS reported that “Hundreds of federal judges have received threats against themselves and their families this year [2026], according to the U.S. Marshals Service. It comes amid a litany of verbal and written attacks by President Trump and his administration on judges who have ruled against them.” There is no reason for the president of the United States to put federal judges, public servants, in harm’s way. And yet, that was where his attention was focused as the lawyers returned to court in the East Potomac Park case today….

Strategic Political Economy

GRAPH – Corporate America’s share of the nation’s income, 1950-2025

[Axios, US Bureau of Economic Analysis, via The Big Picture 10-21-2026]

Wealth Inequality in America Drawn to Scale

[Dream Again USA. [22

Quite the infographic.

Global power shift

China invests record $583 billion in science and tech as US administration seeks research cuts

[Interesting Engineering, via Naked Capitalism 10-18-2026]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

AIPAC Is Spending Millions — Just Not Under Its Own Name

Luke Goldstein and Katya Schwenk, Oct 24, 2026 [The Lever]

… Under the guise of championing popular liberal causes like electing women, promoting reproductive rights, or supporting Latino candidates, these pass-through groups are helping increasingly toxic political machines deliver ads to voters without being named, and they’re weaponizing disclosure deadlines to keep their fingerprints hidden until after ballots are cast. Campaign spending through super PACs that can keep their donors secret until after Election Day has more than doubled this cycle compared with 2024, according to Politico.

These front groups and disclosure loopholes mark a new frontier for secretive political spending in elections already awash in dark money networks that let donors obscure their identities from the voters they’re trying to influence. And they are surely a direct response to this election season’s distinct anti-establishment political climate, where even the most powerful lobbying operations recognize they must find new ways to subvert public sentiment without being exposed….

*WATCH OUR NEW AIPAC DOCUMENTARY* Zeteo Pulls Back the Curtain on the Pro-Israel Lobby

[Zeteo, Oct 21, 2026]

Oligarchy

Premium: The Hater’s Guide To Blackstone

Ed Zitron [via Naked Capitalism 10-24-2026]

For whatever reason, Blackstone founder and CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman has a thirty-chapter-long series called “My Personal History” that is, well, exactly what it sounds like — a financial hagiography that frames him as a noble, sensible man with strong values, like when he sent a letter to “distinguished skull and bones alumni” Averell Harriman, whose father Edward Harriman had crashed the stock market in 1901 in his dogged attempt to monopolize the post-bubble railroad industry. Averell himself had co-founded a bank with Fritz Thyssen, who banked the nazis.

Heather Cox Richardson, October 22, 2026

… Strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien wasn’t buying that explanation, posting that it is evident “the White House is desperately trying to make [Musk] the fall guy for what is happening to Ukraine.” He continued: “If Trump wanted to help Ukraine militarily and with starshield he could. He is president. He doesn’t want to.”

But it is simply astonishing that the president of the United States, the commander in chief of the United States military, is suggesting he had to negotiate with a private citizen to tell him to stop interfering with American foreign policy….

As Republicans brace for election losses, Musk prepares for war

Faiz Siddiqui, October 23, 2026 [The Washington Post]

A host of Democrats have said they are eager to wield the power of their office to investigate the tech titan and his ventures should they win either chamber in the midterms.

Elon Musk Just Threatened the Coming Democratic Majority

Lee Hepner, Oct 22, 2026 [BIG]

A few months ago, Paramount owner David Ellison succeeded in forcing California and Democratic states attorneys general to drop their antitrust suit against his acquisition of Warner Brothers. He used a variety of tactics, including a threat to move the studios out of the state, and ultimately bluffed the elected officials into folding. BIG predicted at the time that Ellison’s threatened capital strike, along with political coercion, was a preview of what is to come if voters choose Democrats as a Congressional majority.

And sure enough, that’s what one of Ellison’s close allies – Elon Musk – just did. Earlier this week, following reports that Musk had throttled Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite network, Politico ran a story that several Dem members of Congress are gearing up to hold oversight hearings if the midterms go their way in a couple of weeks.

Musk responded by explicitly threatening any Democrat or institution seeking to scrutinize him, his portfolio of companies, or his time at DOGE….

United States of Oligarchy Exposes Trump Regime Corruption

[The Nerd Reich, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]

The Nerd Reich podcast interviews Casey Michel about his new book on how America’s wealthiest ally with dictators and oligarchs betting against democracy.

The Biggest Source of Inequality That No One Talks About

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]

For 40 years, pass-through income has let millionaires and billionaires sidestep the corporate tax and shield much of their fortunes from income tax. Rogé Karma tallies the trillions in lost revenue.

Felonomics

Trump Aides Are Getting Ready to Penalize Defaulting Student Loan Borrowers

[Washington Sun, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261019]

“Last year, the White House Office of Management and Budget began assisting the Education Department in preparing to seize federal benefits and wages from defaulted borrowers. Trump administration officials are preparing to impose financial penalties on millions of Americans in default on their federal student loans next year, according to five sources familiar with the matter.” And: “The Treasury Department is moving forward with plans to hire private debt collectors, three of the sources said, possibly as soon as November. The sources said those plans are unlikely to be announced before the midterm elections.”

FEMA tells states to handle disasters on their own

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2026]

Pending Home Sales Plunge to Record Low

[Wolf Street, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2026]

Health care crisis

What a Health Care Crisis Looks Like on the Ground – In South Los Angeles, ER patients are cared for in a gift shop, in tents, and even outdoors. And that’s before the crushing Medicaid cuts.

David Dayen, October 23, 2026 [The American Prospect]

… And that’s before the $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts.

CONVERSATIONS LIKE THE ONES AT MLKCH are happening at safety-net hospitals across the country. Their primary patient population is on Medicaid, and the cuts put into place by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that Republicans passed last year will torch planned budgets and send administrators frantically searching for revenue to keep the doors open.

This is the silent issue animating much of the anti-Republican backlash in the midterms, and it compounds on itself. Work requirements and other paperwork mandates are pushing people off the Medicaid rolls; enrollment is down by 6 million since Donald Trump’s inauguration; 2.5 million of those are children. The expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies has made insurance supremely unaffordable, and enrollment in those exchanges is down by 5 million.

This spike in the uninsured population leads people to turn to emergency departments as their primary mode of care, and uncompensated care—U.S. hospitals are required to take on all emergency patients—shreds budgets for safety-net hospitals. If they go out of business, the flow of patients moves to the next ER, and the next, recreating the same problems in a new venue. And the worst cuts are yet to come….

Predatory finance

Same Rules, Different Ruins – How the Basel weights priced factories out of eleven economies’ banks

Craig Tindale [via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2026]

The Basel Committee de-industrialised the countries that adopted its rules. According to World Bank figures, manufacturing’s share of GDP fell in ten of the eleven countries in this essay, dropping by 16.8% in India and 60.7% in Australia, where it fell from 13.7% of GDP in 1990 to 5.4% in 2024….

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

The Cover-Up: How a Trillion-Dollar Industry Launders Illegal Gold

[New York Times, via The Big Picture, October 24, 2026]

This is an illegal mine in Madagascar. Its gold is banned from the world’s legitimate marketplace. Thousands of children work in these mines, in violation of international law. Yet Madagascar’s gold flowed easily to market. And the world’s gold authority helped cover it up. The line between dirty and clean gold is an industry fiction. Wall Street and governments profit off gold from criminals, gangsters and those who exploit children.

Fabrications, fraud and false accounting: how Deloitte helped Abramovich hide $10bn

[The London Bureau of Investigative Journalism, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]

The Big Four firm spent years faking documents that helped the sanctioned oligarch conceal assets and dodge tax

ProPublica: Trump’s FBI purge ended a bribery probe touching Lindsey Graham, James Clyburn, and Joe Wilson

[ProPublica, via Drop Site Daily, October 20, 2026]

In early 2025, the FBI opened a corruption investigation built on confessions from Martin Kao, CEO of the defense contractor Navatek, who told agents that his business model was bribing officials for government contracts, according to a new report from ProPublica. He said he struck cash-for-contracts deals with Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rep. James Clyburn and Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, and with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. Agents found that much of Kao’s account matched company records seized in the investigation.

After Trump returned to the White House, the DOJ’s anti-corruption section lost authority to file new cases, the career prosecutor quit, and agents assigned to the case were fired or pushed out. The case is now dead. The living lawmakers involved (Clyburn, Wilson, and Collins) have denied any wrongdoing.

How Trump’s FBI Purge Saved Lindsey Graham and James Clyburn From a Bribery Investigation

ProPublica

Restoring balance to the economy

New Mexico Takes Meta To Court and Wins

[Economic Liberties, Oct 23, 2026, The Economic Populist]

A New Mexico judge this week ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for deceiving users about its data privacy practices after a jury last month found the company guilty of 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection laws. New Mexico’s victory is a profound lesson to both state and national enforcers: if you want to hold Meta accountable, don’t settle. It’s a take we’ve been sharing with Politico, the Associated Press, and more this week.

New Mexico’s verdict is part of a pattern, with the “Land of Enchantment” having now pressed its own cases against Meta to judgment three times and counting: $375 million in March over child safety violations, $567 million in a second child safety case this August, and now $25 billion. This has all been done after other enforcers signed a settlement, leaving them unlikely to ever pursue what New Mexico just won. The case sends the message that strong consumer laws, when enforced, are a great way to hold big tech to account for its abusive business practices….

The Largest Campaign Finance Penalty in American History Cost Meta About an Hour of Revenue. Washington State fined Meta $24.6 million. The European Union’s ceiling for the same violation is $12 billion.

Christopher Armitage, Oct 19, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

…The European Union sets the penalty for the same kind of failure by the size of the company. Under the Digital Services Act, the European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, can fine a large online platform up to 6% of global annual revenue. For Meta’s 2025 revenue, that comes to about $12 billion. The commission issued its first fine under that law on Dec. 5, 2025: €120 million against X for transparency violations, including an ad repository that left out who paid for each ad.

Brazil and Australia apply the same principle to bribery and corporate misconduct. Brazil’s Clean Company Law, in force since 2014, makes a company strictly liable when the company’s employees or agents bribe public officials for the company’s benefit. Prosecutors have to prove the bribe and the benefit. The law allows a fine of up to 20% of the prior year’s gross revenue, and the fine can never be less than the benefit the company obtained. Australia’s 2019 corporate penalties law sets the maximum civil penalty for a company at the greatest of several measures. Those measures include three times the benefit obtained and 10% of annual turnover, up to 910 million Australian dollars….

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Why aren’t AI companies being charged for hacking?

[Musing Mortoray, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]

A blogger asks whether hacking is legal now, after Anthropic models broke into three systems and OpenAI’s hit an Australian government health site. AI companies claim their hacks were unpredictable accidents — but they follow foreseeably from deliberate design choices, and that establishes criminal intent.

The technopolitics of ad-tech

Cory Doctorow, October 19, 2026 [Pluralistic]

… the internet’s original sin isn’t advertising, it’s surveillance. Contrary to what you have been told – and pax Winner’s framework – the internet is fully compatible with privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism

It wasn’t the internet’s technopolitics that made it a surveillance nightmare. It was just plain politics. Specifically, our politicians decided to stop enacting and enforcing privacy laws….

Surveillance also promotes oligarchy. Without surveillance, oligarchs must give up more of their fortunes to keep the public happy, because the alternative is spending even more money on guards to keep the public from building guillotines on their lawns. Surveillance lets oligarchs make targeted strikes on restive radicals, which is much cheaper than broad-spectrum policies that make us all better off and neutralize the case for guillotines:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/26/autostabilizer/#slicey-bois

These are the technopolitics of surveillance, not advertising. There is nothing about advertising that demands surveillance. For centuries, advertising was not meaningfully linked to surveillance. The decision to fuse surveillance with advertising was just that – a decision, not an inevitability….

I Used AI To Surveil Myself At Work. What It Can See Will Disturb You. We talked to workers at Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft about Bossware.

[More Perfect Union] Oct 22, 2026

Collapse of independent news media

If the Supreme Court wants to protect freedom of the press, here is its chance

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 10-18-2026]

The death of history’s most successful publisher

Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic]

Contrast this with AI, the money-losingest endeavor in the history of human civilization. Google is losing hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. The more AI Google does, the worse the company’s financial footing becomes. If Google does this for long enough, it may cease to exist altogether. This collapse can only be prolonged by Google’s ongoing extraction of value from web publishers, who no longer have their works connected with audiences via Google search results. Instead, Google usurps those audiences, shows them as many ads as it can, and still loses money in the bargain.”

Democrats’ political malpractice

Why Are Democrats The Party Of No?

David Sirota, Oct 22, 2026 [The Lever]

It is an open secret that establishment Democrats loathe the left of their own party more than they oppose Republicans. You can see it in corporate Democrats trying to sabotage populist Democratic nominees and vilifying the Democratic Socialists of America. Less well understood is a related dynamic: Establishment Democrats’ foremost mission — the thing they equate with the ultimate form of toughness, courage, and morality — is using power to block the full set of policies the public actually wants.

To them, Democrats’ highest virtue is not their ability to enact big ideas, but instead their willingness to replace the GOP as the new party of no and be this era’s William Buckley — a bulwark that “stands athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

This vector isn’t much talked about in polite circles, but it is finally getting a rare moment in the sun, after a series of scream-the-quiet-part spectacles related to Medicare For All, which a new Yale study shows could save $1 trillion and 114,000 lives every year.

The first of those came from Majority Democrats, a billionaire front group aiming to become a new version of the old Democratic Leadership Council….

DNC votes down ‘dark money’ resolution singling out AIPAC, defers resolution on military aid to Israel

[ABC News, via Naked Capitalism 10-18-2026]

James Carville Says He’d Rather GOP Win House by 5 Seats Than Dems Win by 5: They’d Be ‘Hostage to DSA’

David Gilmour, October 19, 2026 [yahoo.com/news/politics]

Rahm Emanuel’s Plan To Make Sure Democrats Lose In 2028 – Desperate to cast their do-nothing, pro-billionaire agenda as shrewd politics, Democratic elites pretend the key swing vote is country-club Republicans rather than enraged working-class voters.

David Sirota, Oct 22, 2026 [The Lever]

The Blue-State Democrats Fighting To Shield Billionaires From Taxes

David Sirota, Oct 22, 2026 [The Lever]

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

MAGA Built the Censorship Machine It Spent Years Falsely Accusing Democrats of Building

[Techdirt, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]

Mike Masnick on the projection: the apparatus MAGA warned Democrats were building is the one it built itself.

All the Things You’re Not Allowed to Say In Texas

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]

How new state laws and university policies at Texas Tech, Texas A&M, and UT Austin are restricting what professors can teach.

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

The Supreme Court’s Right Flank Wants to Give You Fewer Privacy Rights Than a Famous Judge

[Slate, via Naked Capitalism 10-18-2026]

‘Big business’: little-known court system in Louisiana churns out thousands of evictions – and millions in fees for judges

[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2026]

Civic republicanism

SpaceX Is a De Facto Government Agency. It Should Be Nationalized. Otherwise, Elon Musk sets U.S. foreign policy.

Harold Meyerson, October 22, 2026 [The American Prospect]

This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the decision to block Ukraine from the high-speed Starlink satellite alerts that enabled it to intercept Russian missiles and drones was made by SpaceX owner Elon Musk, either in conjunction with President Trump or in advance of Trump’s support for the action. Whichever version is more correct, Musk is either making or carrying out a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign and military policy—something that no private citizen has ever done in our 250-year history….

I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2026]

the breakdown of elite competence

The REAL Reason Europe Destroyed Itself | Dr. Ulrike Guérot (YouTube video)

[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2026]

[Robin K:

A very provocative presentation followed by Q&A on the future of Europe. The title is slightly misleading. Her talk is about the future of Europe, based on her recent book, Why Europe Should Become a Republic. Guérot makes a distiction between democracy and republic. She aims for recreating Europe as a national Republic.

 

Tech bro branded ‘huge piece of s–t’ for game that lets you kill ‘homeless people’ — but some fans love it

[NY Post, via Naked Capitalism 10-18-2026]

[TW: The tech bro flagrantly violated one of the basic principles of political economy in a republic: government should encourage citizens to “do good.” Letting players kill billionaires might not be much better, but it at least would be taking aim at the cause of most all our problems.]

.

What I Released This Week

• Coffee Break: Netflix Purges the C-Suite While Larry Ellison Goes Deep to Fund Skydance — Naked Capitalism, 21 Oct.
• Coffee Break: Trump Regime Wilding Amid Scandals and Backstabbing — Naked Capitalism, 19 Oct.
• West Asia War: Egyptian Parliament Delays Vote on Joining Yemen War, Saudi Admits Chopper Went Down — Naked Capitalism, 19 Oct.
• West Asia Wars: Egyptian Parliament Weighs Defense of Saudi Arabia, Why Ansar Allah’s Missile Accuracy Has Improved — Naked Capitalism, 18 Oct.

From me as Nate Wilcox at the Let It Roll Podcast

• Chick Webb’s Big Beat Style of Swing Led Directly to Rock ’n’ Roll: Let It Roll From the Beginning… 4.8 — Let It Roll, 23 Oct.
• Swing King Chick Webb Brought Ella Fitzgerald to the World: Let It Roll From the Beginning… 4.7 — Let It Roll, 21 Oct.
• Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Big Joe Turner: How Kansas City Vice Birthed Kansas City Jazz: Let It Roll From the Beginning… 4.6 — Let It Roll, 19 Oct.

From me as Nate Wilcox — The MMA Draw & the Mad Squabbles Show

• Over 200 million reasons for TKO to worry about Saudi Arabia — The MMA Draw, 19 Oct.
• The UFC Is Sucking MMA Dry — The MMA Draw, 18 Oct.
• Cheap Shots: Are They Really Going to Fight in the Middle East? — The MMA Draw, 17 Oct.

Ariel Helwani SCOLDS Sean Strickland as Dana White eliminates his UFC pay leverage — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 20 Oct.

It’s Ian’s annual fundraiser. This allows us to cover the changeover of hegemony from America to China, environmental collapse, internal US fascism, what a better society would look like, Gaza, AI, the coming stock market crash and various other issues. As of this writing we’ve raised about $3,185 out of a $14,500 goal, from 34 people. It’d be great if you can help out (please don’t donate if your financial situation is dire.) You can Subscribe or Donate here or contact me at admin-at-ianwelsh-dot-net if you need another way to donate (mail, usually. A lot of cash apps don’t work in Canada.)

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

Trump Regime 2.0

• The Pentagon Buyout King — The American Prospect. “Feinberg has been doing a little of everything at the Pentagon, overseeing nearly all of the administration’s pet projects. He supervises its investment units, which, staffed with former Cerberus execs, have been buying equity in and making huge loans to companies in the military supply chain, many of them with ties to the Trump family and other well-connected private investors. One of those investment offices, which the Biden administration stood up to make low-interest loans to backstop domestic defense production, is now involved in managing the United States’ Venezuela oil deal. It recently floated issuing a $5 billion loan for AI infrastructure development, in partnership with a new bank founded by defense tech billionaire Palmer Luckey. Another one is called the Economic Defense Unit; Feinberg created it himself earlier this year and installed George Kollitides, a former aide-de-camp at Cerberus, as its head. Kollitides also leads Feinberg’s new Business Operators for National Defense consortium, which plans to ‘embed’ hundreds of defense executives in Pentagon offices.”
• The Wall Street Veteran Trying to Solve the Pentagon’s Missile Problem — Wall Street Journal. “Trump asked Feinberg why he was still seeing media reports that the U.S. had paused attacks on Iran amid concerns about dwindling weapons stocks, given Feinberg’s job was to improve those stocks.
  “‘The president wants more. The secretary wants more. I want more,’ Feinberg recently said, explaining his approach in his first interview since taking the job last year.
  “As the U.S. expends thousands of missiles in the Iran war, Feinberg is trying to speed up the Pentagon’s ability to get new weapons. The jury is still out on whether it will work.
  “Over the past year and a half, he has attempted a sweeping overhaul of the Defense Department’s approach to weapons production, establishing a new procurement bureaucracy reporting directly to him and taking billions of dollars in government stakes in companies that supply critical materials, rocket engines and other key parts.
  “In large part, he has relied on companies and executives familiar to him from his time running the investment firm he co-founded, Cerberus Capital Management.”
• The Moment Katie Zacharia Found Out Her Five-Day Stint as Press Secretary Was Over — Wall Street Journal.

Saudi Arabia

• Blood without representation: Why Saudi Arabia can’t stop the Houthis — Kulna. “Why can’t Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s biggest military spenders, stop the Houthis? The answer isn’t weapons. It’s the bargain the Gulf monarchies were built on, which is now breaking, and a decade of MBS’s absolute power that left the kingdom no way out.”
• Rave. Fight. War. — Sportspolitika. “As the U.S. orders its diplomatic staff to leave the Gulf, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are relying on combat sports and raves to maintain a facade of normalcy in a time of war.”
• Bryan Fonseca on the Saudi events still going ahead — @BryanFonsecaNY. “Everyone has been canceling their Saudi-based events — except for ones that are TKO-backed.
  “Canelo vs. Mbilli (Oct. 31) and WWE Crown Jewel (Nov. 7) still set to move forward despite the ongoing war.
  “Zuffa is reportedly planning another boxing card on Nov. 14 in Riyadh.”

• Turki Alalshikh announces the return of Riyadh Season — @Turki_alalshikh. “With the support and empowerment of His Highness the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, and His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince, sponsor of the Vision and our inspiring leader, Riyadh Season returns with diverse entertainment events and experiences, exceptional sports championships, and varied musical concerts and theatrical shows 🇸🇦♥️
  “Welcome to Riyadh Season”
• Saudi Arabia executes a man for charges he allegedly committed at 14 — @DropSiteNews. “Saudi Arabia announced Saturday it had executed a man convicted of charges he allegedly committed at 14: befriending people who were detained or wanted by the state, according to court documents reviewed by Human Rights Watch.”

UAE

• Jared Kushner’s Hacked Phone Revealed His Secret Negotiations—Including More Than $700 Million in Transfers — Vanity Fair. “An exclusive excerpt from Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East examines how bank accounts linked the president’s son-in-law—and former senior adviser—to Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.”

Skydance

• Elon Musk makes $1 billion investment in Ellison’s Skydance — Semafor. “Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, according to people familiar with the matter, providing a much needed financial injection as the company looks to cut costs and bolster its stock price.
  “The deal came together at roughly the same time as equity investments from Skydance’s other investors, including board member Laurene Powell Jobs, the people said. Semafor reported in September that Paramount was considering seeking an equity injection from Musk.
  “Musk has publicly praised the Ellisons and Skydance, prompting speculation of a more expansive partnership between Musk’s lower-earth-orbit satellite network, Starlink, and Skydance.
  “‘He’s gonna have to re-engineer all of those channels, and figure out how they morph into streams themselves rather than just traditional linear,’ billionaire cable executive John Malone said Tuesday.”
• CBS’ DraftKings Gamble — Status. “Late last week, as local stations around the country continued to prepare for Election Day, executives at CBS’ owned and operated television stations learned of an unexpected curveball from corporate management. Their election coverage, they learned, would now be sponsored by the sports gambling site DraftKings.”

Israel

• Israel Was Inside Al Jazeera’s Computers — Ahmed Eldin.
• Remembering Ori Goldberg — Kulna.

Ukraine

• The Man in the Middle of Trump’s Deeply Conflicted Ukraine Policy — The Atlantic.

Dem Collapse

Mehdi Hasan INTERROGATES Neera Tanden for hosting Benjamin Netanyahu — @ClippingWings.

https://x.com/ClippingWings/status/2110922837506568642

GOP Hacks

• ICE Barbie Goon Unmasked as Creator of MAGA’s Vilest Ad — The Daily Beast. “The man behind Kristi Noem’s infamous horseback commercial at Homeland Security has been exposed as the creator of Vivek Ramaswamy’s vile new attack ad, a new report alleges.
  “The Rooster reports that The Strategy Group Company, run by Benjamin Yoho, is the creator of the ad featuring an interview with Democratic candidate Amy Acton’s estranged mother, in which she casts doubt on her daughter being a victim of horrific childhood abuse.”

Uprisings

• Indian Gen Z ‘cockroach’ protesters aim to upend assumptions about democracy – and populism – in Modi’s India — The Conversation.

Psychopathology

• You Can’t Know Everything — Unpopular Front. “Here’s what I think is going on with Elizabeth Holmes: She has an extremely severe form of the defense mechanism that Melanie Klein called splitting—dividing self and world into unambiguous ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ She cannot admit that she has any bad qualities: any aggression, any selfishness, any tendency to deceive others, or even any of the more positive forms of aggressiveness like ambition. On her account, her motivations are all benevolent, idealistic, and noble. She even says she never lies! Now, I believe a consciously deceptive person would admit that they, like everyone else, lie casually from time to time to avoid hurting others or to get out of inconvenient situations, but they avoid lying in serious issues or have a strong ethical aversion to lying. A total denial of lying immediately raises red flags: It is not an effective strategy for building trust. Usually, hearing something like that is a sign of someone being a little bit crazy. She cannot face or integrate that aggressive part of herself. Most mature adults with healthy psyches can admit to themselves and others that they have some less than stellar qualities—that they can be selfish or even destructive at times—although they balance that behavior out with nice qualities, for example, the capacity for love and kindness, and the ability to make amends when they do wrong.”

Conspiraversy

• 9/11 Fooled Us. Epstein Makes Us Finally Get It — Aaron Good & Bryce Greene — BettBeat Media (YouTube).

Follow and Support My Work at NatWilsonTurner.com

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 18, 2026
by Tony Wikrent

Coup-Proofing: Inside the Pentagon’s MAGA-to-Military-to-ICE Pipeline

Christopher Armitage, Oct 11, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

On May 28, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo ordering every branch of the military to “prioritize and broadly advertise” Department of Homeland Security jobs to troops leaving the service. The memo told commanders to approve requests from departing troops to spend their final months interning with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection “to the maximum extent possible.” Michael Miller, who directs the Pentagon’s office for troops transitioning to civilian life, said the department typically does not recommend any specific career to separating service members. This time the department picked one.

That memo is the last step in a process called “coup proofing.” The first step is who the military is trying to recruit….

James Quinlivan, a RAND Corporation analyst, described militaries built for loyalty in a 1999 study in the journal International Security. He called the practice “coup-proofing.” The regimes he studied chose their commanders by family, tribe, sect and ethnicity before competence. They also built a second armed force outside the regular military, recruited it for loyalty, funded it separately, and gave it the missions the army might refuse. Saddam Hussein built the Republican Guard. Hafez al-Assad gave his brother a private army. In the United States the regular military is bound by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which bars it from civilian policing. ICE sits outside that law.

The regular army is being emptied of the officers who would refuse an unlawful order, and the removals have landed hardest on Black and female officers. On the night of Feb. 21, 2025, Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hegseth fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations, the same night, along with the judge advocates general of three services, the uniformed lawyers who tell commanders whether an order is legal. Days later he called such lawyers “roadblocks to orders that are given” by a commander in chief. In August 2025 Hegseth fired Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, two months after Kruse’s analysts drafted an assessment that contradicted Trump’s claim that U.S. strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites.

In April 2026 Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, after George and Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll refused to strike four names from a list of 33 officers recommended for promotion to one-star general. Two of the four are Black men and the other two are women. By September 2026, The New York Times counted more than 80 generals and admirals fired or blocked from promotion, more than half of them Black or female, and military officials told the Times that the purge “does not appear to be driven by job performance.”….

The budget law Trump signed on July 4, 2025, funded the second facet of the coup-proofing process. It gave ICE roughly $75 billion over four years. By January 2026 the agency had hired 12,000 new officers and agents, more than doubling its officer corps to 22,000.

ICE’s minimum hiring age dropped to 18, and training was cut from 22 weeks to as little as 42 days. For 2026 the agency budgeted $100 million for what its own planning document calls “wartime recruitment,” with ads aimed at people who have attended UFC fights or listened to “patriotic podcasts,” The Washington Post reported….

Do they want to control what the troops hear? In October 2025, nearly every outlet in the Pentagon press corps, Fox News included, surrendered its credentials over new rules against gathering unapproved information. The Pentagon replaced them with more than 60 “new media” reporters, including Turning Point USA’s own outlet and far right activist Laura Loomer.

Do they want veterans with the extremism screen off? Maryland researchers found that about 85 percent of extremist offenders with military ties are veterans. Trump pardoned the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted for Jan. 6. ICE’s 2026 plan pushes its ads to phones that pass through military bases, NASCAR races, college campuses and gun shows.

Do they want a force the courts cannot constrain? On Sept. 2, 2025, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco ruled that the Los Angeles troop deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act and warned of a “national police force.” In December, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Illinois that the administration had no authority to deploy the Guard in Chicago. Neither ruling touches ICE. A soldier who joins ICE keeps the training and leaves the legal limit behind.

So the process as outlined looks like this: recruit political zealots, remove the officers and lawyers who object to unlawful conduct, turn off the extremism screens, and send the graduates to a rapidly growing ICE that the law has not effectively constrained….

War on voting

Exclusive: How the Military Will Hack the Election

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]

DOJ gives California 48 hours to act on alleged noncitizen voter list or face legal action

[Drop Site Daily, October 14, 2026]

In a Tuesday letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, reviewed by Reuters, acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter demanded the state take a series of actions related to a list of voters until their citizenship is confirmed, including segregating any returned ballots, or face legal action.

The letter escalates the administration’s pressure on states and suggests DOJ may challenge ballots before the Nov. 3 election. DOJ has repeatedly claimed noncitizen voting is widespread despite studies showing it is rare. DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has sued 30 states that refused to hand over voter data and has lost 26 cases without a win.

War

Ukraine is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia’s Online Disinformation Machine. Yandex answers 70% of Russian searches, and Ukraine hit three of its five data centers in four days.

Christopher Armitage, Oct 11, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

… Yandex is the Kremlin’s information machine. It answers about 70% of search queries in Russia, according to the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin, which titled its 2024 report on the company “From Independent Tech Startup to Kremlin Propaganda Tool.” …. Cloudflare, the internet security company that fronts a large share of the world’s websites, measured automated requests from Yandex’s network at 0.4% of their two-week peak after the Vladimir strike. That count covers every automated program on Yandex’s servers that sends requests to websites, its search crawler among them, and nobody outside Yandex can see which of them went dark….

On September 18 The New York Times reported that United States intelligence found the Kremlin had authorized a covert online campaign for the midterm, and that every example researchers had attributed to Russia attacked a Democratic Senate candidate…. The United States government dismantled its own defenses against that campaign in 2025. Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in February 2025. Congress let the State Department’s Global Engagement Center expire in December 2024, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio closed its successor office in April 2025. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard shrank the Foreign Malign Influence Center, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency pushed out more than a dozen officials who had monitored foreign election influence. I laid this out in my August Watchdog Report on the midterms….

Iran war costing average U.S. household $2K, economist estimates

[Seeking Alpha, via Naked Capitalism 10-13-2026]

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [Mediaite]

How the Trump Admin. Is Expanding the Definition of ‘Terrorism’ — and What It Means (w/ Dan Boguslaw)

Chris Hedges, Oct 14, 2026

Investigative journalist Daniel Boguslaw uncovers collusion between law enforcement, Corporate America and academics to create new targets for the expanding US security state….

Hedges and Boguslaw begin by discussing the newest threat category, ‘anti-technology extremism,’ “a direct response to widespread protests over the building of these massive data centers and the increasing intrusion into our lives as well as their destructive power of artificial intelligence.” Then Boguslaw speaks about the long rise of fusion centers where Corporate America has partnered with local and federal law enforcement to use the “cloak of the state to give them more powers to persecute dissent.” ….

Trump’s Corruption Is Different In Kind – He isn’t just more corrupt than most politicians; corruption is his raison d’être. This isn’t just “government corruption” to be reformed away. It’s a GOP crime spree, and voters need to know it.

Brian Beutler, Oct 16, 2026 [Off Message]

… one of the most infuriating facts about the Trump era is that, for much of the past decade, he’s managed to neutralize corruption as a political liability. There’s truth and there’s what you can prove in the court of public opinion. While as a factual matter, Trump is far and away the most corrupt political figure in the history of the country—the people who believe Trump is dangerously corrupt have been well grounded in their belief—the general public has been split on the question of which of the country’s major political parties is more corrupt.

Indeed, voters frequently identify the Democratic Party as the more corrupt of the two. Trump loyalists won’t admit Trump is corrupt, or any more corrupt than a typical politician; Republican lifers won’t accept their party’s complicity. But they are all happy to believe or claim that the Democratic Party and its leadership are shot through with fraud.

This is simultaneously a triumph of propaganda and an artifact of institutional failure. Republicans built echo chambers designed to deliver received wisdom to a huge swath of the country, and they know corruption is a political liability. They’ve thus spent the entire decade assassinating the character of prominent Democrats, leveling false or exaggerated accusations of fraud and criminality against all factions of liberal society, while ignoring or denying Trump’s relentless crime spree.

This effort was easier than it should have been, though, because most Democratic leaders and the leaders of liberal institutions convinced themselves most citizens did not care about political corruption ….

Trump’s Sick Plan for Ilhan Omar Exposed

Hafiz Rashid, October 15, 2026 [The New Republic]

… The investigation ostensibly centers on whether Omar’s father put her age as 17 rather than 18 on her citizenship application to allow her to qualify immediately for citizenship alongside his own application. Omar became a citizen in 2000.

“They cheat on everything,” Trump said to an Ohio audience at a rally Monday about Somali Americans. “We’re not going to stand for it.”

Trump DHS Is Building Deranged Case Against Ilhan Omar

Edith Olmsted, October 16, 2026 [The New Republic]

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin revealed Friday that the Trump administration is hoping to bring a criminal conspiracy case against Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar….

“If someone comes in and claims—that fills out their paperwork illegally, and they claim that they are this person, and this is their background, and then underneath that individual, a lot of other people come in … then that can be considered a RICO case,” Mullin said.

“There was a conspiracy to deceive the American government, and therefore everything else that came in with it could then for be looked at as the same case,” the secretary said.

“Good thing about something like a case like that, is when it is a RICO case, that the statue of limitations on things, they don’t, they don’t apply. A few cases they do, but in most cases they don’t,” he added….

Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act 

[Wikipedia]

… Under RICO, a person who has committed “at least two acts of racketeering activity” drawn from a list of 35 crimes (27 federal crimes and eight state crimes) within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering if such acts are related in one of four specified ways to an enterprise.^[6]

Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count.^[7]

In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gained through a pattern of racketeering activity.^[8]

A US Attorney who indicts someone under RICO has the option of seeking a pre-trial restraining order or an injunction to temporarily seize a defendant’s assets and prevent the transfer of potentially forfeitable property as well as to require the defendant to put up a performance bond. An injunction or performance bond ensures that there is something to seize in the event of a guilty verdict.

This provision prevented the owners of Mafia-related shell corporations from absconding with assets. In many cases, the threat of a RICO indictment can force defendants to plead guilty to lesser charges, in part because the seizure of assets would make it difficult to pay a defense attorney.

Despite its harsh provisions, a RICO-related charge is considered easy to prove in court because it focuses on patterns of behavior as opposed to criminal acts….

There must be one of four specified relationships between the defendants and the enterprise. Either the defendants:

• invested the proceeds of the pattern of racketeering activity into the enterprise (18 U.S.C. § 1962(a)); or
• acquired or maintained an interest in, or control of, the enterprise through the pattern of racketeering activity (subsection (b)); or
• conducted or participated in the affairs of the enterprise “through” the pattern of racketeering activity (subsection (c)); or
• conspired to do one of the above (subsection (d))….

[TW: Looks like Trump and Mullin are going to stretch RICO beyond its original legislative intent. On the other hand, Trump and the (anti)Republicans have repeatedly claimed that the Somali community in Minnesota engages in widespread fraud. Which suggests premeditation — which in turn suggests something like the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. ]

Judge orders cancellation of Trump’s government-funded ads

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2026]

Jared Kushner’s Middle East Financial Ties Draw Scrutiny as US Funds Gaza Force

[Military.com, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2026]

Officials Flagged a $580 Million Oil Bet Made Minutes Before Trump’s Iran Reversal, Then Were Told to Back Off

[International Business Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]

ICE Planning $100 Million ‘Nightmare’ Domestic Spy Program

by Whitney Curry Wimbish, October 14, 2026 [The American Prospect]

Under ERO ONE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to hire 142 intelligence contractors with top secret clearances and deploy them in cities across the country.

The Dawn Of The Self-Funding Pentagon – It’s not like the military is cash-starved from Congress. But it looks a lot like it’s going to make money off Venezuelan oil

Spencer Ackerman,  13 Oct 2026 [FOREVER WARS]

DOGE

Michael Lewis on the Lone Security Guard Who Resisted DOGE

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, October 13, 2026]

In an exclusive excerpt from ‘Blockers,’ the inside story of the high-stakes D.C. standoff where security chief Colin O’Brien fought off DOGE operatives.

Supreme Court takes on public access to DOGE records

[Courthouse News Service, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]

The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to review how much information the Trump administration can be forced to reveal about the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency under public records requests.

Earlier this year, an appeals court ordered discovery into the structure and work of the U.S. DOGE Service under a Freedom of Information Act request from an ethics watchdog. The Trump administration pushed the justices to review the decision, arguing it intruded on the autonomy and confidentiality of presidential advisers….

Strategic Political Economy

The Grain Is There. The World’s Hungry Can’t Reach It. And El Niño Won’t Wait.

Mark Roberts [4Hunger.org, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]

The world is not running out of grain this year. It is running out of grain that poor countries can reach at a price they can pay. Wheat is trapped behind closed ports by war, the world’s spare rice sits largely in one country, India, which may need it for its own people, and the world is eating into its maize reserves. Whether this becomes hunger and famine in 2027 now turns on two things: 1) whether this super El Niño spares India, Australia and South Africa, which hold much of the world’s spare grain and which previous strong El Niños pushed into drought; and 2) whether world leaders get humanitarian aid to the countries with no grain reserves before their harvests fail. The second is a choice, and the time to make it is now….

Africa: 800 Million Young People Face a Future Without Jobs

[allAfrica, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]

Global power shift

Trump Is Gutting America’s Core Geopolitical Advantage

[Foreign Affairs, via The Big Picture, October 11, 2026]

Robert B. Zoellick, former US Trade Representative, deputy secretary of state and World Bank president, on the strategic cost of antagonizing Canada and Mexico.

America Didn’t Lose Its Rare Earth Industry. It Sold It.

[Lawfare, via The Big Picture, October 17, 2026]

Markets price for cost. China prices for control. The risk of a rare earths cutoff is asymmetric, and the financing to rebuild American supply should be too. Kirsten Asdal: Beijing’s rare-earth export controls have been suspended one short reprieve at a time since October 2025, the latest until Nov. 10. How the US ended up this dependent.

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Israel’s New – and Terrifying – Security Doctrine

Trita Parsi [via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]

In a stunning piece published by the head of one of Israel’s most prominent think tanks, Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman describes the reality of Israel’s new security doctrine:

A few crucial principles he describes:

1. The United States is a “declining power” and, given its ongoing social and political shifts, will soon abandon Israel in any event. This is compelling Israel to move toward greater self-reliance in order to avoid “excessive dependence” on the US since it “exposes Israel to the influence of a progressive American value system that is incompatible with Israel’s Jewish character.”

Then he concludes: “Severing ties with the United States is therefore not only inevitable, but essential to Israel’s independence and the resilience of its Jewish national identity.”

2. Primacy of Jewish Identity over Democracy: The state’s Jewish identity takes precedence over its democratic system of government.

3. Peace as a Means Rather Than an End….

4. “Rejection of the Independent Existence of Arab States….

5. “War as a Foundational State: War is essential to national security and cannot be replaced by a state of peace, which, as noted, is merely a means rather than an end…. War is necessary, and preventive war is preferable because it secures a significant achievement at the outset.” ….

Oligarchy

The $430 Million War Against Taxing The Rich – Ultrawealthy donors have spent nearly half a billion dollars trying to convince voters to keep their taxes low via the ballot this November.

Veronica Riccobene, Oct 15, 2026 [The Lever]

The Requisite Variety of Power For Neoliberal Feudalism: Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Money, and the Limits of Total Control

[Hermes of the Threshold, via Naked Capitalism 10-13-2026]

GRAPH – The Global Public-Private Partnership

Inside Elon Musk’s $276 Million Midterm Rescue Mission for Republicans

[New York Times, Oct 13, 2026]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Sales of Existing Single-Family Homes Scrape along Bottom of 4-Year Dumpster, Supply at 11-Year High. Condo Sales at Record Low, Supply at Record High

[Wolf Street, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]

Car payments just hit a record $787 a month—and 1 in 4 new-car buyers is now signing a 7-year loan

[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2026]

How Expedia Rigs Travel Markets and Raises Your Hotel Prices

Lee Hepner, Oct 14, 2026 [BIG]

Health care crisis

We Exposed the New AI Scheme to Deny Your Healthcare – It’s the latest oligarch attack on healthcare.

[More Perfect Union, Oct 13, 2026]

The Trump administration is using AI to analyze Medicare prior authorizations, and companies get 25 percent of the “savings” the system generates.

We found two private equity firms, Carlyle Group and Patient Square Capital, backing this process….

Q3 2026: UnitedHealth’s Profits Soar as it Covers Fewer People, Pays Less for Care

[HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]

Predatory finance

Frenzied Stock-Options Trading Shows Individual Investors Are Still Hungry for Risk

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, October 15, 2026]

Daily single-stock options volume is running near $700 billion, close to 2021 meme-mania levels, as retail traders look past rising rates, $100 oil and war. Trading in single-stock options contracts is near levels reached in 2021, when a new generation of amateur investors shook up Wall Street

[TW: US GDP in 2026 is estimated at $32.38 trillion, or $89.0 billion a day. In 1980, options trading was $45.8 billion for the entire year, compared to US annual GDP of $17.8 trillion.

[According to CBOE, the average daily value of stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange is $176,990,302,863 and on NASDAQ $167,576,703,483. But these two exchanges now account for only 40 percent of daily stock trading. A slightly larger share of daily trading are off-exchange equity trades which are now reported through a Trade Reporting Facility (TRF) operated by one of three FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc.) systems.]

How the Fed Is Quietly Inflating the AI Bubble While Hiking Your Electric Bill

Matt Stoller, Oct 17, 2026 [BIG]

When the Fed raises the price of money, it hikes electric bills, property taxes, mortgage and auto costs, and the price of working capital. It’s time to drop our illusions about the central bank.

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Our economy is literally criminal

Robin McAlpine, 14 Oct 2026 [Common Weal, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-2026]

The Many Ways Trump Is Kneecapping White-Collar Crime Enforcement

Hannah Levintova, October 16, 2026 [Mother Jones]

Burying the Horrors of Epstein Island

[The Epstein Files by Julie K. Brown, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2026]

Ken Paxton Partied in Dubai With Fugitives Ahead of High-Stakes Texas Senate Race

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]

Scammers Are Stealing Millions From Food Stamp Recipients. Congress Could Fix It — but Won’t.

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 10-14-2026]

Bank of America fined $1.2 billion over customer money laundering

[Drop Site Daily, October 14, 2026]

Bank of America has been fined a near-record $1.2 billion over its failures to monitor and report billions of dollars of suspicious transactions, the Treasury Department and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced on Tuesday.

The OCC’s civil penalty of $750 million, a significant portion of the $1.2 billion total, is the largest it has imposed. The Treasury Department separately announced an $11.6 million sanctions settlement. The Bank of America admitted that it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act, failing to maintain an adequate anti-money-laundering program, conduct due diligence on foreign-correspondent accounts, and file suspicious-activity reports.

Restoring balance to the economy

North Dakota’s Bank Earned the State $231.8 Million Last Year. Here Is What the Same Bank Would Have Earned Yours.

Christopher Armitage, Oct 13, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

One formula, 49 states, each figure built from the state’s own treasury records. The profit a state bank would’ve earned in 2025: California $2.26 billion, Texas $1.78 billion, New York $1.04 billion

Disrupting mainstream economics

Of Mathematics, mathiness, mythematics, and mathemagics

Steve Keen

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Character.ai’s Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don’t Work 

[404 Media, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261014]

“Character.ai’s bankruptcy is the one of the first dominos to fall in the long-foreseen AI bubble. The circumstances of its bankruptcy are exactly what critics of AI have been saying would happen: Character.ai lit a huge amount of money on fire running its product, did not bring in a lot of revenue, and faced enormous legal fees after causing harm to its users. Enshittifying its product to try to make its expenses cheaper did not work, according to a narrative filed in bankruptcy court Tuesday.” And: “Disney has reportedly offered Character.ai $20 million to license some of its intellectual property; Last year, Disney sent Character.ai a cease and desist letter demanding it stop using its copyrighted characters without permission. In 2023, it was valued at $1 billion after raising $150 million in a round led by a16z. ”

[Lambert Strether added:]

Whoopsie. Commentary:

The junk AI firms are crashing. Last week it was Firmus, then CharacterAI, now CoreWeave.

Firmus and CoreWeave are backed by Nvidia. These are the stocks that would be the first ones to crater in an AI bubble pop. https://t.co/WVwVSGURzX

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) October 14, 2026

“Anthropic admits Houthis used Claude AI instead of weapons engineers to make rockets and ballistic missiles that correct themselves after missing targets” [Daily Mail]. • “Admits,” forsooth. Given that AI executives have no ethics or conscience, this is a sales pitch to the Pentagon.

Monopoly Round-Up: AI Cockroaches Scurry Out from Under Nvidia, the Most Valuable Company in the World

Matt Stoller, Oct 11, 2026 [BIG]

A failed initial public offering from an Nvidia-backed “neocloud” called Firmus, run by a man with a criminal record, suggests the AI bubble is getting ready to burst.

Fears of Big Tech Censorship Grow After Meta Suspends No Kings Instagram Account

How Meta Muse Profiles People Who Never Used It

Ken Macon, October 14, 2026 [reclaimthenet.org]

… Meta’s new personal agent, Muse, was built to learn the people in its users’ lives. That includes friends, exes, colleagues and siblings who have never opened it….

Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for “mercenary spyware”

Cory Doctorow, October 17, 2026 [Pluralistic]

… This allowed an Israeli spyware company called Discover-Tech (which masquerades as an ad-tech company) to sell totalitarian governments and sleazy corporate mercenaries the ability to pluck individual internet users out of the billions who log in every day and then serve “malicious ads” (that is, blobs of arbitrary code) to those targeted users. These malicious ads contained “no-click, zero-day” attacks, which meant that they exploited previously unknown vulnerabilities to take over devices without any user interaction. The mere act of loading a web-page or opening an app that relied on one of these gigantic ad-tech companies to serve ads was enough to compromise your device. No clicks needed, and no warning.

Among the targets of this attack campaign were the computers of workers at Al Jazeera. They were attacked with malware from the mercenary spyware company Candiru (which now calls itself “Integrity Labs” because irony is not dead). Beyond Candiru, Discover-Tech also facilitates attacks by numerous criminal mercenary spyware companies, serving ads on hundreds of thousands of sites and apps….

AI’s Supercharging a Scam Economy Bigger Than the Cocaine Trade

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 10-12-2026]

Google-CNN Deal to Integrate Generative AI Into News Platforms

[TeleSur, via Naked Capitalism 10-16-2026]

Congress Is Cashing In on the AI Boom – Roughly one in five members of Congress has household investments in the industry.

David Moore and Donald Shaw, Oct 15, 2026 [The Nation]

Climate and environmental crises

Solar Panels That Plug Into Your Wall Are About to Be Everywhere

(National Geographic, via The Big Picture, October 12, 2026]

California is the latest state to pass a law making it easier to install balcony-friendly solar panels. Renewable energy experts think the new technology is about to take off.

Driving Plug-in Solar Legislation State by State

[Brightsaver, via The Big Picture, October 12, 2026]

Plug-in solar, small panels that plug into the wall let renters and homeowners generate their own electricity, is being legalized state by state. The map below tracks legislation across all 50 U.S. states: Where bills have passed, where they’re advancing, and what’s next.

Water has emerged as a key issue for Arizona voters ahead of US midterms – governments should take note

[Chatham House, via Naked Capitalism 10-17-2026]

Democrats’ political malpractice

Newsom Endorses Ballot Measure That Would Cancel Out Billionaire Tax—and Ban Future Wealth Taxes

Jake Johnson, Oct 11, 2026 [CommonDreams]

J Street Is Trying To Rescue Zionism In The Battle Over Israel’s Future In The Democratic Party

[Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-2026]

Resistance

Democrats: Embrace Incivility! – Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff is leading the rise of the rude Democrat. More should follow his lead.

Jason Linkins, October 18, 2026 [The New Republic]

… as TNR contributor Nacona Nix explained at length, the liberal commitment to civility theater does a lot of real-world harm: It’s currently one of the primary vectors by which antisocial and undemocratic ideas get laundered into respectability….

When Democrats win the House, they must investigate Elon Musk and bar future government contracts!

Dean Obeidallah, Oct 17, 2026

First, we learned earlier this week from The NY Times that Musk is the GOP’s top donor by far this midterm. He has quietly funneled more than $276 million into Republican groups and his super PAC since the start of July. By doing so, Musk has been building below the radar “a huge turnout operation to help the party battle headwinds in the midterm elections.”

But it’s worse than that! On Friday, we learned from The Washington Post that Musk has poured in even more as documented in new campaign finance filings on Thursday. How much? Musk has donated as of now $369 million of his own money into this year’s midterm elections! (Below is image from Washington Post article on GOP megadonors in 2026.)….

But it’s not just money. The Washington Post reported this week that Musk is using his X/Twitter platform to help Republicans—and especially to help defeat Talarico. Musk elevated a false conspiracy theory about Talarico over the past weekend claiming he didn’t take a break from the campaign trail because he had the flu but because of Talarico’s mental health.

Musk began is his campaign of lies Sunday afternoon when he replied to a post alleging that Talarico had been checked into the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health facility in suburban Cincinnati. That is when Musk wrote, “The Talarico campaign is hiding something big that voters ought to know about.” Given Musk’s massive following and that he controls the algorithm for the platform, his reply went wildly viral….

Musk’s top priority is ensuring he is not investigated by Democrats if they win the House. That is why he is spending $400 million plus. And given Musk’s desperation, there are valid questions if he would use his technology to impact/steal the elections?!

When Democrats win the House, for starters there must be oversight over the billions Musk receives in US tax dollars for various contracts. SpaceX alone holds around $22 billion in government contracts. And Musk currently has at least 52 active contracts across seven federal agencies were on track to pay Musk’s companies an additional $11.8 billion.

Musk must publicly answer questions under oath before Congress if there has been waste, fraud or abuse?! Plus did Musk directly use any of the government money to fund campaigns—which would be illegal. Did Musk engage in an illegal campaign contribution by using X to spread lies to help candidates?

And while we are at it, we should investigate how exactly Musk became a citizen—which is relevant since he receives billions in US tax dollars by way of contracts. As The Washington Post reported back in 2024, Musk came to the US in 1995 on a student visa for a graduate degree program at Stanford University. But he never enrolled in courses. Per The Post, “that left Musk without a legal basis to remain in the United States.” Yet he remained and started a business in apparent violation of US immigration law….

Exposure Is Not Accountability – When bad actors are shameless, exposure accomplishes little. They need to face tangible consequences.

Brian Beutler, Oct 14, 2026 [Off Message]

… Hold at least one prominent Republican truly accountable for dirty tricks or election crimes before date X. Do something to change the incentive structure that encourages Republicans to lie and cheat all the time, even if it’s at the margin….

Too often, Democrats conflate the concepts of exposure and accountability.

Exposure is an element of accountability. And in some cases it can be the lone ingredient that leads to accountability. Where shame still prevails, people exposed as liars, frauds, cheats, perverts, and abusers sometimes choose to make themselves scarce forever.

That’s accountability of a sort, mostly self-imposed.

But where shame is absent, exposure is only step one. Enforceable consequences must follow.

Democrats made this mistake most fatefully when they concluded that the January 6 insurrection had discredited Trump for all time. He’d been “exposed” and exposure would do most or all of their civic and political work for them. It’s why the Biden administration slow-walked its investigations of Trump’s attempted coup and the classified documents he stole, which in turn allowed Trump to escape justice, mount a political comeback, and pardon everyone….

And it’s why they choose, repeatedly, to look forward, not backward: The bad guys were exposed, we won the election—that’s incentive enough for them to change their ways.

No it’s not….

… exposure is insufficient as a goal. Today, various conservatives and GOP operatives will pretend to be embarrassed by Nick Sortor—the degenerate who published the Talarico libels. But this is just part of the larger act, an attempt to run this story out of the news now that the lies have done their damage. They publicly feign contempt for people like Sortor and James O’Keefe and Benny Johnson whenever they’re caught lying or promoting slander—then, when people have moved on, they’ll fete those very same people at private black tie events and funnel money their way. They see liars and cheaters as valued members of their movement. We’ll know we’ve imposed enough accountability when shame is restored and that calculation changes.

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

The MAGA Cult: Why “Feelings” Trump Facts

[Lucas Bean Daily, via The Big Picture, October 13, 2026]

There is a question that haunts every person who has ever tried to have an evidence-based conversation with a MAGA supporter. How can they believe something with zero evidence behind it?

How Does the Run Towards Fascism Occur?

[Why Weak Americans Run Towards Fascism, via The Big Picture, October 11, 2026]

Why did people let Hitler take power? Not the inner circle. Not the military leaders or the party functionaries or the industrialists who funded the operation. The ordinary people. The shopkeepers and teachers and factory workers and farmers who watched a democratic republic dismantle itself and did not just allow it to happen but cheered while it did.

(anti)Republican clown car

An Ad Targeting Susan Collins’s Opponent Airs in the Wrong Portland
An executive with the Republican super PAC that paid for the ad attacking Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, blamed its vendor for running the ad in Oregon.

By John Yoon [New York Times]

Why Conservative Men Can’t Spell

[Lucas Bean Daily, via The Big Picture, October 11, 2026]

Lucas Bean takes Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 definition of anti-intellectualism, resentment of the life of the mind rather than ignorance, and applies it to MAGA.

Civic republicanism

What’s at Stake in the Omar Case

John Ganz, Oct 15, 2026 [Unpopular Front]

Yesterday evening, The Wall Street Journal reported “Ilhan Omar Investigation Aims to Build Case for Stripping Her Citizenship.” The repeated failure of this regime to prosecute its enemies—its manifest incompetence in all of its endeavors, really—has perhaps muted the alarm with which the news about Omar’s denaturalization case ought to be greeted.

Consider the gravity of all this: the executive is attempting to cast an opponent out of the political community entirely; this attempted expulsion is undoubtedly driven by racial and religious animus—vicious hostility to Somali-Americans is a central part of MAGA politics. She is not merely a private citizen or even an outspoken critic of the administration: She is an elected representative of the American people. The executive is attempting to deprive a member of an equal branch of government of the status that entitles her to participate in the constitutional order: They are attacking not just her rights, but her very right to have rights.

One’s personal opinion of Omar’s character or her politics is immaterial. This is a serious assault on the constitutional order being carried out through the executive branch’s legal and bureaucratic machinery. Perhaps the reason that the public response is so tepid is that we have so long taken for granted—or simply no longer understand—just how fundamental the questions involved really are. This move strikes at some of the most elementary assumptions of a free and republican government, principles so basic that we scarcely imagined they would need defending: that political opposition is legitimate, that the executive cannot determine the composition of the legislature, and that citizenship is not a privilege held at the pleasure of those in power.

We often hear that we face creeping authoritarianism in this country, but it would be more precise to call this a case of creeping totalitarianism. Authoritarian governments suppress political opposition and deprive their subjects of particular rights. Totalitarian movements aspire to something much more radical: the destruction of independent political and juridical personhood. They attack not merely the liberties of particular citizens they seek to repress, but the concept of citizenship itself—and then, ultimately, the concept of shared humanity….

Since the beginning, it’s been my contention that the attack on citizenship itself is both the very essence of the Trump movement and its most dangerous feature. From birtherism to the stolen-election myth, Trumpism can be understood as the notion that some Americans are not really Americans, that their political rights are illegitimate, and that the nation must be purged of these interlopers….

Henry Giroux: America’s Descent Into Fascism—and the Struggle to Build a Different Future

Sharon Kyle, Dick Price and Henry A. Giroux, Oct 9, 2026 [LA Progressive]

What happens when cruelty becomes a governing philosophy? When political leaders celebrate violence, billionaires wield extraordinary influence over government, and institutions supposedly designed to defend democracy become instruments of repression?

These questions were at the center of our recent conversation with political theorist Henry Giroux, whose latest LA Progressive essay, “The Politics of the Abyss: MAGA, Moral Rot, and the Struggle for the Future,” examines what he considers the accelerating collapse of America’s democratic and moral foundations….

Giroux argued that decades of neoliberalism have encouraged Americans to understand themselves primarily as isolated individuals competing for personal advantage.

Under this ideology, self-interest becomes the organizing principle of society, empathy becomes a liability, and solidarity is displaced by competition.

“We live in a country that should be appropriately called gangster capitalism,” he declared.

And, in his formulation, gangster capitalism produces a population increasingly accustomed to its values.

The Powell Memo and the Counterrevolution Against the 1960s

One of the most revealing exchanges occurred when Sharon raised the 1971 Powell Memo, written by corporate attorney Lewis Powell shortly before his appointment to the Supreme Court.

Impeaching a Judge for Federalist Society Membership – Unitary Executive Theory, the Good Behavior Standard and the Role of the Senate

Christopher Armitage, Oct 17, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]