Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 21, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
US Finally Capitulates with ‘Memorandum’ of Surrender
Simplicius [via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
Iran Enlisted “Senior Psychologists” to Help Craft Messages to Trump Ahead of Agreement
[Jeremy Scahill, June 15, 2026 [DropSite]
… “We added two senior psychologists to the negotiations’ advisory circle so that we can shape messages intended for President Trump from the perspective of managing what we regard as psychopathic behavior pattern,” an Iranian official told Drop Site. He said the psychologists began assisting Iranian negotiators following the initial round of bilateral talks in Islamabad in April as the two sides began exchanging proposed terms for a potential Memorandum of Understanding.
“[Trump’s] reactions have improved noticeably since we began incorporating the recommendations of these advisers into our messages and written communications,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
“Because the exchanged texts will ultimately become part of the historical record, we conduct our negotiations in a manner that ensures the relative weight and sophistication of each party’s negotiating techniques will be evident should these communications be made public in the years ahead,” the official added….
The Race for Hypersonic Missiles
[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]
The Future of Warfare is Coming Faster Than Most Think
Karl Sanchez [via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2026]
Ukraine’s Naval Drone Program: Origins, Development, and the Organizations Behind It
[Black Mountain Analysis, via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2026]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Trump says there are ‘no limits’ to his power
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 06-20-2026]
Frustrated by Courts, Trump Weighed Suspending a Constitutional Right
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan [The New York Times, via scotusblog.com, June 16, 2026]
Citing “a secret memo” written by the White House staff secretary, The New York Times reported on Monday that the Trump administration last year seriously considered suspending habeas rights for unauthorized immigrants as part of a broader deportation push. “The suspension of habeas corpus has occurred just a handful of times in U.S. history, and always under the most dire circumstances of war or invasion. Yet to a greater degree than previously known, administration officials, encouraged by Mr. Trump, actively weighed taking that step in the early months of his second term.” In his memo to the White House chief of staff, Will Scharf counseled against that move, noting that it would “likely precipitate hazardous legal and constitutional battles.” “Even where Congress has explicitly suspended habeas corpus rights, the Supreme Court has held that some alternative process must be provided to defendants, with procedural safeguards akin to a habeas corpus action,” Scharf wrote.
Joyce Vance, June 15, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
…The reporting clarifies that Miller’s role extended to advocating for the suspension of basic rights, and that he was narrowly run off. The same appears to be true for the Vice President. The risk is not over. It is a warning for what could be coming, one that cannot be ignored….
Why Does Trump Want the Save America Act? The Answer Should Worry Us.
[Balkinization, via Naked Capitalism 06-18-2026]
… That leaves a fifth reading, and it is the most disquieting one. The Act has virtually no prospect of passing the Senate in its current form. If the President convinces the public that the Act is necessary, and Congress refuses to enact it, he can claim that the integrity of the next election is in doubt and that an executive remedy is justified.
By this interpretation, the President’s campaign for the Act builds the predicate for unilateral action: the suspension or federally supervised disruption of the midterm elections, sufficient to secure continued Republican control of the House. This is not as speculative as we would hope. Federal troops and law enforcement agents have been deployed to Los Angeles, Washington, Portland, and Chicago under contested theories of executive authority. A draft executive order circulated among Trump allies would declare a national emergency to ban mail-in ballots and voting machines. And recently, the President issued a different executive order attempting to grant his Postal Service unprecedented federal control over who is eligible to vote by mail….
Trump Is Threatening To ‘Take Back’ DC Based On Who Wins Mayoral Primary
[Huffington Post]
…Janeese Lewis George, a city council member who has led in the polls, is a democratic socialist who’s campaigned on delivering universal childcare and ceasing the D.C. police department’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Trump said last week he “wouldn’t like it” if she won.
“Maybe we’d take back Washington, run it on the federal basis,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question at the White House. “We won’t put up with it. We’re not going to lose our businesses.” ….
There’s no question he can meddle in the city’s affairs. Trump has direct control over D.C.’s National Guard, and the Home Rule Act gives him the power to use the D.C. police force for federal purposes if he decides there are “special conditions of an emergency nature.” He took advantage of those authorities last year, when he briefly took over the police department and deployed the National Guard in response to a supposed crime crisis. Groups of guardsmen, mostly from GOP-controlled states, still roam the city’s streets….
Why Aren’t There More Whistleblowers Against Trump?
Christopher Armitage, June 20, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
What you’re about to read covers why so few people have blown the whistle on this administration, what happened to the insiders who did, and how the people who lied to protect those in power came out ahead instead. It then turns to the fix: this country has protected whistleblowers before, the programs that protect them still work, and states can build them now. It ends with the specific law worth asking your state to pass and the offices to call….
So now that we have outlined the problem and it’s source, we can look for an example of a successful whistleblower program. In the middle of the American Revolution, ten sailors aboard the USS Warren reported that the most powerful officer in the Continental Navy, Commodore Esek Hopkins, had tortured British prisoners. Hopkins dragged two of them into court. The Continental Congress addressed the misconduct, they knew this wasn’t the sort of activity they wanted their nation to engage in. On July 30, 1778, Congress declared that every American had a duty to report misconduct by people in power, and it voted to cover the sailors’ legal defense. The first thing this country ever did about whistleblowers was protect them and pay their legal bills.
And when this country has wanted information badly enough, it has paid cash for it. Lincoln signed the False Claims Act in 1863 to catch war profiteers, and the law still lets an ordinary person sue on the government’s behalf and keep a cut of what comes back. Since Congress put real teeth in it in 1986, whistleblowers have helped recover more than $85 billion, and the people who came forward keep 15 to 30 percent of it….
A state can give a person who exposes wrongdoing in the federal government two things: protection and a reward. The protection does not require the state to recover any money, and it applies no matter what the person exposed. Keep their name secret: let them report through a lawyer to the governor and state attorney general rather than to the official they are reporting on. Punish retaliation: give a state, local, or private worker in the state the right to sue, legal representation to fight for the return of their job, recover double their lost wages, and make the employer pay their attorney fees. Fund their defense: pay the legal costs of a whistleblower who faces a lawsuit or a prosecution, so those costs do not bankrupt them….
‘Just Do It Anyway’: Inside Trump’s Plans to Pay His Allies, Slush Fund or Not
Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez, June 18, 2026 [Zeteo]
Shortly after Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund of taxpayer money was announced by the Justice Department last month, it triggered such furious backlash that the administration was forced to at least pretend it was pausing the project, with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claiming that his department was “not moving forward with the fund, period.”
Right around that time, three sources familiar with the situation tell Zeteo, senior Trump officials immediately got to work on alternate plans for delivering public funds to the president’s allies – even if the new “fund” didn’t technically exist on paper.
According to two of the sources, Trump himself had a succinct reply, when the topic of political or legal roadblocks to his slush fund came up in recent conversations with close advisers: “Just do it anyway.” ….
Letters from an American, June 20, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, June 21, 2026
[Begins with a useful summary of the corruption and incompetence of Trump filling the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with green slime.]
Friday night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.” By this evening, he was blaming “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll [sic]. Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”
[TW: Make Algae Great Again.]
E. Tammy Kim, June 20, 2026 [The New Yorker]
Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland
Ben Taub, June 15, 2026 [The New Yorker]
Robert Kuttner, June 17, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Strategic Political Economy
The (real) dead economy theory: Vibes and memestocks, all the way down.
Cory Doctorow, June 17, 2026 [Pluralistic]
Here’s a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it’s $1t (nominally). But that’s not the fun fact; this is: everything he’s done since 2020 was a flop.
As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world’s hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called “XAI”:
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/06/15/one-big-grift/
Quiggin declares that this is the era in which “financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately,” and “the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying.” Nor did this start with the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it cryptocurrency because no one is even pretending that it’s a form of money….
Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things:
https://johnquiggin.com/2018/02/09/bitcoin-kills-the-efficient-market-hypothesis/
That’s the logic of the whole market today. AI – the world’s money-losingest technology – attracts investment at the expense of everything else. When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk’s broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in their faces, saying we don’t need cancer research because “GAI” is almost here and it will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down real cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it’s about to become God and cure cancer.
Today, Goldman Sachs isn’t merely all-in on crypto – it’s all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk’s claim that “Musk’s ragbag of assets” will grow one hundredfold in the next 40 months….
The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.
We could do “AI cancer research” by producing tools that automate gnarly multivariant analysis problems for cancer researchers. But what we’re actually doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into “systemic” cancer because studying systemic things is “woke”) to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire.
That’s not just a dead economy – it’s one that’ll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.
Global power shift
China has a powerful new oil price weapon
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 06-18-2026]
Oligarchy
Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society
Dell Cameron, Yulia Almazova, June 16, 2026 [Wired]
Matthew Ehret, June 18, 2026
Palantir was not born in a garage. Like Space X, Paypal, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, it was commissioned by military intelligence agencies seeking to create a civilian branding for an insidious Orwellian control grid. In Palantir’s case, you will discover how Thiel and his Stanford school chum Alex Karp were introduced to CIA director George Tenet, and Total Information Awareness architect John Poindexter by neocon grand strategist Richard Perle.
In this episode, you will discover what Palantir actually is, who built it, who it serves, and why a company that named itself after the all-seeing eye of Sauron now manages the intelligence, policing, banking, and military systems of most of the Western world. Palantir’s ambition to generate “predictive crime” is also an open goal of this burgeoning new hand of a Minority Report dystopia.
By the end of the show, I examine Thiel’s Straussian gnostic teaching and ‘secret doctrine’, Thiel’s belief that freedom and democracy are incompatible, his obsession with the same antichrist which he claims to fear but appears to be building, and the influence of Rene Girard’s sick ideas of human nature on the young Transhumanist.
From Bilderberg to Dialog: How Peter Thiel’s ‘Secret Society’ Signals a New Elite
Curro Jimenez, June 18, 2026 [Naked Capitalism]
Nothing seems to entice those in positions of power as much as secret societies. Nothing seems to reek of corruption more than secret societies. And nothing seems to capture public attention like secret societies. That is why Peter Thiel’s “secret society” leak is a confirmation that there’s a new class in the upper echelons of the system. Not because the “secret society” exists, but because it has been “leaked” that it does….
And that is the telling sign. I have argued that many of the events that we are seeing happen, from geopolitical moves to financial decisions, are being directed to protect and promote the interests of a new class that has arrived at the upper echelons of systemic power. They are reshaping finance, war, surveillance, industry, entertainment, academia, and the State. The combined valuation of the US stock market sits at between 75 and 80 trillion dollars. The ten largest US companies are all tech companies and represent around a third of the total US market valuation, or 28 trillion dollars. For reference, that is more than the GDP of China, EU or Russia.
And I have argued that this tightly-knit oligarchy knows each other, talks to each other, and fights or helps each other. The fact that Dialog has been made public is an indication that they are already comfortably occupying their seats and that, far from fearing public scrutiny, they crave it.
The Pope and a Silicon Valley Trillionaire Fight Over God
Matt Stoller, June 14, 2026 [BIG]
Elon Musk is a trans-humanist, the ultimate expression of the Chicago School philosophy. The Pope offers a different vision about how limits make us human.
Man who hates paying taxes loves government handouts
[Boing Boing, via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]
The Oligarch-on-Oligarch Fight That Defines Politics in 2026
David Dayen, June 18, 2026 [The American Prospect]
[media lawyer McClain Delaney vs. Total Wine boss Rep. David Trone, in Maryland US Senate race]
Felonomics
‘Elon Musk Should Have to Pay For This’: Trump Admin Says It Needs $1 Billion to Combat Screwworm
[Common Dreams]
Nicole Santa Cruz, , June 17, 2026 [ProPublica]
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2026]
How an Addictive Gas Station Drug Found Allies in Trump’s Cabinet
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
The OMB and the Politicization of Science
[New England Journal of Medicine, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
… For decades, the Soviet Union promoted the unorthodox views of Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist who used his close ties to the political leadership to spread misinformation denying Mendelian genetics. What followed was a disaster: many years of poor harvests based on unsupported science and suppression of the teaching and practice of modern genetics throughout the Soviet bloc. A similar threat now hangs over U.S. science.
First, a review of where we are now. Proposals for scientific research are submitted to various federal agencies (we will use the National Institutes of Health [NIH] as an example), where they undergo an initial administrative review (to ensure adherence to all the rules) followed by peer review by a panel of experts in the field. These experts assess the proposal and assign it a priority score. Priority scores are based on the value of the science and are determined by peer reviewers who are shielded from politics. The appropriate NIH institute determines how many grants can be funded, depending on its budget, and then — with rare exceptions — funds strictly by priority score. The NIH leadership and Congress can influence funding by, for example, changing broad budgets or issuing “requests for applications.” However, the decisions are almost entirely driven by science. Once funded, the proposed work proceeds, unless the grantee fails to perform it, for the period designated at the time of the funding decision.The rule changes that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently proposed to the Health and Human Services (HHS) grant process would drastically change this process. There are too many objectionable aspects of these proposals to discuss here. But three are particularly striking….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Nearly 1 in 4 US tenants fell behind on rent in 2025
Stephen Semler [via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
There are 46 million renter households in the US. The share behind on rent has more than doubled since 2019…. Nearly one in four tenants fell behind on rent in 2025, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest report on household economic well-being. At 23%, the share who fell behind on rent last year was two percentage points higher than in 2024, six points above 2022, and 13 points above 2019.1 That’s as far back as the Fed’s survey data goes….
Real Estate Merger Poised to Create Several Local Apartment Monopolies
Rebecca Burns, June 17, 2026 [The American Prospect]
A combination between AvalonBay and Equity Residential would put close to 200,000 apartments in the hands of one company.
Health care crisis
[Sky, via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]
Congo reports large daily jump in Ebola cases a month after outbreak was declared
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Private equity dismantled West Suburban Medical Center and other area hospitals
[Chicago Sun-Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
[TW: Private equity should be treated as a conspiracy to commit murder. But here’s a symptom of our current problem: the next article does not even mention to role of private equity.]
Illinois hospital fully closes after last elevator fails
[Becker’s Hospital Review, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
Restoring balance to the economy
Can We Automate the Safety Net?
[Can We Still Govern?, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
…Psychologists and behavioral economists have long observed that default rules—rules that determine how a person is treated if they don’t make an active choice—tend to have major effects on program enrollment. One recent study found that suspending health insurance auto-enrollment in Massachusetts caused new enrollments to decline by 33 percent, an effect that is an order of magnitude greater than the effects of softer “nudges” such as providing information and assistance and up to twice as large as the impact of Massachusetts’ mandate penalty.
Programs like Medicare Part B and Social Security, which come close to automatically enrolling everyone who is eligible, unsurprisingly boast take-up rates of nearly 100 percent….
David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodríguez Guerra, June 18, 2026 [Washington Monthly]
Rule by the rich may look inevitable, but history shows it’s not. From ancient Greece to New Deal America to today’s Hungary, democracies have found ways to separate private fortunes from public power.
Art Cullen [via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]
The Most Powerful Political Office You’ve Never Heard Of
David Sirota, Natalie Bettendorf, June 19, 2026 [the Lever]
One elected official quietly controls a $300 billion fund and holds the power to move financial markets. Why is no one watching?
Today, we’re sharing David Sirota’s exclusive interview with Goyle, a progressive running for New York State comptroller, a job that single-handedly controls nearly $300 billion and has the power to sway financial markets in ways that can take on President Donald Trump and corporate interests.
“This is a job that has more singular power than a U.S. senator… all of Wall Street is watching what happens in a job like this,” Sirota said.
You’ll hear Goyle explain why he’s challenging the longtime incumbent, promising to leverage the office’s enormous power …. And why Democrats around the country in these financial officer roles should join forces….
Disrupting mainstream economics
Economic Calculation Problem….. Debunked
[historic.ly, 19 Jun 2026]
According to libertarians, the Economic Calculation Problem is the ultimate kryptonite against socialism — a decisive argument that no one has ever refuted. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises presented it as a logical proof that socialism is inherently irrational….
Mises maintained that the information necessary for economic calculation cannot be directly derived from physical quantities alone. Steel, labor, coal, machinery, and land are qualitatively different inputs that cannot be compared through simple measurement. Market exchange generates prices that reduce these heterogeneous goods to a common monetary denominator, allowing alternative production plans to be compared. Millions of exchanges produce prices that summarize dispersed information about relative scarcity and demand. In his view, the market functions as a mechanism for coordinating information that no individual planner could assemble independently.(Mises 1949, 92–97; 1920; 1922).
Without price-based calculation, Mises concluded, socialist planning must be arbitrary, leading to waste, inefficiency, and eventual collapse….
A central assumption in Mises’s argument is that profitability indicates that resources are being used more effectively. If a producer cannot compete profitably, Mises argues that others have found a better use for the resources involved (Mises 1949, pp. 300–302, 334–336; see also 1920)
Yet profitability in this system often comes not from genuine improvements or feeding more people, but from engineered scarcity and the quiet destruction of life….
Prices embed existing inequalities and power relations rather than revealing objective scarcity or true societal value.For example, in order to mine cobalt (a critical input for electric vehicle batteries and other high-tech goods), children between the ages of 3–17 in the mining communities of the copper-cobalt belt in the Democratic Republic of Congo are heavily involved in the labor. According to a 2017 UC Berkeley CEGA white paper, 11% of children aged 3–17 work outside the household in these artisanal mining areas, while an additional 57% perform domestic household tasks that support the mining economy.Even when prices exist, they reflect the current structure of power and property relations, not moral value or labor input….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI digital sovereignty risk doesn’t exist
Cory Doctorow, June 18, 2026 [Pluralistic]
You see, blockchain weirdos kept insisting that they could solve problems related to trust and institutional design with “smart contracts.” Rather than having to trust a board of directors to steer an organization, you could just have a self-executing institution, the “distributed autonomous organization” or DAO.
So for example, if you want to buy a copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby’s auction, you could set up a DAO to raise and pool the funds, eliminating the need to find trustworthy people to receive, hold and deploy these funds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConstitutionDAO
However – and here’s where the palmed card comes in – the DAO can’t go to Sotheby’s and place a bid on the Constitution. Instead, the members of the DAO have to elect a guy to receive all that cash, walk into Sotheby’s, get one of those little ping-pong paddles last seen at the State of the Union in Chuck Schumer’s withered claw (emblazoned with the brave slogan “You’re hurting my fee-fees”) and raise the paddle during the bidding.
That guy doesn’t have to go to Sotheby’s. That guy can simply walk away with all the money. Members of the DAO are trusting this guy with their entire collective treasury. Indeed, since the DAO has no corresponding legal entity, it might even be that members of the DAO can’t sue this guy if he steals all their money – and even worse, without a limited liability structure, it might mean that everyone in the DAO can be sued for anything bad this guy does with the money.
Which raises the question: what’s the point of building this insanely complex hairball of blockchain-based smart contracts to raise and hold the money if you’re just going to hand it to this guy and trust him without limit? ….
Thomas Neuburger, June 16, 2026 [God’s Spies]
The US Government Is Letting a Key Data Center Regulation Expire
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
Climate and environmental crises
The Merchants of Doubt are coming for Extreme Event Attribution science
[The Climate Brink, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
… For those unfamiliar with it, extreme event attribution attempts to quantify the contribution of climate change to an extreme event. For example, several groups analyzed the impact of climate change on Hurricane Harvey’s enormous rainfall totals over Houston, Texas and they found that climate change increased rainfall by 15 to 38%.
One thing that came up again and again was how terrified fossil-fuel interests are of extreme event attribution science. They are acutely aware that this research could land them in court. And losing those cases would leave them legally liable for billions of dollars in climate damages.
Because the legal stakes are so high, the blowback has turned ugly. I spoke with several scientists at the meeting who are facing ongoing harassment over their work.
This blowback is a coordinated campaign to make the entire field look suspect. The goal is to create the impression that attribution science is too uncertain, too political, or too conflicted to be useful in court or in public policy. The strategy is not based on actual science or evidence of misconduct, but on the generation of doubt….
[TW: One of the few hopes I have is that as a new generation of legal officials and prosecutors rise to positions of power, the idea that climate deniers are engaged in a conspiracy to murder and even commit genocide, will become more and more acceptable – and actionable.]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Why Cities Go Socialist – Here comes a generation of DSA big-city mayors.
Harold Meyerson, June 19, 2026 [The American Prospect]
… Which is why the future of most American big cities—most certainly, those that attract younger residents—is likely to be social democratic and often run by avowed socialists. The Bernies, Mamdanis, and AOCs won’t be the Democratic Party’s lonesome ends; they’ll be the party’s urban wing. The sooner the Democrats understand that—and the sooner they embrace many of that wing’s policies, however they choose to label them (and themselves)—the better.
Why Is Newsom Fighting California’s Billionaire Tax?
David Sirota, Natalie Bettendorf, June 18, 2026 [The Lever]
California voters are poised to vote on a one-time billionaire tax that would fund schools, food assistance, and Medicaid. Silicon Valley is spending big to keep the precedent-setting initiative off the November ballot, but the campaign’s most powerful opponent isn’t a tech oligarch — it’s California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic power broker and potential presidential candidate.
Today on Lever Time, David Sirota sits down with Dave Regan, the union leader who engineered the billionaire tax, to find out why Newsom and his allies are racing to kill the measure — and what this fight reveals about oligarchs’ control of the Democratic Party.
The Obama Center is a Monument to the More Effective Evil
[Black Agenda Report, via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2026]
Obama library dedication turns presidency of war, Wall Street bailouts into Democratic Camelot
[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 06-19-2026]
The Democrats’ 2024 “Autopsy” and the Party’s Refusal to Halt Weapons to Israel
[Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 06-14-2026]
Resistance
Which Crimes Could Trump and His Allies *Actually* Be Prosecuted For? Legal Expert Explains
John Harwood, Joyce Vance, and Team Zeteo, June 17, 2026 [Zeteo]
Is Trump immune from the law? And after he’s gone, will his enablers face the consequences? Ex-federal prosecutor Joyce Vance weighs in with Zeteo’s John Harwood.
We Can Start Deterring Election Lies Right Now
Brian Beutler and Andrew Weissmann, June 18, 2026
I had the opportunity on Wednesday to chat live with Andrew Weissmann, the former federal prosecutor and legal-affairs commentator, whose new book Liar’s Kingdom proposes ideas, inspired by foreign democracies, for amending our own laws to impose civil or criminal consequences on political candidates who tell Trump-like lies about elections.
Andrew crafted his proposals carefully to pass muster under our Constitution. They are thus meant to serve both as actionable responses to Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign of post-2020 lies, and as realistic prescriptions for discouraging copycats in the future. But the book hit the shelves just a couple weeks before Republicans in California and across the country asserted new false claims of fraud, in the vain hope of overturning the results of the Los Angeles mayoral primary, and installing a defeated GOP candidate on the general election ballot.
I was reading Liar’s Kingdom as that happened, and borrowed from it heavily in writing this piece, which argues California Democrats should pass a law that would effectively disqualify these election liars from seeking office in the state on future ballots….
Chris Hedges, June 19, 2026
There are two forms of satire. That of the educated elites, which dominates the commercial media, ridicules the foibles and pretensions of Trump and his hapless followers. This satire does not attack corporations or the war industry. It ignores the decay and rot within our political institutions, including the Democratic Party, which created Trump. It pretends we live in a democracy. It breeds cynicism, not resistance. It is characterized by a repugnant moral and intellectual superiority and heartless demeaning of the underclass. It fosters the social divisions and alienation that feeds fascism.
[Project Salt Box, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
What Spies, Saboteurs, and Abolitionists Can Teach Us About Effectively Influencing Politics
Christopher Armitage, June 17, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Minneapolis Is The Way – Why fascists hate the labor movement.
Hamilton Nolan, June 17, 2026 [How Things Work]
… There are hundreds of panel discussions and workshops at Labor Notes, and no one can go to more than a small fraction of them. But I want to discuss one of them, which focused on what is, to my mind, the most important union action of the past year: the long and ultimately successful struggle by the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul against ICE’s militaristic occupation of their cities.
I got to moderate a panel that included both elected union leaders and rank and file members from the Twin Cities, who talked about the nuts and bolts experience of the ICE surge, the rapid resistance to it, the enormous citywide march against ICE on January 23, and the aftermath. It was fascinating and inspiring and it helped to show us all not just what unions are, but what they can be.
These were unions representing teachers and hotel workers, service workers and janitors and telecom technicians. Regular working people. They spoke about the brutality of ICE’s operations, and how they sprung into action. The teachers made plans to protect their students and schools. The unions all plunged themselves into mutual aid and protection for their immigrant members. And, after an initial phase of figuring out how to safeguard their own people, they threw themselves into a staggering citywide effort to resist ICE in every way possible.
The Minneapolis area has one of the most impressive citywide labor movements in America. It has a rich history of strikes. The leaders of the city’s unions today have had the benefit of going through both the George Floyd protests of 2020, and of planning and executing a multi-union, multi-industry coordinated citywide contract fight in 2024. They have practice working together—like a real movement, rather than an atomized collection of interest groups. When ICE came to town, they were able to exercise those muscles immediately. When they decided, with only a couple of weeks’ notice, to have a huge march and shut down the city on January 23, they were able to pull it off….
Elon Musk keeps refusing to pay his bills. In California, that is felony theft by false pretenses.
Christopher Armitage, June 14, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
OMB FISCAL YEAR 2025 MEMOS PART 1: THE FIRST TEN MEMOS
Joshua Lawrenc, Juan Hanes [Notes on the Crises]
… It is no coincidence that the man who headed up “Project 2025”, Russell Vought, actively sought the head OMB position in order to implement his radical agenda. To understand why the leader of project 2025 would choose this perch over all others, we have to understand what exactly the OMB does….
“I would gladly give up my right to vote to have a more conservative country.”
Joyce Vance, June 16, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
If you haven’t actually listened to these women express their views, this five-minute clip compiled by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is worth your time.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Corporate America’s Secret Courts Are Stealing Your Rights
[Economic Liberties, June 17, 2026 The Economic Populist]
If you’ve ever signed up for a credit card, clicked “accept” on a website’s terms and conditions, or started a new job, you’ve almost certainly agreed to forced arbitration, a private system for resolving disputes that keeps companies out of public courts, away from class actions, and largely beyond the reach of the law. In When Companies Run the Courts: How Forced Arbitration Became America’s Secret Justice System, Brendan Ballou traces how this hidden architecture came to be, why it has quietly gutted whole areas of consumer and employment law, and what regular people might do to claw some power back.
Justice Scalia’s Jiggery-Pokery in Federal Arbitration Law
David S. Schwartz [Minnesota Law Review Headnotes, 2016]
Jill I. Gross [Brooklyn Law Review, Vol. 81, Iss. 1 (2015)]
Erwin Chemerinsky [via scotusblog.com, June 17, 2026]
In his Courtly Observations column, Erwin Chemerinsky revisited what he believes to be “the most extraordinary June in the modern Supreme Court,” examining a nine-day period in June 2022 during which “the court overruled Roe v. Wade, greatly expanded the scope of gun rights, dramatically weakened the wall separating church and state, and imposed a significant new limit on the power of federal administrative agencies.”
Civic republicanism
Letters from an American, June 16, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, June 17, 2026
In Chicago, a case against six protesters for interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with a federal agent at a detention facility protest fell apart in May when the judge discovered that prosecutors had talked to individual grand jurors outside the courtroom and removed those jurors who refused to indict, as well as apparently overstating the strength of the evidence against the defendants. Then the prosecutors tried to hide evidence of their misconduct by redacting the transcripts from the grand jury.
As Julie Bosman of the New York Times reported, U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed the case against the “Broadview Six,” saying: “I have read hundreds—if not thousands—of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”
[TW: The Trump regime’s disdain for following legal norms, precedents, and procedures is a direct manifestation of the conservative mindset. Recall this harks back to Nixon and Reagan. It is why conservatives so easily support authoritarianism: the leaders are the fount of authority, not the government. “If the president does it, that means it’s legal.”]
And Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial is having the effect experts warned of. Because of the dark paint on the floor of the pool, the sun heats the water up even faster than it did before, and the resulting algae bloom has turned the pool bright green. Today, workers poured hydrogen peroxide into the pool to try to kill the algae.
[TW: The absurdity of the conservative mind is captured by the fable of an authoritarian king attempting to command the ocean tides. Here is Trump attempting to command the appearance of a basin of water.]
Alex Krainer, June 19, 2026
[TW: I peg Krainer as a libertarian attracted to conspiracy theories, but he often has good information. And arguments, as in this post.]
… Reframing the debate might start with the idea that healthcare ought to be a social obligation. This would be more consistent with human nature, because this is how we naturally approach illness and care for the ill. If someone in the family or in our community is unwell, we feel obligated to help. It’s a hardwired impulse, it does not require an accounting ledger, an economic theory, or a University medical ethics department.
People naturally go quite out of their way to help those in need. I believe we’ve all seen countless videos online where ordinary individuals risk their lives and wellbeing to rescue a child fallen down a well, a dog that fell through the ice in a river, or an elephant stuck in the mud. Nobody stops to ask how much that costs, whether the rescuee has the money or insurance to compensate us, or whether they have the human (or elephant) right to deserve our effort in helping them.
If this is the way people relate to one another in families and in communities, why shouldn’t this be the case at the national level? Why shouldn’t every nation treat healthcare as a social obligation? ….
Regular readers will know that for a couple years I’ve been saying that Chinese open source AI would win the AI “war” because it’s cheaper and non proprietary (prices can’t just be raised suddenly, or capacities taken away.)