Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 12, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War on voting
Christopher Armitage, July 05, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
… The court wins protect mostly the governments that sued. The June 25 injunction covers the 23 suing states and DC, and the administration told the courts this week that it is moving ahead with the system in the remaining states. Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate on June 24 that under the proposed rule the Postal Service would refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that do not send their voter lists to the federal government. A voter in Houston or Columbus gets nothing from the injunction, because that voter’s state government joined the federal programs instead of fighting them. One ruling reaches further: in a separate case brought by the NAACP, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan found the plan to deliver ballots only to preapproved voters broke a 2021 agreement with the Postal Service, and his ruling applies nationwide. That ruling protects ballot delivery. It does not touch the data collection, the purge agreements, or the state purge laws. So the court protection concentrates in states whose governments already refused to cooperate. In the cooperating states that hold the races deciding control of Congress, only the ballot delivery ruling applies.
The 60 million registration checks flagged about 24,000 possible noncitizens, and officials also flagged several hundred thousand registrations of people who may have died. Those totals only show how many people the government has flagged so far. It can flag as many as it chooses, and no one has to prove a flagged voter is ineligible before the registration is canceled; the voter has to prove they are eligible. That arrangement is a devastatingly powerful voter disenfranchisement tool.
In Texas, flagged voters got a letter, and if the county heard nothing within 30 days, the registration was canceled; some who did answer turned out to be citizens. A new Ohio law makes local election boards promptly cancel the registrations of people the secretary of state flags as noncitizens in checks he must run at least monthly. That secretary, Frank LaRose, defends the law on the ground that flagged voters can “immediately restore their registration status” by showing proof of citizenship.
The system also discourages people from registering at all, separate from the cancellations. A federal official confirmed that people flagged by SAVE are referred to DHS for possible criminal investigation, and the judge who reviewed the system wrote that a centralized federal database like this would discourage registration because citizens could fear misuse of their personal information. In races decided by hundreds or a few thousand votes, losing voters from only one side, and mostly from one party, can change the result even when the national numbers stay small….
Trump Is Revving Up His Vote-Suppression Tactics: A Video Roundup – Our mid-July collection of clips
[theunpopulist.net, July 11, 2026]
We’ve got a fantastic roundup of clips for you this week. First, video correspondent Landry Ayres reports on the FBI’s recent raid on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a group whose entire job is registering voters. More than 100 federal agents descended on five Ohio cities in a single day, in some cases without warrants, to chase down fraud allegations that Ohio’s own track record shows are almost never substantiated.
Next up is a clip from senior editor Andy Craig’s recent conversation with Boston University law professor Jed Shugerman on the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling—and the gap between what everyone expected and what the court delivered. (Their full conversation, which is full of really valuable insights and expertise, is here).
In our third clip, editor-in-chief Shikha Dalmia powerfully conveys, drawing on her experience as an immigrant in this country, what being an American means to her.
But wait, there’s more! We also have a bonus clip from an upcoming episode of The Reconstruction Agenda that you won’t want to miss. That’s right—tomorrow, Craig’s conversation with political scientist Lee Drutman drops. We give you a teaser of this excellent convo below….
‘A Pathetic Power Grab’: Trump Purges Bipartisan Election Assistance Commission
Jake Johnson, July 10, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
[Migrant Insider, via Naked Capitalism 07-08-2026]
ICE’s Internal Watchdog Is Now Investigating Online Critics
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 07-08-2026]
Judge to USDOT: Keep Funding Gateway!
David Peter Alan, July 6, 2026 [Railway Age]
We have been covering several battles concerning railroads lately here in Railway Age, and one of them is about funding for the Gateway Program, a series of projects on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (NEC) in New York City and nearby New Jersey. This time, POTUS 47, his appointed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and others at USDOT have been attempting to stop federal funds going to the Gateway Development Commission’s Hudson Tunnel project, and have faced Judge Jeannette A. Vargas, who has twice prevented them from defunding it. On Monday, June 29, she made her Feb. 6 injunction that stops USDOT from withholding the money permanent, at least for now….
Vargas summarized the case in the introduction to her 59-page Opinion document. She began by saying: “On Sept. 30, 2025, the United States Department of Transportation (‘DOT’) abruptly announced that it was suspending federal funding to the Gateway Development Commission (‘GDC’), a bi-state entity of New York and New Jersey, for a rail corridor initiative known as the Hudson Tunnel Project (the ‘September 30 Suspension’). The ostensible reason for the suspension of funds was to allow DOT to conduct a review of GDC’s compliance with federal nondiscrimination law. President Donald J. Trump, however, made contemporaneous statements indicating that he had personally made the decision to ‘terminate’ funding or the Project ‘because the Democrats are so foolish—what they’ve done to the country.’ Although DOT has never made any determination of GDC noncompliance with federal law, the funding freeze was still in place as of February 2026” ….
“83. But then, on October 15, President Trump openly declared that he had decided to “terminat[e]” the tunnel project in a brazen act of political retribution, stating: Russell Vought is really terminating tremendous numbers of Democrat projects. This is not only jobs, I mean the project in Manhattan, the project in New York. It’s billions and billions of dollars that Schumer has worked 20 years to get—it’s terminated.
“84. Two days later, the President reiterated his political motivations: [W]hat we’re doing is, we’re cutting Democrat programs that we didn’t want. . . . [W]e’re cutting them permanently. We’re cutting a $20 billion project that Schumer fought for 15 years to get, and I’m cutting the project. The project is gonna be dead. It is pretty much dead right now.
“85. And just a few days after that, the President declared: As of now, it’s terminated. . . . And that’s up to me. And as of now, it’s terminated. It’s terminated because the Democrats are so foolish—what they’ve done to the country. I mean, we have the hottest country in the world. There’s no country even close. And they just want to do this. There’s nothing for them to do. All they have to do is just say, ‘let everything continue.’ . . . Right now, there is no funding—because it’s up to me.”
Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, July 05, 2026]
A Kazakhstan minerals deal with a familiar conflict-of-interest aroma. The family-business presidency, chapter umpteen. An agreement between the U.S. and Kazakhstan has given a group of American investors with ties to the president and the commerce secretary access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten.
A Trumpworld Events Company Is Raking In Millions in Federal Contracts
[Wired, via The Big Picture, July 05, 2026]
The Trump administration has awarded Event Strategies several contracts—including one that could be worth up to $100 million—with little competition, according to federal filings. The team behind the January 6 rally now cashes government checks. Wired follows the money from the Ellipse to the federal ledger.
Strategic Political Economy
PWhy do countries need industrial policy?
[Global Currents, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2026]
[TW: Why do countries need industrial policy? Simple: so they can have industry. Ie, the ability to produce stuff. Otherwise you get headlines and stories like below.]
Almost $1 Billion Later, the US Still Can’t Make a Medical Glove
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2026]
Restoring balance to the economy
Global power shift
What does China’s submarine missile test mean for its nuclear triad expansion?
Amber Wangin and Gabriel Dominguez, 7 Jul 2026 [South China Morning Post]
China’s rare launch of a ballistic missile from a nuclear-powered submarine into the deep Pacific sent a strategic signal to the United States and regional neighbours, particularly Japan, amid concerns about Beijing’s military expansion….
The launch served as a public demonstration of the operational readiness of China’s sea-based nuclear deterrent – the most survivable leg of its nuclear forces and a cornerstone of its second-strike capability – as Beijing continues its drive to establish a fully operational nuclear triad spanning land, sea and air.It was China’s first known submarine-launched ballistic missile test since 1982….
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 07-08-2026]
[Military Watch Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 07-05-2026]
China has achieved a significant milestone in electric propulsion for satellites by successfully demonstrating a new 750-newton Hall-effect thruster, which completed a record-breaking orbital transfer mission and surpassed the performance of all comparable preceding systems. The engine powered Communications Technology Experiment Satellite 26A from its initial transfer orbit to geostationary orbit through five orbit-raising manoeuvres, firing for a cumulative 11,617 seconds (approximately 3.2 hours) during its maiden mission. The engine was developed after Chinese researchers were unable to obtain required technologies from abroad because of Western Bloc states’ export restrictions….
… Although these thrusters are primarily used for station keeping and orbit raising, higher-thrust electric propulsion expands what military spacecraft can do throughout their operational lives. One of the most important implications is faster deployment of military satellites. Conventional Hall-effect thrusters often require weeks or even months to raise a satellite from a transfer orbit into its final operational orbit because of their relatively low thrust. A substantially more powerful engine shortens this process, allowing reconnaissance, early warning, communications, and navigation satellites to become operational much sooner following launch. More powerful electric propulsion also enables the development of larger and heavier military satellites, and provides greater orbital manoeuvrability….
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
The Guardian: Israeli program identified 850,000 “real-time targets” in Lebanon and Gaza
[Drop Site Daily, July 7, 2026]
A presentation at a London military conference from Israel’s largest arms supplier, Elbit Systems, claimed that the Tzayad “digital army” system, designed by the company, flagged 850,000 real-time targets across Gaza and Lebanon between October 7, 2023, and the end of 2025, according to reporting from the Guardian on Monday.
-
One official noted that the figure could imply that the IDF had at one point marked up to half of Gaza’s 2.2 million people and 300,000 buildings for attacks, while another said that properly vetting 1,000 targets a day for civilian harm—the number touted by the company—would be impossible. “Even characterizing 50 a day is hard enough,” the official said.
What Happens ‘When the World Sleeps’ (w/ Francesca Albanese)
Chris Hedges, July 07, 2026.
United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese shares stories of the immense suffering in Palestine and laments the gutting of international law in her new book, “When the World Sleeps”.
Oligarchy
Why A U.S. Wealth Tax Is Needed
[Moon of Alabama, July 07, 2026
I find this more than disturbing:
- The average (mean) of wealth per adult in the U.S. (2025) is US$ 696,777.
- The median (half have more, half have less) of wealth per adult in the U.S. (2025) is US$ 68,998.
Interpretation: There are a small number of very, very rich people and a big mass of relatively poor ones.
This is not healthy.
The difference is, compared to other countries, extremely stark.
For France the numbers are 341,359 average to 121,898 median.
For the UK the numbers are 292,808 average to 125,335 median.Source: USB Global Wealth Report 2026 (pdf)
You’re obsessing over the wrong Peter Thiel conference
[How to Survive the Broligarchy, via Naked Capitalism 07-08-2026]
DIRTY FORTY: EPSTEIN’S BILLIONAIRE FRIENDS & ASSOCIATES ARE SULLYING AMERICAN ELECTIONS
[Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2026]
[Surviving Leviathan with Peter Gelderloo, via Naked Capitalism 07-06-2026]
Meet the Bodyguards Signing Up to Protect America’s Frightened Billionaires
[GQ, via The Big Picture, July 06, 2026]
After a season of high-profile assassinations, political violence, and kidnappings, wealthy Americans are racing to hire personal security services. GQ on the private-security boom catering to anxious tech and finance moguls. Genuine threat or vanity expense — the budget moves either way.
American mercenary firm expands with launch of ‘the largest shoot house on the East Coast’
[All-Source Intelligence, via Naked Capitalism 07-08-2026]
Felonomics
Trump appointees are overruling DOJ lawyers scrutinizing corporate mergers
Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian, July 9, 2026 [MSNow, via CommonDreams]
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is moving to scuttle lawsuits and investigations for a string of proposed corporate mergers, which experts fear could raise prices for consumers for years to come, according to three people briefed on the plans.
Trump administration appointees have overruled moves by career attorneys who had proposed suits or launched reviews to assess how the company mergers and acquisitions might lead to unfair price gouging for both consumers and taxpayers, according to the three people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal DOJ processes….
Nathan Tankus, 9 Jul 2026 [Notes on the Crises]
What is the vision of the second Trump administration? … I do think there is a method that lies behind the madness. At the core of that method is the specific way of understanding what markets are (and how they work) that we’ve been developing so far in this series. And the current core of that intellectual framework is AI—a term which has come to be used as a synonym for Large Language Models (LLMs)— which has rapidly become such a ubiquitous part of our society, so quickly. A set of newly charged information processing markets are also key to our new order. Thus, everything we analyzed in the past two parts finally gives us the intellectual tools to “see the vision” guiding the second Trump administration.
… an obvious starting point is the striking infiltration of prediction markets into everyday life. When you turn on CNN, their resident polling expert Henry Enten flaps his hands around looking through the latest polling. But he also does something else. He runs viewers through what political betting markets are saying about elections. The odds that market participants put on outcomes are treated as just as reliable, maybe even more reliable, than polling. This is remarkable for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is that political betting markets only became legal in the United States in 2024, right on the eve of the 2024 presidential election. According to the DC Federal Court of Appeals, derivative “event contracts” that “allow persons within the United States to place money on the outcome of the November 2024 congressional elections” do not “involving either gaming or gambling”.It’s worth pausing here to fully soak in the court’s reasoning that these “event contracts” are not “gaming” or “gambling”….
Investigation: Trump Administration’s War on Food Stamps
Bryce Covert, July 09, 2026 [The Nation]
…Republicans passed HR1 last July, or the One Big Beautiful Bill, entirely along party lines, enacting the largest cut to food stamps, also known as the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, in history. The legislation reduced SNAP by about $187 billion over the following decade.
The bill achieved that cut through a number of changes. It tightened the program’s existing work requirement by applying it to people up to age 65 and to parents with children 14 and older. It also narrowed exemptions for veterans, homeless people, and former foster youth, and barred undocumented immigrants. Starting next year, states will have to cover 75 percent of the program’s administrative costs, instead of the 50 percent they have been covering. If states are found to have high payment-error rates—meaning they underpaid or overpaid too many recipients—they’ll have to chip in even more to cover the actual SNAP benefits, too.
Since the bill was enacted, more than 4 million people have fallen off of SNAP’s rolls, a 10 percent decline. That includes more than 800,000 children—and that is only from the 13 states with available data….
The administration has a new climate change office. It’s headed by a climate critic.
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2026]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 07-05-2026]
David Weil, July 9, 2026 [The American Prospect]
… I served as the lead expert witness for the Massachusetts Attorney General Office in that suit, and my task was to explain the Uber and Lyft business model to the court—that is, the methods that the companies use to create sustainable profits.
To fulfill this task, I had access to evidence collected through discovery by the Massachusetts Attorney General over several years. For the many academics and governments that have attempted to get an accurate picture of working conditions in the gig economy over the years, this data is something of a holy grail: Most studies of gig worker income, hours, safety, and such are built on laboriously collected surveys. The companies themselves claim these data as proprietary trade secrets and guard closely against release into the public domain.
For the purposes of this article, I have not revealed anything beyond what was stated directly on the public record in my testimony during that trial, corroborated by findings of other recent studies. Many of my findings have more recently been corroborated by other academic studies and investigative reporting.
After reviewing the data, I came to a very clear conclusion: Drivers don’t have flexibility because they want it. They have it because it is the essential core of Uber’s and Lyft’s business model….
The system is particularly weighted against drivers, who are only paid once they are offered and then accept (within 15 seconds) a ride, receiving no compensation for the time when they are on the platform but not matched with a rider. The length of time that a driver waits in that uncompensated state is largely a function of how many other drivers are also on the platform and willing to be paid less. Since bringing another driver onto the road is essentially costless to the companies, the supply of drivers can be maintained at the minimum amount needed to fulfill current ride demand….
What Big Food Did to Ice Cream
[Medium, via The Big Picture, July 05, 2026]
The slow degradation of the supermarket pint, explained with real food science. Enshittification comes for dessert. The “encrapification” of the American pint — a chemist’s plain-language dissection.
[1945, via Naked Capitalism 07-05-2026]
Health care crisis
Ebola outbreak is ‘fastest growing ever’ as 600 die
[AFP, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2026]
Private equity’s joint venture takeover of nonprofit healthcare
[Private Equity Stakeholder Project, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2026]
Why American ambulance rides are so expensive
David Oks [via Naked Capitalism 07-11-2026]
Predatory finance
Fletcher Calcagno and Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, July 8, 2026 [The American Prospect]
… Perpetual futures contracts—often called “perps” for short—have no end date. As a result, they never require one side to hand over the commodity in question; instead, money is made by correctly betting on whether the price of the commodity will increase or decrease. Since 2016, when they were first introduced on the scandal-ridden BitMEX crypto exchange, perps have become one of the primary ways that traders extract profit out of the crypto industry. They eliminate the need to actually own crypto, so anyone can indulge in the get-rich-quick culture of digital assets. They also offer 24/7 trading cycles, allowing users to constantly monitor the prices of their ever-so-volatile assets. As a result, global daily trading volume of crypto perps is in the billions of dollars, often far exceeding the amount of actual cryptocurrency that changes hands. Until recently, perpetual futures existed in legal limbo on offshore exchanges, but President Trump’s CFTC has been working to change that….
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
About Those High Egg Prices (The Washington Monthly Was Right)
[Washington Monthly, via The Big Picture, July 08, 2026]
Much of the press believed The 2022-25 spike in egg prices was mere supply and demand. Now that the industry has settled with DOJ and state AGs, our suspicions proved warranted. that dominant egg corporations may be manipulating a price index tied to most commercial egg contracts. On Monday, the Department of Justice and a group of bipartisan state attorneys general agreed. They concluded a months-long investigation into companies like Cal-Maine, alleging that these corporations colluded to exploit the bird flu crisis and drive up egg prices, cheating consumers. Cal-Maine, Hickman’s Egg Ranch, and Versova will donate 53 million eggs to food banks and pay up to $3.3 million to state attorneys general.
New Mexico AG accuses DOJ of obstructing Epstein investigation
[New York Times, via Drop Site Daily, July 10, 2026]
Raúl Torrez accused the Justice Department of obstructing the state’s criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s activities at his Zorro Ranch property by withholding unredacted records despite six requests since February, according to a letter reported by the New York Times.
Torrez said the withheld records, which contain names of survivors, witnesses and co-conspirators, are needed for the state’s investigation, warning “every day that the U.S.D.O.J. withholds these records, the foundation upon which a New Mexico prosecution could be built erodes.”
The Amazon is not just under environmental assault. It’s also increasingly under criminal control
[Globe and Mail, via Naked Capitalism 07-07-2026]
How a Master of Deception Conned Investors Out of $50 Million—in His Own Words
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, July 05, 2026]
Paul Regan recorded himself ripping off clients to teach others how to do it, too. A fraudster narrates his own scheme. First-person grift is uncomfortably compelling — and instructive. Those tapes reveal the inner workings of a fraud.
Disrupting mainstream economics
Steve Keen, July 10, 2026 [Building a New Economics]
I take the Government Accountability Office report warning Congress of an imminent debt crisis and systematically dismantle it. Using double-entry bookkeeping and live simulations, I show that government deficits don’t “crowd out” the private sector, they create money. The real threat isn’t the $39.4 trillion national debt. It’s the much higher level of private debt sitting on household and corporate balance sheets, crushing the velocity of money, and dragging GDP down with it. This is the argument the mainstream doesn’t want you to hear, because they don’t understand it themselves.
Richard Murphy, July 10 2026 [Funding the Future]
This quote comes from Prof Jamie Galbraith’s March 2010 article ‘In defence of deficits‘. The original is here. I learned of it via William Thomson’s Substack.
“To put things crudely, there are two ways to get the increase in total spending that we call “economic growth.” One way is for government to spend. The other is for banks to lend. Leaving aside short-term adjustments like increased net exports or financial innovation, that’s basically all there is. Governments and banks are the two entities with the power to create something from nothing. If total spending power is to grow, one or the other of these two great financial motors–public deficits or private loans–has to be in action.
“For ordinary people, public budget deficits, despite their bad reputation, are much better than private loans. Deficits put money in private pockets. Private households get more cash. They own that cash free and clear, and they can spend it as they like. If they wish, they can also convert it into interest-earning government bonds or they can repay their debts. This is called an increase in “net financial wealth.” Ordinary people benefit, but there is nothing in it for banks.
“And this, in the simplest terms, explains the deficit phobia of Wall Street, the corporate media and the right-wing economists. Bankers don’t like budget deficits because they compete with bank loans as a source of growth. When a bank makes a loan, cash balances in private hands also go up. But now the cash is not owned free and clear. There is a contractual obligation to pay interest and to repay principal. If the enterprise defaults, there may be an asset left over – a house or factory or company – that will then become the property of the bank. It’s easy to see why bankers love private credit but hate public deficits.”
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
“Rights for robots” and the AI slavery fantasy
Cory Doctorow, July 10, 2026 [Pluralistic]
AI dangles the possibility of a world without ego-shattering confrontations between bosses who tell themselves they’re in charge, and the workers who know how to do things and insist on telling bosses that their ideas are dangerous, illegal and/or unworkable:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism
A world without people might be lonely, but it sure would be convenient. How maddening it must be to invest billions in Amazon warehouse automation, only to have to slow down or (gasp!) stop the machines so that the workers who serve as “humans in the loop” can stop to pee! Isn’t there some way we can make that their problem, not ours?
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove
With AI, the fact that you need to pee – or get paid – does become your problem, rather than your boss’s. After the majority of your colleagues have been fired (“because AI will do their jobs”), you become painfully aware that there are plenty of people who need your job, who will happily step in to take it if you complain too much about your bladder or your paycheck.
Even better is when the “human in the loop” can be outsourced to a company overseas, which allows bosses to simply set-and-forget a set of requirements for how the human part of the AI’s labor is to be done without ever having to meet or even think about those workers’ conditions. This is the illusion of full automation, in which the AI does the job “like magic.”
Who Are the Biggest AI Villains? An Industry Watchdog Has Made a List
Brad Reed, July 09, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The Revolving Door Project on Thursday launched a webpage that tracks the actions of major players in the AI industry and their ties to President Donald Trump’s administration.
AI Is Turbocharging Bosses’ Efforts to Spy on Their Workers
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2026]
The Great AI Repricing Isn’t Going Well
David Dayen, July 08, 2026 [The American Prospect]
…Companies that previously told workers to use AI in every facet of their job are now seeing how that affects the bottom line. One unnamed company reportedly spent half a billion dollars on Claude in a single month. Part of this is because AI is being used on mundane tasks like making PowerPoint presentations to “prove” rapid take-up of the technology, something highly prized on Wall Street.
Now, though, we’re seeing the snapback. Companies like Uber and Tesla and Meta and Microsoft are capping worker token usage. (For Tesla, Elon Musk’s in-house product, Grok, is exempted from the cap.) Palantir CEO Alex Karp said bluntly earlier this month that “something has gone completely wrong” with the billing model….
How do you solve a problem like social media?
Chaminda Jayanetti [via The Big Picture, July 11, 2026]
Part I It’s all well and good saying we should regulate social media. But social media is already regulated. So why is it failing? And what could we do in response? The first installment of a serious policy analysis of what regulation would actually look like—beyond the usual hand-wringing and congressional hearings that go nowhere.
At 17, She Sued Meta and Google, and Won. Now She’s Ready to Tell Her Story
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture, July 11, 2026]
Kaley Glenn-Mills’ lawsuit reshaped the fight to protect children from social media. She says she still can’t stop scrolling.
How and why to de-Google your life
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 07-06-2026]
Collapse of independent news media
Trump’s crazed lies about ‘communists’ demand media debunking
Dan Froomkin, July 7, 2026 [Press Watch]
Donald Trump’s latest Big Lie is that Democrats are godless communists who want to destroy the country. They are animals, thieves, and lunatics who want to kill Christians, he says. They pose the greatest threat to our country since its founding and must be rooted out like cancer and sent into exile.
I am not making this up.
But rather than debunk Trump’s wildly dishonest, unhinged, and inflammatory new rhetoric, our major news organizations have responded largely with mild stenography – effectively amplifying his lies.
When they should be definitively stating that Trump is wrong, and that Democrats are not actually godless communists, they instead sanewash Trump’s calumnies by casting the victory of a handful of pragmatic and pugnacious democratic socialists as the Democratic party’s dangerous lurch to the left.
And perhaps worst of all, instead of questioning Trump’s mental status and depravity, they focus their attention on whether his new line of attack is an effective political tactic and they ponder how it will play in the midterms….
The Iran War’s Most Embarrassingly Wrong Pundits
Branko Marceti, July 09, 2026 [Jacobin, via Moon of Alabama]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Cory Doctorow, July 09, 2026 [Pluralistic]
There’s plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan “political polarization” and call for a politics that abandons the “tribalism of left and right.”
Obviously there’s the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza….
The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as “tribalism” doesn’t know what “left” and “right” mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers – pronouns, MMA, brands of beer – for politics.
Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism’s most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you’ll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn’t the identities of the ruling class – it’s whether we have a ruling class at all….
But when it comes to a “post-politics that is neither right nor left,” the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:
“Left” and “right” have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, “What is more important: human rights or property rights?” If they say “Property rights are a human right,” then they are on the right.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#ppp
That’s it. That’s the crux….
If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering:
https://sos.mn.gov/media/3k4hu2if/minnesota-election-laws-statutes-and-rules.pdf
If you believe property rights are human rights, then you end up supporting unlimited dark money spending in elections:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-621_h315.pdf ….
“Post-political” movements are made up of people who don’t know what politics are. A “centrist” is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy (“property is a human right” means that it’s a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a lucky orifice). It’s the ideology that breeds oligarchy.
Notes for Next Time – Lessons of a lifetime doing progressive journalism and politics
Robert Kuttner, July 10, 2026 [The American Prospect]
… One of my chapters, and a key theme of the book, is called “Winning the Arguments, Losing the Politics.” The neoliberals who contended that the mix of deregulation, privatization, and corporate globalization would energize the economy were dead wrong about the economics.
That recipe actually produced slightly slower growth and much greater disparities of wealth and income than in the postwar decades, when prosperity was broadly shared. But the neoliberal formula succeeded in redistributing power as well as wealth—upward….
You can have the best ideas in the world, but unless they are married to a viable politics, the other side keeps the power.
When I was born, the legacy of FDR’s New Deal produced a stunningly egalitarian society, better than anything before or since. As my memoir recounts, you could buy a house without help from affluent parents, go to college without incurring crippling debt, look forward to a secure career. Factory workers, not just professionals, could be part of the middle class.
None of this was a lucky accident. It was the result of a deliberate politics that shifted power, security, and opportunity. That package is gone. Even if democracy survives Trump, we will need transformative policies to get it back, and a politics to match….
Corporate Dems Are Weaponizing Graham Platner’s Demise
Matt Stoller, July 8, 2026 [The Lever]
Democratic powerbrokers are now positioned to use the Maine Senate candidate’s withdrawal to overturn voters’ policy demands.
It’s clear something messed up happened in Graham Platner’s relationships, and he hasn’t hidden that. But let’s be adults. This is a political attack.
Notable Maine Democratic Party donors in recent years include Reid Hoffman, Haim Saban, and David Ellison. David Ellison! As in the Trump ally who fired Stephen Colbert and is taking over TikTok, CBS News, and CNN. These names should mean something. Saban may be the single most important AIPAC donor in the Democratic Party.
Another big donor to the Maine Democratic Party is the founder of Zynga, Mark Pincus, who said in 2024 that “When you attack Amazon, you’re attacking America.” It goes beyond big tech and Wall Street. Crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried’s partner Nishad Singh at FTX gave $100,000 to the Maine Democratic Party in 2022.
The insiders running the party are the people funded through these streams of revenue. They are the ones dealing with the donors and currying favor with them. And while I will not speak out of school, the Maine Democratic establishment simply cannot be trusted and that is well-known….
Economic Hit Men for Gambling Apps
Max Moran, July 7, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Former solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar is writing justifications for prediction market gambling apps, joining several Biden administration colleagues defending the industry.
[TW: It should be clear that the negative social effects of gambling makes gaming on obstacle to promoting the General Welfare. So then, how to deal with it? Simply outlawing it probably won’t work – just like prohibition did not work to end alcoholism. At the very least, there must be a strong social stigma attached to anyone who promotes gaming. I do not think it coincidence that the authoritarian war mongers Trump and Netanhayu both have strong ties to gaming, including the rancid largess of the Adelson casinos. By their fruit ye shall know them, indeed.]
Like “combining alcohol and cocaine”: Meta plans to add gambling to its addictive platforms
[Oligarch Watch, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2026]
Resistance
First Wrongful Death Climate Case Against Big Oil Wins Major Rulings, Moves Toward Trial
[Center for Climate Integrity, July, 09 2026, via CommonDreams]
The first-ever U.S. lawsuit seeking to hold Big Oil companies accountable for the death of a family member in a climate disaster will proceed toward discovery and trial after a Washington State court rejected the companies’ joint motions to dismiss and strike the case. The court found that the claims in this first-of-its-kind case are not blocked by federal law because they are “not about regulating emissions,” as the oil companies argued.
Misti Leon sued ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell, and other oil and gas companies for fueling the extreme heat that killed her mother, Julie Leon, on the hottest day in Washington State history during the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome. Scientists found that the event would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change….
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 07-05-2026]
We Are Officially Beginning the Process to Convene Grand Juries Over DOGE.
Christopher Armitage, July 05, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Six states allow citizens to convene grand juries via petition. Every official with the authority to act was asked. None acted. Time to grab a clipboard.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The only bias uncovered in the White House’s Smithsonian report is its own
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture, July 10, 2026]
A White House report radical bias at the National Museum of American History. But the assembled evidence reveals a large and vibrant institution carrying out its mission. A pointed WaPo column: the only bias uncovered in the White House’s Smithsonian report is its own.
Christopher Mathias, 07.07.26 [Talking Points Memo]
No Eulogy – What the Tributes Will Not Say
Mike Brock, July 12, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
… On June 21, three weeks before he died, Graham sat across from Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation after a four-and-a-half-hour meeting with the President. He granted diplomacy its fig leaf. “Let’s try a diplomatic solution,” he said. “I think it’s going to fail.” Then came the message dressed as a forecast: “I spent four-and-a-half hours with President Trump, Friday. Here’s what I think will happen next.” If the memorandum of understanding with Tehran collapsed, Graham predicted, “President Trump is going to take the Strait of Hormuz over by force. The United States will control the Strait of Hormuz. We’ll charge a fee for all those who go through to pay for the operation.” And then, in the sentence that will follow his name in the archives, he said what would happen if Iran resisted this seizure of its own maritime border: “If Iran contests control of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States, we will obliterate them.”
Obliterate. A nation of ninety million people, discussed on Sunday morning television in the register of a man previewing a real estate transaction. Graham’s forecast performed the courtier’s signature function. He emerged from the principal’s rooms to predict, with evident authority, what the principal would do, delivering the threat while preserving the deniability. His place in the ecology of this administration was to translate the President’s belligerence into a form that could pass through the Senate without requiring the Senate to think about what it was passing….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Supreme Court is corrupting American democracy
Henry Farrell, July 06, 2026 [Programmable Mutter]
… what is useful about Mark’s approach is that it shows how apparently quite different lines of Supreme Court jurisprudence are mutually reinforcing. Across various dimensions, they systematically corrupt the democratic process.
Consider, for example, the line of jurisprudence that has culminated in last week’s decision to overturn limits on the amounts that political parties can spend in direct coordination with candidates. The practical consequence of this is to undermine limits on campaign contributions. In his opinion for the majority, Kavanaugh claims that:
- under the Supreme Court’s current campaign finance cases, the only rationale for campaign-finance restrictions is to prevent “quid pro quo” corruption – that is, “contributions in exchange for official action.” … there are other measures in place to prevent such circumvention that do not restrict speech in the same way that the coordinated-expenditure limits do, Kavanaugh emphasized: the base limits on contributions, federal laws that treat “earmarked” contributions as contributions to a candidate, and federal disclosure laws. … most states do not impose these kinds of coordinated-expenditure limits in their elections, but “‘no evidence of corruption’ via circumvention ‘has materialized.’ … Kagan argued in her dissenting opinion that the court’s ruling “ushers in the same opportunities for quid pro quo corruption that the contribution limits were meant to check.”
Properly understanding the relationship between democracy and corruption means that we should not just be worried about direct “quid pro quo” corruption. Allowing those who can afford it to make very large contributions undermines people’s equal opportunity to participate in collective decision making as well as their collective voice. It means that very rich people and organizations will have much greater say in politics than poor, middle class, or even moderately rich ones. Already, 300 billionaires and their close family members were responsible for nearly 20% of campaign contributions in 2024.
Consider too, the 2024 decision that US presidents enjoy “absolute immunity for actions that relate to “core” or “exclusive” presidential powers, [and] at least presumptive immunity for all other “official acts.” This decision has clearly empowered the current president to enrich himself in a staggeringly corrupt fashion, without any plausible means of judicial redress….
Civic republicanism
Justice Jackson BLASTS Clarence Thomas for SHOCKING DISSENT!!! (YouTube Video)
[Court of History, YouTube, July 06, 2026]
Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz speak with David Blight, Yale historian and Plitzer Prize winning author of “Frederick Douglass,” on Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s sharp refuation of Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in the birthright citizenship case.
Justice Jacskon’s Concurring Opinion in SC 25-365 Trump v. Barbara (06/30/2026) (pdf)
Spencer Norris, July 9, 2026 [New York Focus and propublica.org]
The state constitution makes an unusual promise to residents: to provide care and support for the needy. But a recent lawsuit accuses it of failing to meet that mandate by putting low-income households on the brink of homelessness.
Mike Brock, July 05, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
… The project has a history. The history is not a mystery. The history is fully documented and has been for decades.
The unitary executive theory as it exists today — the doctrine that all executive power is vested in a single president who must therefore command every officer exercising executive authority, that independent agencies with for-cause removal protections are constitutional impositions on Article II, that the administrative state as it developed from 1887 forward is a century-long usurpation Congress must be forced to unwind — is not the constitutional understanding of the Founders. It is not the constitutional understanding of the nineteenth century. It is not the constitutional understanding of the first two-thirds of the twentieth. It is a doctrine constructed in the last four decades of the twentieth century by lawyers working inside a legal-movement infrastructure funded by particular donors for particular purposes.
The infrastructure has a name. Its founding document is the 1971 Powell Memorandum, written by Lewis Powell — later a Supreme Court Justice — for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, calling on American business to build a permanent counter-institutional apparatus in response to what Powell described as an ideological assault on the free enterprise system. The apparatus Powell called for was built. Its financial backbone was constructed in the following decade by the Olin Foundation, the Scaife foundations, the Bradley Foundation, and the Koch network — donor structures whose wealth derived, in every principal case, from extractive and heavy industry, and whose interest in the administrative state was the interest of every regulated industry in the regulator’s disempowerment.
The institutional expression of the apparatus, on the legal side, was the Federalist Society, founded at Yale, Chicago, and Harvard in 1982 with seed money from those foundations. The Federalist Society did not invent originalism, which existed as an academic tendency, and did not invent the unitary executive theory, which existed as a fringe view. It industrialized both. It funded chairs, hosted conferences, credentialed clerks, ran the pipeline that fed the federal bench for forty years, and by the first Trump administration effectively vetted the Supreme Court short list — the three Trump appointees to the Court all came from Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society list. The doctrines it promoted did not become the law of the land because they won a fair fight in the marketplace of legal ideas. They became the law of the land because the pipeline was built and staffed and funded to make them the law of the land….
The purpose of the project is not, and has never been, constitutional or historical fidelity. The plausible-sounding arguments about Article II, about the Vesting Clause, about the meaning of executive Power, about the founding generation’s supposed hostility to independent commissions — these are the arguments. The purpose is elsewhere. The purpose is to render the modern professional administrative state — upon which our modern economy and life depend — untenable within the constitutional framework as reinterpreted by the pipeline, and thus to see a complete end to the New Deal-era settlement on the role of the federal government. That is the goal. That has always been the goal. Everything else is the vestment worn over the goal.
The New Deal settlement, roughly, is this. Between 1887 and 1938, the country built a set of specialized administrative bodies — the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Communications Commission, the Food and Drug Administration in its modern form — designed to regulate technically complex industries with expertise Congress does not possess and cannot assemble. The design was bipartisan. The design was ratified by the country repeatedly at the ballot box. The design was upheld, for ninety years, by a Supreme Court that recognized Humphrey’s Executor in 1935 as the constitutional accommodation without which the modern regulatory state cannot function. The design is what makes it possible for you to trust that the pill in the bottle is the pill on the label, that the elevator in the building has been inspected, that the airplane in the sky has been maintained, that the money in the bank is insured, that the food in the grocery store is not poison, and that the water in the tap is not lead. This is not a philosophical claim. This is a description of how the country actually runs.
The doctrine currently marching under the unitary executive banner is a plan to dismantle that design by making it constitutionally impermissible. Not by convincing the country to repeal it. Not by winning legislative majorities and passing statutes to shrink it. By ruling, from the bench, that the design was unconstitutional all along, that the country was mistaken about its own founding for ninety years, that Humphrey’s Executor was a mistake now corrected, that the independent commissions Congress built to run a modern economy were never constitutional to begin with, and that the president must now command every one of them — or Congress must recover its non-delegable functions by supermajority, which it cannot, which is the point. The doctrine looks like a fight about executive power. It is a fight about whether the modern regulatory state can continue to exist. The doctrine’s real target is not the president’s control over the FTC. The doctrine’s real target is the FTC….
Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?
Carlyn Beccia [via Naked Capitalism 07-07-2026]
[TW: An important article. Don’t be misled by the crude headline]
… Here’s the good news, and I’m as surprised as you are that there is any: America has stood at this line before. Not near it. At it.
By the early twentieth century, the top 1 percent owned roughly half the nation’s wealth — a concentration we would not see again until, awkwardly…now. Senators were chosen by state legislatures, and the trusts bought the legislatures, which is why the Senate was openly nicknamed the Millionaires’ Club.
Political violence wasn’t rhetorical; it was a body count. The Haymarket bombing in 1886. The Homestead strike in 1892, where Andrew Carnegie’s man Henry Clay Frick sent an armed Pinkerton barge against his own workers and left about ten men dead. The Pullman strike, crushed by federal troops, in 1894….
Then something happened that isn’t supposed to happen, and I want to be precise about what it was — because the story you know is wrong in a way that matters.
The story you know stars the trust-busters: Teddy Roosevelt swinging the big stick, Standard Oil broken up in 1911, the reform laws stacking up — direct election of senators, food and drug regulation, the eight-hour day, and eventually Social Security. All true. All late. The legislation was the lagging indicator, the fever breaking after the immune system had already been fighting for twenty years.
The actual first movers were, and I cannot stress this enough, nobodies.
Between roughly 1870 and 1920, Americans went on the greatest civic-joining spree in the country’s history — Putnam’s data show more enduring civic organizations founded in those decades than in any comparable period before or since. Unions, granges, fraternal lodges, women’s clubs, settlement houses, mutual aid societies, congregations, the PTA. Millions of people who had every reason to conclude that honesty was for suckers instead went out and found the other cooperators.
They weren’t being noble. They were being practical: alone, each of them was lunch. Together, they were a market where decency broke even.
And then the clusters grew teeth. Ida Tarbell — whose father had been ruined by Rockefeller’s schemes, so this was personal — spent years in the archives and published a nineteen-part dissection of Standard Oil in McClure’s that turned the most powerful corporation on earth into a public villain.
Upton Sinclair wrote a novel about immigrant meatpackers so revolting that food safety laws were passed within months. He aimed for the public’s heart, he said, and hit its stomach.
A young woman named Frances Perkins was having tea in Greenwich Village in 1911 when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory caught fire across the square. She stood on the sidewalk and watched workers jump because the exit doors were locked. She spent the rest of her life converting that afternoon into policy, and twenty-four years later, as the first woman in a presidential cabinet, she drafted Social Security.
Note what did not happen. Rockefeller never repented; he died holding the largest fortune that any citizen had ever amassed — a record that stood for 109 years until this June, when an immigrant from South Africa surpassed him. Frick died hated and rich, in that order.
The parasites were not reformed, redeemed, or converted. They were outlasted — by a host that rebuilt its own immune system beneath them until the environment stopped rewarding their behavior.
That is the only mechanism, in three thousand years of receipts, that has ever moved a society back across the line. Not a savior. Not a purge. Not, I’m sorry to report, an election….
.
