Author: Tony Wikrent Page 3 of 49

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 15, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Why The Epstein Scandal Is Really A Billionaire Scandal – Barry’s Economics (YouTube)

Barry Ferns, Feb 8, 2026 [YouTube]

Everyone thinks Jeffrey Epstein was an aberration. The science says he was inevitable. This video breaks down the neuroscience, psychology, and economics that explain how extreme wealth concentration doesn’t just create inequality. but manufactures monsters.

00:00 – Introduction: The Elephant in the Room

02:04 – Part One: Power Rewires the Brain

03:30 – Part Two: The Empathy Gap and Isolation

05:19 – Part Three: Moral Licensing

08:13 – Part Four: Structural Impunity

10:50 – Part Five: Manufacturing Vulnerability

12.54 – Part Six: The Epstein Economy

15:53 – Stand-up Comedy Relief

The Epstein class and collapse porn 

Cory Doctorow, 09 Feb 2026 [Pluralistic]

… The latest batch of Epstein emails includes a particularly ghoulish exchange between Epstein and his business partner, the anti-democracy activist and billionaire Peter Thiel:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00824843.pdf

The email is dated 26 Jun 2016, right after Brexit, and in it, Epstein writes:

• “… return to tribalism . counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain….”

This is a perfect example of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.” It’s been the norm since the crash of 2008, when bankers were made whole through public bailouts and mortgage holders were evicted by the millions to “foam the runway” for the banks:

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2012/08/how-treasury-secretary-geithner-foamed-the-runways-with-childrens-shattered-lives/

The crash of 2008 turned a lot of people’s homes – their only substantial possessions – into “distressed assets” that were purchased at fire-sale prices by Wall Street investors, who turned around and rented those homes out to people who were now priced out of the housing market at rents that kept them too poor to ever afford a home, under slum conditions that crawled with insects and black mold:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/

Note here that economic collapse helps the Epstein class only if society has no social safety net. If Obama had supported homeowners instead of banks, there wouldn’t have been a foreclosure crisis and thus there wouldn’t have been any “distressed assets” flooding the market.

So it’s no surprise that the Epstein class are also obsessed with austerity. Peter Mandelson (British Labour’s “Prince of Darkness”) is a close ally of Epstein’s, and also a key figure in the crushing austerity agenda of Blair, Brown and Starmer. He’s a machine for turning Parliamentary majorities into distressed assets at scale….

The thousand-plus children that Epstein lured to his island rape-camp were often “distressed assets” in their own right: Julie K Brown’s groundbreaking reporting on Epstein for the Miami Herald described how he sought out children whose parents were poor, or neglectful, or both, on the grounds that those children would be “on their way to collapse,” too.

The Epstein class’s commitment to destroying “The Economy” makes sense when you understand that trashing civilization is “much easier than finding the next bargain.” They want to buy the dip, so they’re creating the dip.

They don’t need the whole number to go up, just theirs. They know that inclusive economies are more prosperous for society as a whole, but it makes criminals and predators worse off. The New Deal kicked off a period of American economic growth never seen before or since, but the rich despised it, because a prosperous economy is one in which it gets harder and harder to find “things on their way to collapse,” and thus nearly impossible to “find[] the next bargain.”

[TW: On October 30, 2025 Patriotic Millionaires posted a summary of modern studies which prove the corrupting power of wealth. But the problem of the psycho-pathology of the rich has been known for centuries:

[“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” is repeated three times in the New Testament, in Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25.

[In The Spirit of Laws, Book 5. Chapter 5, ”In what Manner the Laws establish Equality in a Democracy,” Montesquieu warned for “men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury.…” ]

Why Do the Epstein Files Matter? An Expert on the Elites Explains Why

Mehdi Hasan and Team Zeteo, Feb 05, 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2025]

In this can’t-miss ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’ interview, the Financial Times’ US editor and veteran columnist Edward Luce takes Mehdi on a deep dive into what it all means, and the who’s-who of those that appeared in the files, from Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Howard Lutnick, to Elon Musk, Noam Chomsky, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak….

During the wide-ranging interview, the Mehdi and Luce also discuss:

• The world leader that could be brought down by the latest release of the Epstein files (hint: it’s not Trump!)
• Epstein’s deep involvement with Israeli and Russian intelligence services
• Why Joe Biden and then-Attorney General Merrick Garland didn’t do anything with these incriminating Epstein files when they were in office….

“It’s an MRI of how things work in a culture where shame has vanished,” Luce tells Mehdi.

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]

Trump not violating any law

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

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

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

The Crime of Witness

Fintan O’Toole, February 26, 2026 issue [The New York Review]

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence….

Watchfulness is the most dangerous form of resistance because it obstructs the Trump regime’s project of habituation. Fascism works by making the extreme normal. Habit, as Samuel Beckett has it, is a great deadener. It has been obvious since the start of Trump’s second term that he is trying to make the sight of armed and masked men with virtually unlimited powers one to which Americans are accustomed.

First by dispatching National Guard troops to Los Angeles and other cities, then by sending ICE contingents to Washington, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, Brownsville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis, the regime is redefining not just legal and political norms but normalcy itself. It is making the threat of arbitrary state violence routine, stitching it into the fabric of daily urban life. The hope is that most Americans can be schooled to go about their mundane preoccupations even while they are being visibly occupied….

This procedure of habituation is also a process of escalation. Authoritarian takeover in a long-established democracy must be gradual. And the gradations are primarily moral. The populace must be desensitized. People must get used to images of little children being kidnapped by unidentified masked agents. They must become acclimated to young women being grabbed and hustled into unmarked vans by faceless men; they must learn not to acknowledge abduction.

They must become familiar with official disappearances—an idea once confined to the outer darkness beyond the southern border but now fully domesticated. They must get used to killing—first to the out-of-the-way obscure deaths of migrants: thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, often because of the authorities’ refusal to treat acute medical conditions. And then they must get used to the public, open, and flagrant killings of American citizens. In this logic of escalation, a cold-blooded summary execution is not an accident. It is a climax….

How Germany Went from Street Protest to Silence

Sharon Kyle, Jan 30, 2026 [LA Progressive]

The Step‑by‑Step Collapse of Moral Resistance. In 1930, Germans still filled the streets. By 1938, open opposition had vanished.

Classified Whistleblower Complaint About Tulsi Gabbard Stalls Within Her Agency

Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber, Feb. 2, 2026 [Wall Street Journal, via Letters from an American]

…A U.S. intelligence official has alleged wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a whistleblower complaint that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter.

The filing of the complaint has prompted a continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle about how to assess and handle it, with the whistleblower’s lawyer accusing Gabbard of stonewalling the complaint…..

A cloak-and-dagger mystery reminiscent of a John le Carré novel is swirling around the complaint, which is said to be locked in a safe. Disclosure of its contents could cause “grave damage to national security,” one official said. It also implicates another federal agency beyond Gabbard’s, and raises potential claims of executive privilege that may involve the White House, officials said.

The complaint was filed last May with the intelligence community’s inspector general, according to a November letter that the whistleblower’s lawyer addressed to Gabbard. The letter, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, accused Gabbard’s office of hindering the dissemination of the complaint to lawmakers by failing to provide necessary security guidance on how to do so….

…Wyden is a longstanding member of the Senate intelligence committee. He takes seriously its responsibilities to stop the intelligence agencies from using their operational secrecy to break the law, violate peoples’ privacy – or worse – and enmesh the country in dangerous misadventures both foreign and domestic….

Interviewing Wyden is a maddening mixture of candor and obstinacy. He has a security clearance to lawfully access classified information. The reporter interviewing him does not. He wants to tell you what he found, but that would break the law and get him, at a minimum, thrown off the committee. You as the reporter are trying to absorb what little Wyden is telling you. You are primarily attentive to the vastness of what he leaves unsaid. You try to improvise clever ways to ask, and reask, questions that might clarify what he means, and/or yield leads for other ways to investigate it. Usually Wyden says he can’t answer those, either….

All I can tell you is that Wyden’s record of warning that there is deep and constitutionally-serious dirt being done by the intelligence agencies in secret is unblemished. Never once in the many years I have been reporting on Wyden have I ever encountered a warning of his to be hyperbolic, let alone baseless….

Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon 

[WaPo, via Naked Capitalism 02-05-2025]

BREAKING: DOJ Empowers Board of Immigration Appeals to Strip Due Process From Migrants 

[Migrant Insider, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]

The Paramilitary ICE and CBP Units at the Center of Minnesota’s Killings 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]

In ICE’s War, the Public Is Winning — Feds stockpile 35,000 munitions in Minneapolis – but suddenly withdraw

Ken Klippenstein, Feb 04, 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]

Gregory Bovino reported to Corey Lewandowski, not CBP chief

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]

Christopher Webb

@cwebbonline

Wait! The public face of nationwide immigration enforcement, Gregory Bovino, said in a newly discovered email that his boss wasn’t the head of CBP. He reported to Corey Lewandowski instead.

Emails reveal possible command structure for immigration Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago

Mark Rivera and Barb Markoff, Christine Tressel and Tom Jones, February 4, 2026 [abc7chicago.com WLS]

Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said his boss was not the head of CBP, emails newly obtained by ABC News show.

Accountability for ICE and CBP

Garrett Graff, February 01, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario]

On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s “Illinois Accountability Commission,” the state government body he set up after the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we’re experiencing now. The body’s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward.

I was called as the commission’s expert witness on the history of problems, corruption, and training within CBP and ICE — a story I’ve covered for more than a dozen years, as regular readers of this newsletter know. To prepare, I spent the last week re-reading and re-familiarizing myself with DHS scandals and waves of corruption and mismanagement — and found myself horrified anew.

It was the first time I’ve ever sat down and tried to organize and explain all of the last twenty-five years of DHS and immigration enforcement since 9/11 and painted a complete picture of what’s gone wrong with ICE and CBP. Overall, the totality of the criminality inside CBP in particular is so much worse than I even realized….

ICE’s Private Prison Contractors Spent Millions Lobbying to Force Banks to Give Them Loans

Biplob Kumar Das, February 5 2026 [The Intercept]

Some of the largest banks in the nation for years have eschewed the business of private prison giants like GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two firms that operate more than half the private carceral facilities in the country, including many U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.

The moves to “debank” the companies, which have been dogged by reports of rights abuses, came after the banks’ reviews of their environmental, social, and governance policies, which included site visits and meeting with civil rights leaders. According to a nonprofit report, the moves by banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, cost the prison companies billions in potential financing.

This 3-page court opinion releasing Liam Ramos is one of the best ever written!

Dean Obeidallah, Feb 02, 2026

Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon

John Woodrow Cox, February 3, 2026 [Washington Post]

In October, a retiree emailed a DHS attorney to urge mercy for an asylum seeker. Then DHS subpoenaed his Google account and sent investigators to his home….

“Unconscionable,” Jon thought as he found an email address online for the lead prosecutor, Joseph Dernbach, who was named in the story. Peering through metal-rimmed glasses, Jon opened Gmail on his computer monitor.

“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” he wrote. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

That was it. In five minutes, Jon said, he finished the note, signed his first and last name, pressed send and hoped his plea would make a difference.

Five hours and one minute later, Jon was watching TV with his wife when an email popped up in his inbox. He noticed it on his phone.

“Google,” the message read, “has received legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.”

Listed below was the type of legal process: “subpoena.” And below that, the authority: “Department of Homeland Security.”

That’s how it began. Soon would come a knock at the door by men with badges and, for Jon, the relentless feeling of being surveilled in a country where he never imagined he would be….

Yet Another Sign that the Trump Administration is Laying the Groundwork for Election Intervention?

Bob Bauer, Feb 05, 2026 [Executive Functions]

For many years, in both Democratic and Republican administrations, the Department of Justice has published a manual for its prosecutors entitled the Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses. It is now in an eighth edition, published in December 2017. It is a remarkable document—and it articulates principles of federal prosecution that the president is currently rejecting….

The department has pulled the 2017 manual from the website of its Election Crimes Branch. With the midterm elections only months away, journalists and responsible members of Congress should press the White House and the Department of Justice to explain why….

‘Beyond Crazy’: FBI Summons State Election Officials to Secretive Meeting After Trump Threat to ‘Nationalize’ Midterms

Stephen Prager, February 06, 2026 [CommonDreams]

Bannon floats big lie to prepare stealing of 2026 elections

Heather Cox Richardson, Feb 05, 2026 [Letters from an American, February 4, 2026]

Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.

On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.

Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.

Judge Incredulous as Trump Lawyer Asks Him to Create New Law for Mark Kelly Retribution Crusade

Kate Riga, 02.03.26 [Talking Points Memo]

“You’re asking me to do something that the Supreme Court has never done — that’s a bit of a stretch, is it not?” the George W. Bush-appointed judge asked DOJ’s John Bailey.

The Trump administration tried during the hearing to argue that the diminished speech rights that apply to the active duty military — meant to preserve obedience and discipline — should apply to Kelly, who is retired, as well.

Strategic Political Economy

Pay No Attention To The Pillaging Behind The Curtain

David Sirota, February 03, 2026 [The Lever]

Have you noticed that the “news” is now almost 100 percent anything other than the unprecedented financial pillaging of the entire country, at every single minute of every single day? Have you noticed how life is becoming unaffordable for almost everyone around you, and yet this is barely a topic of national conversation, buried under the spectacle of violence and political theater being manufactured by the party-media complex?

• This is no accident — it’s part of an ongoing effort by both parties and their media machines to help their donors depoliticize the systematic looting of America. They are trying to make politics, voting, and elections about literally everything but the Great Fleecing. Why?

Blinders on. Because they do not want the public to believe that elections can change the economic superstructure that enriches the oligarchs and corporations. They do not want the political conversation to be about how nobody can financially survive, because if the political conversation is about that, then the general population might develop expectations. Expectations that democracy is an actual system rather than a slogan. Expectations that voting can create actual mandates. Expectations that elections result in politicians getting into power and materially improving people’s lives — or facing the prospect of being quickly thrown out of office….

How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism — Macroeconomics is the driver, not median voters.

Thomas Ferguson, February 3, 2026 [Boston Review]

…The Democratic Party’s historic links to working-class Americans had been fraying for a while, but Jimmy Carter’s decision to replace G. William Miller with Paul Volcker—well before the nineties—transformed a slow downward spiral into a catastrophe. Stanley Kelley’s dissection of how Volcker wrecked Carter’s reelection effort in his important 1983 book Interpreting Elections was a fine start. It should have been aggressively followed up by studies of how the Great Volcker Deflation destroyed the Democratic brand as the heartland collapsed over the next few years. The fact that a Democrat appointed him is rarely pondered by political scientists.

Together with colleagues like William Greider and Joel Rogers, I have worked through the dismal details (including opinion polling), so I will simply dismiss the idea that any appeal to the median voter was responsible for any of this. Carter’s decision reflected massive pressure from financiers and financial markets in a panic over what in hindsight was a trivial uptick in the government deficit. Ever since Democratic financiers and business groups lined up behind fiscal austerity, their demands have defined the party’s center of gravity.

This was certainly the case in 1984. Almost everyone agrees that Walter Mondale’s promise to raise taxes doomed his bid for the presidency. But as Rogers and I document in Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, Mondale made that decision after two key Democratic financiers, Robert Rubin and Roger Altman, flew out to Minnesota and pressed him to drink from the poisoned chalice.

The story four years later was similar, if less melodramatic. Under pressure from the party’s financial bloc, Michael Dukakis resisted calls for stronger fiscal spending that might have helped workers whose jobs were disappearing amid the first great surge of imports and overseas investments by U.S. firms. He lost in a landslide. Two of the most prominent Democratic financiers supporting his campaign were, once again, Rubin and Altman, while Larry Summers, closely connected to Rubin, advised the campaign. Thereafter the Democratic elite’s emphasis on austerity, lower taxes, financial deregulation, and the benefits flowing from free trade, unrestricted overseas investment, and a high dollar has barely shifted. Their indifference to investing much in average Americans, reconstructing heartland communities, or coping with falling rates of unionization reflects a policy fixation rivaling that of an Egyptian dynasty. Its devastating long-run effects on the party’s position in the Midwest and South are only now being widely recognized.

So much, then, for median voters. This is how money-driven politics works….

Right now, Democratic congressional leaders clearly think that Trump is so vulnerable that a repetition of 2025’s across-the-board shift to Democrats is likely in the upcoming midterm elections. They talk far more boldly than they act while reveling in crypto cash and other streams of political money. But they and many others have a long history of underestimating Trump’s economics and its appeals, as well as how swiftly and convincingly he is able to dramatize those doctrines as populist and outflank Democrats on the left. With Trump’s ostentatious overtures first to Zohran Mamdani and now to Elizabeth Warren, so reminiscent of how he used to talk up Sanders, the shape of things to come is obvious. As the administration revs up cascading streams of tax rebates, prescription drug price cuts, and other (short-term) goodies for an electorate that considers the Democrats more corrupt than the Republicans, these calculations on the part of Democratic elites can easily prove as misguided as they were in 2016 and 2024….

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 01, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

The Crisis, No. 8 — The empire of exit and the conspiracy against America

Mike Brock, Jan 29, 2026 [Notes From The Circus]

The Director of National Intelligence stood in the parking lot of the Fulton County Elections Hub while FBI agents loaded boxes onto trucks.

Tulsi Gabbard, in a dark blazer, watching men in windbreakers carry cardboard boxes out of a building where American citizens cast their votes five years ago. Hundreds of boxes. Computers. Tabulator tapes. Voter rolls. Seized and loaded.

The Director of National Intelligence has no legitimate role at a domestic law enforcement action. The intelligence community’s remit is foreign threats—the enemies beyond our borders, the spies and saboteurs. An FBI raid on a county election office is a domestic matter, whatever pretext is offered. And yet there she stood.

Senator Mark Warner named the only two possibilities: either Gabbard believes there is a foreign intelligence angle and failed to brief the intelligence committees as required by law, or she is turning the intelligence community into a partisan instrument. There is no third option….

The same week that agents loaded Georgia’s votes onto trucks, the Financial Times reported that Trump administration officials have been holding covert meetings with separatists from Alberta.

Alberta. The province that sits atop the Athabasca oil sands—the third-largest oil reserve on Earth. The province whose eastern border is a thousand miles of prairie, whose western edge rises into the Canadian Rockies, whose people have chafed for decades at Ottawa’s carbon taxes and equalization formulas. Alberta, which has never loved confederation the way Ontario loves it, which has always felt more kinship with Texas than with Quebec.

The Alberta Prosperity Project—a fringe group seeking independence from Canada—has met with State Department officials three times since April. They are now seeking a meeting with Treasury. Their ask: a $500 billion credit facility to bankroll the province if an independence referendum passes.

Five hundred billion dollars. To break apart a NATO ally.

The State Department’s response: “The department regularly meets with civil society types.”

Civil society types. That is what they call people seeking foreign backing to dismember a neighboring democracy….

Tulsi Gabbard Drags U.S. Intelligence into Trump’s Election Fraud Campaign 

[Spy Talk, via Naked Capitalism 01-30-2025]

Today Fulton County, Tomorrow???

Joyce Vance, Jan 30, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

[TW: Provides a screen shot of a social media post Trump reposted, promoting the conspiracy belief that Italy was paid by Obama to use military satellites to hack US voting machines in 2020 and literally switch votes from Trump to Biden — all under the direction of the Chinese government.]

GOP Opens Up Its Midterm Elections Playbook in Minnesota

Gabrielle Gurley, January 29, 2026 [The American Prospect]

Last October, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced that the Justice Department wanted state registration data and that federal officials refused to explain why. “Other secretaries of state—both Democrats and Republicans—have asked them that. They won’t tell us,” she said.

Trump officials met group pushing Alberta independence from Canada

Ilya Gridneff and Myles McCormick, Jan 28 2026 [Financial Times]

Monopoly Round-Up: Why ICE Polices in Minnesota, and Not the Corporate Board Room

Matt Stoller January 26, 2026 [BIG]

Law enforcement budgets show we defunded those who police corporate America, while ramping up coercion on working people….

…I want to focus on the raids of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota, where the Trump administration sent ICE officers as part of a crackdown. The net effect was controversial killings of several U.S. citizens by ICE in the last month, including one yesterday, along with broad anger among locals.

At almost the same time, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where global elites meet, billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin remarked on the oppression he felt during the Biden administration during its “regulatory onslaught.” Griffin, worth $50 billion, and bailed out during the great financial crisis, cites the challenge to the Spirit-JetBlue merger as particularly galling.

I was going to write about weird economic statistics, but I think the way we use policing resources is a much more appropriate topic based on this explicit power of state coercion that we’re seeing, contrasted with Griffin’s anger at extremely mild attempts to check corporate power….

This moment is a good one to think about how we allocate law enforcement resources. The immigration raids we see are dramatic, but do not seem to me to be the best way to achieve their stated goal of mass deportations. If the administration truly wanted to deport undocumented workers, they would crack down on the companies, like meatpackers and large farms, who hire them. But doing so would require policing of corporations and employers, which the GOP generally seeks to avoid. These large made-for-TV cracking of heads strike me as a brutal communications strategy.

And that’s true for a lot of the choices we’ve been making in policing for decades. Indeed, the era of rising corporate power from the 1980s onward was characterized by a broad defunding of the police who investigate and regulate the behavior of political and economic elites. At the same time, we have increased policing resources to impose order, if not actual policing of bad behavior, on working people. In essence, there is now a zone of elite impunity for the Jeff Epstein class, but poorer Americans are increasingly subject to a host of restrictions and state violence….

Let’s contrast the $175 billion pot of money with that of the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division, the ‘white collar policing’ of the entire corporate world in our $30 trillion economy for monopolization and consumer abuse. In 2026, the FTC will get $383 million, and the Antitrust Division budget will receive $250 million. There are about as many people at the FTC as there are guards for the Smithsonian museum complex. We have a few dozen, at most, looking at health care, a $5 trillion sector. In other words, the Federal agencies looking at all of corporate America have just 0.5% of the resources that DHS got in additional money solely to deport people. And this puny under-funded group is what Griffin was complaining about as tyranny….

The Staircase of Oppression — Watch the boot ascend.

Hamilton Nolan, Jan 28, 2026 [How Things Work]

…The first step is the scapegoating and persecution of the most vulnerable. We are already there…..

The determination to crush this resistance fuels the next step up the staircase. In America, the government has not fully taken this next step, but it is clear that many in the administration would like to. Opposition has been formally classified as domestic terrorism. Government databases of protesters are being built. The FBI has opened an investigation into the Signal chats that activists use to follow ICE agents. All of these things are flirtations with criminalizing activism.

If this step is taken in earnest, you can expect to see arrests and prosecutions of protest organizers and activist leaders; aggressive mass arrests of street protesters; and even more outright violence used by police to crush protest actions. Activists will be treated as criminals and targeted and sent to jail. The circle of government oppression, which started out by including immigrants and minorities, will be expanded to include regular people who take action to stop that oppression. The criminalization of protest—justified by the argument that impeding law enforcement is itself a serious crime—gets us much closer to real authoritarianism….

Now, imagine peeking down at all of this chaos from the next step up the staircase. That is the step where the powerful people and institutions reside: Elected officials, businesses, very wealthy people, established legal and cultural organizations, and so on. This is the group that collectively held much of the political, economic, and social power before Trump’s race to authoritarianism began. As they watch the brutal oppression of immigrants and minorities play out, and they watch the subsequent protests play out, and they watch the government deciding if it can disregard the Constitution in order to crush that dissent, this already-powerful group must make a choice. Their choice is to either use their power to stop what the government is doing, or try to keep their heads down and protect their own little kingdoms and hope that all of this madness won’t affect them too much.

I expect little courage from the already-powerful, and, in aggregate, they have so far justified this expectation….

…The final step up the staircase is almost trivial. The government need only say: Have you funded the opposition? Then you too are a criminal. Have you used your media outlet to support the opposition? Then you too are a criminal. Has your business made statements in support of the opposition? Then you too are a criminal. Have you made a movie sympathetic to the opposition, or spoken out in an interview? Then you too are a criminal.

Have you, a politician of the opposing party, taken actions that can be interpreted by us as impeding the ability of the government to carry out its vital law enforcement actions? Then you too are a criminal….

What I am saying is that the collective instinct of the powerful to protect themselves ends up having the opposite effect. They refuse to throw their own power behind the opposition to government oppression, and thereby prevent the opposition from being as powerful as it could be, and thereby allow the boot of authoritarianism to step smoothly up the staircase, right to where they are. It would have been wiser for them to do everything in their considerable power to hold the line, to fight back, to fund the activists on the front line, to speak out firmly, to take strong legal and political action against the oppression, to refuse to do anything at all to help the government do its work….

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 25, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Dingbat imperialism and its malcontents

Hoodwinks and Hijinks: Trump ‘Nabs’ Greenland at Davos 

Simplicius [via Naked Capitalism 01-23-2025]

…In this case, Trump did major damage to alliances and economic ties, causing Europe and Canada—by way of Mark Carney and Macron—to announce reorientations toward China. That said, it’s still possible for the whole megillah to turn out favorably in the long term, particularly because it helps rupture NATO and the EU, which ultimately works in everyone’s favor, including the US’s. The more the transatlantic mafia and ‘deep state’ can be hobbled and undermined, the weaker the American deep state becomes, which sources much of its power, funding, and influence from the European arm of the cabal…

[TW: Besides providing this badly needed perspective on Trump versus the “Trilateral Commission” transatlantic mafia, Simplicius also provides in the article a very useful collection of Trump’s craziness this past week.]

The Strong Will Suffer What They Must — Vaclav’s Grocer and American Hubris

Seva Gunitsky, Jan 21, 2026

…The Melian Dialogue is not endorsing a timeless law of global politics. It’s showing us Athens at the precise peak of its imperial hubris: the moment when a great power becomes so convinced of its own invincibility that it can no longer perceive its limits….

Carney seems to be betting, I think correctly, that America under Trump has reached its Melian moment: maximum confidence, minimum self-knowledge….

Watching A Superpower Die By Suicide 

Garrett Graff, January 22, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario, via Naked Capitalism 01-23-2025]

The Great Greenland War — Three Possible Histories

Big Serge [via Naked Capitalism 01-22-2025]

The Bridge at the Center of the Pentagon 

Michael McNair [via Naked Capitalism 01-19-2025]

The Architect of U.S. Defense Strategy

The man setting U.S. defense strategy has already told you exactly how he thinks. He published the playbook years before taking office. And surprisingly few analysts have actually read it.

Elbridge Colby, or “Bridge” to those who know him, now serves as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the senior official responsible for running U.S. defense strategy.

Captain John Konrad, after spending a week inside the Pentagon, put it bluntly in his 13,000-word field report for gCaptain: “aside from Hegseth, the most powerful gravitational body in the building is Elbridge Colby.” He added that Colby’s “grand strategy remains exactly what he published in his books and interviews long before taking office. He is executing it now.”

Trump not violating any law

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

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

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

The University of Pennsylvania Ran a Simulation to Predict an American Civil War. It Gave the EXACT MOMENT WE ARE IN RIGHT NOW.

Shaun King, Jan 22, 2026

A Penn law center war-gamed a federal operation spiraling into state vs. federal force. Their scenario is now playing out

Expert Who Ran Simulations on ‘How Civil Wars Start’ Warns Minnesota Is Exactly What It Looks Like

Brad Reed, January 21, 2026 [CommonDreams]

Claire Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote in a Wednesday column published by the Guardian that she and her colleagues at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conducted a tabletop exercise in October 2024 that simulated potential outcomes if a US president were to carry out law enforcement operations similar to the ones being conducted by the Trump administration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.

‘Absolutely Vile’: ICE Snatches Young Kids From Minnesota Schools, Sends Them to Texas

Jake Johnson, January 22, 2026 [CommonDreams]

Federal immigration agents have detained at least four children from Minnesota public schools over the past two weeks, including a 5-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl who were both sent to Texas detention centers that have come under fire for grotesque conditions.

Trump orders active duty troops to prepare for Minnesota deployment 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 01-19-2025]

Why are federal agents gunning down Americans in the streets?

Noah Smith, Jan 10, 2026 [Noahpinion]

Here’s an assessment by a 25-year ICE veteran whose job was to evaluate shootings by the agency….

Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances. Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents storming a private home without a warrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.

These are all things I noticed on X within just the last two days. There has been a pretty constant stream of these for months. Here’s a roundup of some others, by Jeremiah Johnson….

Vance Endorsed Slashing Civil Liberties Protections During Minneapolis Visit — The VP said that the executive branch should be able to issue its own warrants to enter homes.

Josh Kovensky, January 23, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]

…But Vance made another remark while in Minneapolis that has largely escaped attention.

He threw his support behind the idea that the executive branch can enter private homes as part of immigration enforcement without a warrant. It’s an argument that would transform the Fourth Amendment, which mandates that independent judges can issue warrants on the request of law enforcement.

Vance’s remarks came in response to a question about a whistleblower disclosure to the Senate, first reported by the AP. Per the disclosure, ICE issued a memo in May arguing that immigration authorities could enter private residences absent a judicial warrant if they believe that someone with a final deportation order is inside….

Breaking the Fourth Amendment
Joyce Vance, Jan 23, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

[TW: Using a screen shot of a court warrant, and an administrative warrant, Vance explains the differences and legal implications.]

‘Dark, Bizarre Stuff’: White House Posts Deepfake Image of Arrested ICE Protester Crying

Stephen Prager, January 22, 2026 [CommonDreams]

“All of us are on full notice that this White House feels no compunction about concocting obvious lies, concedes nothing when its lies are exposed, and should be presumptively disbelieved in all matters.”

12 ways the Trump administration dismantled civil rights law and the foundations of inclusive democracy in its first year 

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 01-18-2025]

The Congresswoman Criminalized for Visiting ICE Detainees

Jonathan Blitzer, January 19, 2026 [The New Yorker]

LaMonica McIver went to tour an immigration jail in her New Jersey district. Now she faces seventeen years in prison.

Trump sues JPMorgan for $5 billion, alleges the bank closed his accounts for political reasons 

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 01-23-2025]

The Last Election

Chris Hedges, Jan 19, 2026

The presidential election in 2024 may be the last free vote taken in the United States. Dictatorships only hold elections with predetermined outcomes or do not hold them at all. Trump is no exception.

The Evil Man and the Empty Congress — A psalm for the republic in extremis

Mike Brock, Jan 20, 2026 [Notes From The Circus]

…Let me be precise about what I mean. Evil, as I use the term here, is the systematic use of power to dissolve the constraints that protect human dignity and law, while demanding deference to the very crimes being committed. It is not merely selfishness, incompetence, or even cruelty. It is the deliberate subordination of other human beings to one’s own will, coupled with the insistence that this subordination is right and proper, that resistance to it is illegitimate, that the victims deserve what they receive.

By this definition, observe: A president who pardons those who attacked the Capitol on his behalf, while prosecuting those who investigated him. A president who defies court orders and dares the judiciary to stop him. A president who treats foreign policy as a vehicle for personal enrichment and grudge-settling—threatening war over Greenland, blockading Venezuela, inviting Vladimir Putin to advise on Middle East peace. A president who is 30 days late on releasing court-ordered documents and responds to the deadline by releasing one percent of the files. This is not a policy disagreement. This is the methodical dissolution of the constraints that make lawful government possible, conducted by a man who believes he is owed obedience….

First, let us address those who made this moment possible.

The anti-anti-Trump intellectuals. The contrarians and self-appointed heterodox thinkers who could not bring themselves to support Trump, but who found the alarm of his critics unseemly. The real threat, they insisted, was the overreaction itself. They positioned themselves as the adults in the room while the rest of us succumbed to panic…

Here is what I maintained for years, and what I will now state plainly: the obsessive fixation on leftist excess functioned as a form of cognitive capture. It rendered an entire class of otherwise intelligent people incapable of perceiving threats originating in their own ideological vicinity. They became so convinced that the republic faced imminent danger from campus speech codes and diversity initiatives that they looked upon an actual authoritarian—a man who had already attempted to overturn an election—and concluded he represented the lesser evil.

This is the precise error made by German conservatives in the early 1930s, who persuaded themselves that the Austrian corporal was a manageable risk compared to the Bolshevik menace. I do not make this comparison for rhetorical effect. I make it because the structural logic is identical….

The financial class, which assured us that Trump represented the superior outcome for capitalism and markets. They were explicitly and repeatedly warned that this man was unstable, authoritarian, and constitutionally incapable of the restraint that global economic leadership requires. And they made their calculation: yes, but the regulatory burden. Yes, but the tax implications….

The technocratic establishment—the consultant class, the pollsters, the professional Democrats who have made careers of cautious positioning. They have no theory of the moment. They have tactics designed for a political context that no longer exists. They are preparing for an election in 2026 as though elections, conducted fairly and counted honestly, remain a reliable mechanism for the transfer of power….

To the Citizen—and I use that word with the weight it deserves—I hope you understand that this falls to you now.

The institutions have failed. I have just spent considerable effort documenting the various ways in which people who should have known better did not act as though they knew better. The cavalry is not coming. There is no adult in the room who will fix this while you go about your life. The room is full of adults, and they have failed.

Which means the republic is counting on you to keep her….

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 18, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Dingbat imperialism and its malcontents

Dingbat Imperialism, the Lowest Stage of Capitalism

John Ganz, Jan 13, 2026 [Unpopular Front]

Germany planning ‘Arctic Sentry’ Nato mission to protect Greenland 

[Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 01-13-2025]

Tech billionaires behind Greenland bid want to build ‘freedom cities’ 

[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 01-13-2025]

The Oligarchs Pushing for Conquest in Greenland

Casey Michel, January 13, 2026 [The New Republic]

Trump’s fixation on filching the island territory from Denmark may seem like the demented ravings of a mad king. But to a cohort of plutocrat weirdos, it makes perfect sense.

Trump not violating any law

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

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

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

How Trump gave the green light for the killing of protestors. 

[Borderland Talk with Jenn Budd, via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

…I will argue to my dying day that he did not see her or her wife as an actual physical threat in that moment, but someone who should be taught a lesson. This analysis is based in my experience as a former agent, and teaching lessons to people who do not respect our authority is rampant in ICE, Border Patrol and CBP. Watch HBO’s Critical Incident to see all three agencies teach Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas this lesson….

But in October, things changed.

ICE shot at protestor Marimar Martinez hitting her five times on October 4, 2025. Now, Renee Good is dead. What changed? Why has ICE started shooting at people trying to warn the community of their presence when they did not before?

What changed is that ICE and other agencies performing civil immigration enforcement were given a directive from the President of the United States to label them as “domestic terrorists.” On September 25, 2025, before the Martinez shooting, Trump issued an executive order titled, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Political Violence.” This EO changed the definition of who is considered by federal agents to be a “domestic terrorist” to include:

• anti-Americanism
• anti-capitalism
• anti-Christianity
• support for the overthrow of the United States Government
• extremism on migration
• extremism on race
• extremism on gender
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.

To be fair, people like Marimar and Renee who maintain what the right-wing and this administration considers “extremism on migration” have been considered “domestic terrorists” for quite some time now. But they were not given the green light to kill them until the administration officially designated them as ‘domestic terrorists” in the executive order….

The Machinery of Terror

Chris Hedges, Jan 11, 2026

The Trump administration is consolidating the familiar machinery of terror of all authoritarian states. We must resist now. If we wait, it will be too late.

I have seen the masked goons who terrorize our streets before. I saw them during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were “disappeared” by the military junta. Victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured and murdered. To this day, many families do not know the fate of their loved ones.

I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing 800 people a month. I saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt. I saw them in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I saw them in Iran under the rule of the ayatollahs where I was arrested and jailed twice and once deported in handcuffs. I saw them in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria. I saw them in Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, executed and buried in mass graves.

I know these goons. I have been a prisoner in their jails and spent hours in their interrogation rooms. I have been beaten by them. I have been deported, and in several cases banned, from their countries. I know what is coming….

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-13-2025]

https://x.com/sandibachom/status/2010874067419873362

Exclusive: Secret ICE Programs Revealed 

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 01-15-2025]

Important.

‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid 

[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 01-17-2025]

“Stupod B*tch”: GoFundMe for Minnesota ICE Agent Is Chilling 

[New Republic, via Naked Capitalism 01-13-2025]

US Border Agents Intentionally Stepped in Front of Moving Vehicles to Justify Shooting at Them 

[Nation, via Naked Capitalism 01-13-2025]

Enforcement Regime 

Michale Macher, Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

How a 40-second encounter led an ICE agent to shoot and kill a Twin Cities resident 

[Minnesota Star Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

[NC: Comprehensive report and not a good one for ICE.]

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

My final message before I’m on an FBI watchlist: Palantir, Epstein, & The New York Times 

Juan Sebastian Pinto [a former Palantir employee, via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

Strategic Political Economy

China curbs high-frequency trading to de-risk markets 

[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-17-2025]

[TW: Worth noting to show, yes, it is possible to actually regulate financial markets.]

Global power shift

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-17-2025]

Seyed M. Marandi: Violent Riots & a Massive War Coming

Glenn Diesen [YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 01-13-2025]

‘Kill Switch’—Iran Shuts Down Starlink Internet For First Time

Zak Doffman, Jan 12, 2026 [Forbes]

We have not seen this before. Iran’s digital blackout has now deployed military jammers, reportedly supplied by Russia, to shut down access to Starlink Internet. This is a game-changer for the Plan-B connectivity frequently used by protesters and anti-regime activists when ordinary access to the internet is stopped..

“Despite reports that tens of thousands of Starlink units are operating inside Iran,” says Iran Wire, “the blackout has also reached satellite connections.” It is reported that about 30 per cent of Starlink’s uplink and downlink traffic was (initially) disrupted,” quickly rising “to more than 80 per cent” within hours.

The CIA/Mossad Operation to Spark a Color Revolution in Iran has Failed 

Larry Johnson [via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

The “Trump Doctrine” Is Shaped By Elbridge Colby’s “Strategy Of Denial” 

Andrew Korybko [via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

Trump Declares National Emergency to Protect Stolen Venezuela Funds 

[Antiwar, via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

Venezuela Raid – Aftermath 

[Black Mountain Analysis, via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

Felonomics

1 Year Into Trump 2.0, the Social Security Administration Is in Disarray

Martin Burns and Mary Liz Burns, Jan 16, 2026 [Common Dreams]

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Regulators say DoorDash and Uber Eats chiseled NYC delivery workers out of $550M in tips

[Gothamistvia Naked Capitalism 01-15-2025]

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

LAWYER: Cops Have a NEW “Social Score” to Label You a Threat 

[Hampton Law, YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 01-13-2025]

[NC: Usefully tells you which settings to disable/enable on your iPhone or Android to reduce data extraction. Even though I had told my tech woman to do that, she had missed some. Surprised it does not recommend turning off WiFi save when you specifically want to use it (yours truly is perfectly happy to pay for connectivity for the sake of my privacy, which I infer is a outlier practice). My ride share app asks I turn on WiFi to facilitate geolocation, which despite GPS, is pretty poor otherwise. I prefer to type in my pickup.]

De-Banked 

Scott Ritter [via Naked Capitalism 01-15-2025]

[Ritter’s accounts zeroed out without explanation.]

Climate and environmental crises

Ocean Temperatures Just Hit a Dire New Record 

[Scientific American, via Naked Capitalism 01-13-2025]

World’s richest 1% have already used fair share of emissions for 2026, says Oxfam 

[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

Democrats’ political malpractice

Do the Democrats Have the Guts to Outflank Trump on Defense Industry Looting? 

Les Leopold, Jan 13, 2026 [Wall Street’s War on Workers]

Monopoly Round-Up: Why Did Trump Just Attack the Fed and Corporate America? 

Matt Stoller, Jan 12, 2026 [BIG]

Resistance

What to Do If ICE Shows Up: Know Your Rights

Kim Wehle, Jan 11, 2026 [Zeteo]

Here are five guidelines for how to respond if US federal immigration agents stop, approach you, or knock at your door.

1. If ICE stops or intimidates you, do not precipitously flee

2. If detained (even temporarily), you can stay silent

3. ICE can make certain arrests without a warrant, but it cannot search your home without either a judicial warrant or your consent

4. If detained, you can ask the ICE agent to identify themselves

5. You can hire a lawyer after an arrest, but whether you can immediately call one depends on state law….

Here’s How You Can Challenge Wage Garnishment for Defaulted Student Loans

[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 01-12-2025]

Civic republicanism

Mere Anarchy 

Aurelien [via Naked Capitalism 01-15-2025]

Last week, I suggested that these days governments and the private sector were increasingly following a policy of nihilistic destruction, which was the logical, if uncomfortable, outcome of the kind of apocalyptic individualism now rampant everywhere after the unchallenged triumph of Liberal ideas.

I think that case is sufficiently well established, and this week I want to look in more detail at specific areas where this is happening, or has even happened, and consider what some of the practical consequences may be. They are all logically deducible from the ultra-individualist, almost autistic, mindset that Liberalism at its worst entails, and it may be worth saying just a word about that first….

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 11, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

“A curtain of darkness is settling over our nation.”

[TW: For a reason I shall explain, there were a number of posts this past week that struck me but I have not included all of them here. What struck me was the impression that the writers are beginning to wrestle with some truly fundamental questions of human nature, and how human nature can be molded — or more accurately, channeled and contained — by how society is organized, according to which principles, and whether the leaders of society embody, to some degree or another, those principles. So, I was greatly encouraged a couple days ago when a reader from this site reached out to me using Facebook messages to initiate a discussion of civic republicanism.]

In Defense of Pretexts — Paying tribute to virtue is better than the alternative…

Brian Beutler, Jan 09, 2026 [Off Message]

…my impression is most people, even many of Trump’s own loyalists, haven’t experienced all this as just another week in Trumpville. They feel more disturbed—or, in MAGA, more titillated—as though a new threshold of wickedness has been crossed.

That’s been my feeling since Sunday morning, for reasons I at first struggled to articulate.…

I would of course prefer to live in a world where policymakers and elected officials were scrupulously honest and above board. If that were our condition, we wouldn’t have pretexts, because we wouldn’t start any wars. We might finish them, but we wouldn’t go looking.

Building a world like that should be our north star. But in the world of today—of mixed and rotten motives, where wars of choice happen whether I want them to or not—I’ll take false justifications for bad acts.

If you care about America’s highest aspirations—freedom, equality, self-governance rule of law—the pretexts matter. We can be clear eyed about the people who lay false claim to these ideals, yet still take some solace in their lies, because the lies confirm that the ideals still have power.

Why pretend that a war of plunder is meant to spread democracy or fight communism or defend the homeland, unless you know that the public values certain higher principles, and may revolt if you traduce them? If your true motives are toxic, you have to conceal them, because the people—we the people—are better than you.

This is the tribute vice pays to virtue in the rawest sense, and it is revealing. These are cynical people, many of whom have no place in their hearts for principle or consistency. But if that is their nature, why would they pay tribute to anything? Vice is vice.

They do it because virtue still controls. It’s still the default. Because they haven’t won the masses over to uncut evil.

By dispensing with the pretexts, Trump suggests he thinks he’s overcome that obstacle, worn the public down, made us as malevolent as he is. He still pays some tribute to virtue. He won’t cop to having launched a war. But the theft and subjugation are right there on the surface, without any tributes to virtue.

I think this is what has people so unsettled. Why he has to be stopped preemptively and forced to reverse, or else be run out of office. If he prevails—not just in acting lawlessly, but in doing so nakedly, and without pushback—then it’s over. We become changed.

That’s why I miss the pretexts. It’s also why I take some solace in the fact that his Venezuela “policy” polls poorly. That his menacing of Greenland polls even worse….

The Future of Democracy Depends on the Republican Party — The Battle for a Liberal Society is Happening Within the Political Right

Ryan Enos, Jan 09, 2026

Right now, the Republican Party is enabling the authoritarian leader who is ignoring the law and terrorizing his own citizens. Because of this party’s leader, we no longer live in a full democracy. But, despite this or, perhaps, because of it, the future of democracy in the United States will depend on choices made within the Republican Party.

This must be the path because a liberal democracy requires more than one functioning party, and, at least in the foreseeable future, the Republican Party will be one of them. Our plan for sustaining that liberal society can’t be shutting the GOP out of power, but rather must include shaping the Republican Party, the party that will represent the approximately half of society that inevitably holds right-wing beliefs, into a party that upholds liberalism (small l) and democracy.

The alternative is to hope that Democrats win all elections moving forward. But if this is our plan for sustaining democracy, we are cooked…..

Trump not violating any law

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

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

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

Rep. Omar Warns Trump Aims to Provoke Enough Agitation in Minnesota So He Can Declare ‘Martial Law’

Jon Queally, Jan 10, 2026 [CommonDreams]

Cold Blood: A New Reichstag Plot Begins With Murder — Minneapolis is the target of a blatant effort to incite a new wave of domestic oppression.

Jim Stewartson, Jan 07, 2026 [MindWar]

Following ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good, Trump officials threaten mass repression

[Countercurrents, via Naked Capitalism 01-10-2025]

… The conscious and deliberate character of Good’s killing is underscored by the open and unapologetic defense of the murder by Trump administration officials. By hailing the killing, Trump and the coterie of fascists in the administration are making clear that it was an expression of official government policy.

Everything coming out of the mouths of administration officials is a lie, and everyone knows it is a lie. On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance held a press conference in which he slandered Good and praised her killer. He called the federal agent’s actions “legitimate” and denounced the media for “talking about this guy as if he’s a murderer,” adding menacingly, “Be a little bit more careful.”

The Trump administration is seizing on the murder of Good as a pretext for a sweeping escalation in the criminalization of political opposition. Vance announced the creation of a new assistant attorney general position that will answer directly to the president. Asked about his message to “far-leftist agitators,” Vance declared: “Now they have an assistant attorney general who is going to prosecute and investigate their fraud and their violence more aggressively than it has ever been investigated.”

Vance accused “a group of left-wing radicals” of using “domestic terror techniques” to oppose the government’s immigration policies.

He never referred to Good by name, instead smearing her as “that woman,” a “deranged leftist” who was “brainwashed.” He insisted the killer was “protected by absolute immunity,” denounced the local investigation into the murder, and declared, “The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official can actually prosecute a federal official with absolute immunity.” ….

In an extraordinary statement, Trump declared that he operates outside of any legal constraint. Asked whether there were any limits on his ability to strike, invade or coerce other nations, Trump responded: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He dismissed international law outright—“I don’t need international law”—and made clear that he would be the sole arbiter of any legal constraints: “It depends what your definition of international law is.” ….

While leading Democrats have issued insincere statements in response to the killing of Good, their main concern is to contain the explosive growth of opposition within the United States…. At a press conference Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries were asked if they would use their budgetary powers to rein in ICE. They refused to answer….

Letters from an American, January 10, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, Jan 11, 2026

…Hours after Good’s death, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem appeared in Manhattan behind a podium emblazoned with the words: “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS.”….

We’re All “Domestic Terrorists” Now

Ross Rosenfeld, January 8, 2026 [The New Republic]

In ICE’s Own Words, It’s “Wartime” in America 

Michael Tomasky, January 9, 2026 [The New Republic]

ICE just launched a “wartime recruitment” campaign and seeks agents who want to “defend” their “culture.” There will be more Renee Goods….

Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by ‘My Own Morality 

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]

No Authority. Only Violence.

Jim Stewartson, Jan 09, 2026 [MindWar]

A word often used to describe Trump is authoritarian. But this is insufficient. Authority is the recognized right to control outcomes within a set of constraints accepted as binding—familial, religious, cultural, moral or legal.

The U.S. federal government is deliberately destroying the idea of any authority being legitimate except the ability to project coercive violence. We are living in the “might makes right” world of neo-Nazi ideology, a kratocracy.

• William Montague defined kratocracy as: a government by those strong enough to seize control through violence or deceit.

In ‘Unhinged’ Rant, Miller Says US Has Right to Take Over Any Country For Its Resources

Julia Conley, January 06, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Trump admin sends tough private message to oil companies on Venezuela 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 01-04-2026]

Administration officials have told oil executives in recent weeks that if they want compensation for their rigs, pipelines and other seized property, then they must be prepared to go back into Venezuela now and invest heavily in reviving its shattered petroleum industry, two people familiar with the administration’s outreach told POLITICO on Saturday….

Monopoly Round-Up: A Gunboat Oligarchy Goes After Venezuelan Oil

Matt Stoller, Jan 04, 2026 [BIG]

[TW: a history lesson that is grandly encouraging. Wright Patman would be a wonderful subject for Ron Chernow’s next book (but so also would be Lincoln economic advisor Henry Carey; Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who delivered one of the most important American explanations of civic republicanism; and Pennsylvania Congressman Thadeous Stevens, whose warnings of the dreadful consequences of failing to seize the wealth of the slave-holders proved to be entirely accurate). Also important is Stoller noting that Trump is really just a continuation of Bush. Implication: getting rid of Trump will not solve the underlying problems of an entrenched oligarchy controlling both major political parties, and the militant conservative and libertarian movements that are nurtured and richly funded by that entrenched oligarchy.]

Trump kicked off 2026 with a military attack on Venezuela and a naked seizure of oil resources. Wall Street is overjoyed. Plus, Mamdani takes office and billionaires rage at a wealth tax….

…U.S. domination of the oil reserves of South America is not new. And neither is the fusion of corporate and state interest.

Ninety five years ago, in 1931, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who owned Gulf Oil (now Chevron), forced the President of Colombia to give his company the Barco oil concession, which borders Venezuela. How? Well Wall Street banks and the U.S. government threatened to withhold vitally needed bank loans if Colombia did not cede the franchise….

At the time, Democrats were incompetent and split, as it was an era of deep reverence for the wealthy and bitter culture warring over race and alcohol. For instance, the head of the DNC in the late 1920s, a Dupont executive named John J. Raskob, published a pamphlet titled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich” encouraging Americans to borrow money to invest in the stock market.

Just as there is increasing support for cynical and nihilistic figures today, many in the 1920s felt warmly towards Mellon, Mussolini, and authoritarianism in general….

But then came the 1929 crash, and a period of “debunking” of myths, as Louis Brandeis put it. The old order was discredited. And a political realignment occurred. The Democrats turned to liberalism, and former party elites like Raskob became bitter foes of FDR in the 1930s. But more importantly, Patman’s impeachment campaign succeeded. Mellon was fired, because then-President Herbert Hoover was under political pressure over the widespread revulsion towards economic elites. You get a sense of this dynamic by going through Patman’s Congressional correspondence. “We have just got Al Capone,” wrote one Texan. “Now let’s get some of the others.”

…Ultimately, what the attack on Venezuela shows is that Donald Trump decided to use his 2024 mandate for change to revert back to a traditional gunboat diplomacy framework, both domestically and abroad. Like Mellon, Harding, Hoover, and George W. Bush, Trump is operating on behalf of financial capital. Indeed, Trump more reflects Bush than anyone else; his administration is staffed with former Bush Republicans, and the GOP Congress is full of Bush adherents.

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by Tony Wikrent

Trump DHS Post Calling for ‘100 Million Deportations’ Suggests Intent to Kick Out Nonwhite Citizens

Stephen Prager, January 02, 2026 [CommonDreams]

The Trump administration provoked horror this week with the suggestion that the United States could be turned into a paradise if over a quarter of the people in the country were deported.

On Wednesday, the official social media account for the Department of Homeland Security posted a piece of artwork depicting a pink late-1960s Cadillac Eldorado parked on a bright, idyllic beach. Over the clear blue sky are the words “America after 100 million deportations.”

Happy Race War! (Or anything but the Epstein Files) — The U.S. regime’s vision for 2026 is to deport almost a third of its own population.

Jim Stewartson, January 01, 2026 [MindWar]

To put this number in perspective:

• The total number of undocumented immigrants in America is about 14 million.
• The total number of foreign-born people in America—including naturalized citizens—is about 53 million.
• The total number of Black and Hispanic people in America is about 110 million.
• 100 million is almost a third of the total U.S. population.
• Millions would necessarily die in any such process.
• The economy would collapse.

The “third world” framing in the post makes the intention explicit. It’s not about crime or even immigrants; it’s about race. The only conclusion you can reach is that DHS’s goal is to forcibly transform America into a whites-only ethnostate like apartheid South Africa—by deporting every Black and brown person… somewhere….

DHS Says REAL ID, Which DHS Certifies, Is Too Unreliable To Confirm U.S. Citizenship 

[Reason, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]

Trump’s Immigration Nightmare: It Is Happening Here

Radley Balko, December 24, 2025 [The New Republic]

With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. And the experts agree: It’s all going to get much, much worse….

…Over the last year, I’ve spoken to and met with immigration attorneys and advocates all over the country. Many who openly spoke with me prior to the 2024 election are no longer willing to be quoted, fearing retaliation against their organizations or their funders, or even against them personally.

In more recent months, I’ve also interviewed former ICE and Customs and Border Protection officials, and former Immigration Court judges who served across multiple administrations of both parties. Career legal and law enforcement officials tend to be circumspect in their critiques of fellow law enforcement officers. They tend to avoid casual references to police states, or comparing U.S. police agencies to those in authoritarian countries. That’s no longer the case. These career police executives and prosecutors now use language I’ve rarely heard from current or former government officials in my career….

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