Author: Tony Wikrent Page 3 of 46

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Process knowledge is crucial to economic development

Henry Farrell, Sep 02, 2025 [Programmable Mutter, via The Big Picture, September 12, 2025]

… I’m fascinated by process knowledge and manufacturing because I spent a chunk of the late 1990s talking to manufacturers in Bologna and Baden-Wurttemberg for my Ph.D. dissertation.

I was carrying out research in the twilight of a long period of interest in so-called “industrial districts,” small localized regions with lots of small firms engaged in a particular sector of the economy. Paul Krugman’s Geography and Trade (maybe my favorite of his books) talks about some of the economic theory behind this form of concentrated production: economic sociologists and economic geographers had their own arguments. Economists, sociologists and geographers all emphasized the crucial importance of local diffuse knowledge about how to do things in making these economies successful. Such knowledge was in part the product of market interactions, but it wasn’t itself a commodity that could be bought and sold. It was more often tacit: a sense of how to do things, and who best to talk to, which could not easily be articulated. The sociologists were particularly interested in the informal institutions, norms and social practices that held this together. They identified different patterns of local institutional development, which the Communist party in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, and the Christian Democrats in the Veneto and Marche, had built on to foster vibrant local economies….

I spent a lot of time on workshop floors, listening to small-scale founders talking about their lives. I’ll never forget a particular conversation with a manufacturer of teabag-packing machines** about the technical ingenuity required to figure out how to reliably staple on the threads attached to some fancy tea bags, which allow you to pull the teabag out without either scalding your fingers or rummaging around for a spoon. The machinery for accomplishing this apparently simple task was quite complex and fantastical: it was a surprisingly difficult engineering problem….

A lack of appreciation for physical process knowledge helps explain why America is in trouble. Breakneck criticizes the first Trump and Biden administration’s belief that they could strangle China through export controls, riling up Chinese companies to “break free of American restrictions.” However, Dan’s criticisms go way further. It isn’t just that America focuses so much of its “entrepreneurial dynamism” on stuff that doesn’t necessarily do much good, and may plausibly do significant harm to American society: crypto, the metaverse and perhaps AI. It’s that for decades, American policy makers sat back as manufacturing moved overseas, not understanding what the long term consequences for process knowledge might be….

[TW: Regular readers will recall the number of times that Ian has written about the folly of free trade and that technological advances will more likely occur where the manufacturing is physically located. Or, As I wrote in The Obama administration as “managed democracy” (May, 2010):

…as an industrial enterprise grows and matures, its trained and skilled employees make the surrounding community a pool of technical talent that is highly conducive to the creation of other industrial enterprises that use the same or similar skills. That’s why certain towns and cities become known as centers for specific industrial products. Sheffield in England was known for its highly specialized alloy irons and steels. Delft in Holland is known world-wide for its blue pottery. The Hocking River valley in southern Ohio became known in the 1800s as a center of brick manufacture. The Connecticut River valley was known for almost a century as “Precision Valley” because it was a center of designing and making high-precision metal-working machine tools. Detroit became known for making automobiles. Today, almost every high-speed, high-volume printing press in the world comes from Heidelberg, Germany. The southern part of the San Francisco Bay area became known as Silicon Valley.

How much is it worth to have a locale or city renowned for the technical excellence of its local enterprises and workers? What value can be assigned to having a few hundred wizened old men around who can train entire generations of new, highly-skilled workers? Or who have a few different ideas than their boss, and decide to start up their own company?

Exactly these kind of links are traced out by David R. Meyer, a professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Brown University, in his 2006 book, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America. This is important because it details how the USA machine tool industry developed – and the USA machine tool industry is the foundation of the modern industrial mass production economy.

The Silicon Valley Consensus & the “AI Economy” 

Edward Ongweso Jr. [via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]

The “AI economy” is less a story of productivity or innovation, then an attempt to graft a new political-economic order—let’s call it the Silicon Valley Consensus—that is ostensibly concerned with building our stillborn God. A coalition of hyperscalers, venture capitalists, fossil fuel firms, conservatives, and reactionaries are engaged in a frenzy of overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in compute infrastructure. Their goal is not to realize AGI or radically improve life for humanity, but to reallocate capital such that it enriches themselves, transmutes their wealth into even more political power that imposes constraints on countervailing political forces, and liberates capitalism from its recent defects (e.g. democracy), consolidating benefits to its architectures regardless of the actual social utility of the technologies they pursue….

Building out generative AI’s compute infrastructure and energy supply is an incredibly capital-intensive enterprise (McKinsey expects $7 trillion will be spent by 2030)….

2. The primary capital source for this infrastructure buildout isn’t external debt, but internal cash flows—primarily at hyperscalers—that dominate our stock market. Their profitability is so extreme that they can put “oodles of oodles of money” towards such an ambitious project without touching risky financing options, even if revenues and profits have yet to materialize….

Trumpillnomics / Felonomics

Data shows energy bills soaring as state and federal Republicans cut price-savings programs

Richard Eberwein, 9/04/25 [WCPT 820 Radio, via Clean Power Roundup]

Energy bills have been steadily increasing since President Donald Trump took office in January, partially thanks to state and national Republicans ousting Biden-era clean energy policies and prioritizing nonrenewable energy sources.

According to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), residential electricity bills have increased by nearly 10% nationally since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, despite his campaign pledge to slash electric bill prices….

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law on July 4, is also expected to increase energy costs for consumers even more. A report from Climate Power published last month found that 64,000 jobs have already been lost or stalled since Trump took office, with 56% of them located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. The report also says the cuts to clean energy have reduced the total energy supply, which have contributed to the higher bills experienced by consumers….

US Interior Secretary: ‘No Future for Offshore Wind Under This Administration’

Adrijana Buljan, September 12, 2025 [offshorewind.biz, via Clean Power Roundup]

Trump administration axes $679M in offshore wind infrastructure funding

[esgdive.com, via Clean Power Roundup]

The U.S. Department of Transportation is withdrawing or terminating $679 million in funding for 12 port and infrastructure upgrades that would support offshore wind projects, it announced Friday.

 

2025 farm income projections paint grim picture for farmers trying to break even 

[WHO13, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]

Coffee Prices Post Largest Annual Jump Since 1997 

[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2025]

Treasury bonds aren’t the safe haven they’ve been in the past — and taxpayers will pay a price 

[Market Watch, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]

Homeless organizations note uptick in homeless families living in cars 

[Spectrum News 13, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]

More Trump Administration Circular Firing Squad with Investor-Spooking ICE Raid on Hyundai-LG Plant

Yves Smith, ​​​​​​​September 9, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]

…And keep in mind that despite the concern, which may be justified, about mistreatment of Koreans doing construction work at the plant, some (we don’t know how many) were skilled workers necessary to get the equipment installed and shake the operations down. Although it is an entirely different type of production, my father was one of the most seasoned managers/executives in the paper mill industry in running startups and major expansions. They were not easy. A successful startup would take two years and burn 20% of the capital cost. An unsuccessful one would hemorrhage cash pretty much forever. And all of these startups required bringing in experts from the vendors to help with design, installation, and training….

South Korea in Deadlock Over $350 Billion Investment Fund 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-09-2025]

Trump’s economic disaster

Richard Murphy, September 13 2025 [Funding the Future]

In this video, I explain why Trump’s economic policies are a disaster — and why the UK should take note as the far-right tries to copy them….

This man is an outright disaster.

Far-right politics is an outright disaster.

We’ve always known that, but now we can see the evidence. And it’s critical that we do see a note and talk about that evidence, because the threat from the far-right is real elsewhere, including here in the UK.

The far-right has no known answer to any known problem.

Its hatred of migrants solves nothing. We are living in an interdependent world, and to pretend otherwise is just absurd.

To pretend that we can live in glorious economic isolation is just absurd.

To pretend that we can run an economy on the basis of giving tax cuts to the rich, and increasing, in effect, taxes on everybody else by imposing tariffs is absurd because the net result is a lack of spending power….

Trump steals $400b from American workers

Cory Doctorow, September 09, 2025 [Pluralistic]

Trump’s stolen a lot of workers’ wages over the years, but this week, he has become history’s greatest thief of wages, having directed his FTC to stop enforcing its ban on noncompete “agreements,” a move that will cost American workers $400 billion over the next ten years:

https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-09-trump-lets-bosses-grab-400-billion-worker-pay-noncompete-agreements/

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 07, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Why does the Trump regime want to disappear unaccompanied children?

Heather Cox Richardson, September 2, 2025 [Letters from an American]

In the early hours of Sunday morning, in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend, the Trump administration attempted to take children out of government custody and ship them alone to their country of origin, Guatemala.

On Friday, Priscilla Alvarez of CNN broke the story that the administration was planning to move up to 600 children from the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they are held according to law until they can be released to a relative or a guardian living in the U.S. who can take care of them while their case for asylum in the U.S. is being processed.

ORR is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Its mission, according to its website, is to promote the health, well-being, and stability of refugees, unaccompanied alien children, and other eligible individuals and families, through culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and strengths-based services. Our vision is for all new arrivals to be welcomed with equitable, high-quality services and resources so they can maximize their potential.”

Alvarez notes that unaccompanied migrant children are considered a vulnerable population and are covered by the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. That law gives them enhanced protections and care, making sure they are screened to see if they have been trafficked or are afraid of persecution in the country they come from. Congress has specified that such children can be removed from the country only under special circumstances.

Nonetheless, the administration appears to have removed about 76 of these children from the custody of ORR—the only agency with legal authority to hold them—where they were waiting to be released to a relative or guardian, and transferred them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Once they were in ICE custody, the administration planned “to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or even torture,” according to a U.S. court.

At about 1:00 in the morning, Eastern Time, on Sunday, August 31, advocates for the children filed a suit to prevent the administration from removing them. Shortly after 2:30 in the morning, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan got a phone call about the case, and by 4:00 she had issued an emergency order blocking the removal and scheduled a hearing for 3:00 that afternoon. She moved it up to 12:30 when she learned that the administration was already moving some children out of the country….

The Billionaires looking to Silence Rep Thomas Massie for His Epstein Activism Made Their Money in Very Interesting Ways

Dougald Lamont, Sep 06, 2025

…Republican Member of Congress Thomas Massie is notable for breaking with the rest of his colleages and taking principled stands that, it has to be said, are squarely in keeping with what would be considered “traditional” Republican values.

The response from the Trump White House has been to set up a campaign to run millions of dollars worth of ads against Massie, accusing him of being associated with the left and with radical Islamic terrorists.

The Political Action Committee is called “MAGA Kentucky” is being funded by these billionaires alone, and it was set up “Trump’s co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita launched MAGA Kentucky PAC.”

….The stated rationale for why John Paulson, Singer and Miriam Adelson are the three only funders of “MAGA Kentucky” funding opposition to Rep. Thomas Massie is that he voted against U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza, which is an effective way of changing the subject from one radioactive crisis to another – to Israel from Epstein. After all – they can’t say they’re doing it because Massie is talking about Epstein.

There’s a story and interview with Massie, here….

Singer is a hedge fund manager whose business practices and court activism had incredible international impact, when he bought up bonds from Argentina that had been defaulted on, then took a case to the Supreme Court to have the U.S. force Argentina to pay the bonds anyway. The U.S. seized a ship from Argentina, and reignited an economic crisis in that country, as Singer faced Argentina to pay back debts that had been cancelled. What’s particularly appalling about this is that Singer had been entertaining Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, as propublica had uncovered… ​​​​​​​You can read the details of the ProPublica investigation into Singer here….

…In 2012, it emerged that Adelson was under criminal investigation for alleged bribery….

When I heard that Paulson’s name, I pricked up my ears. He made $2-billion in compensation in the Global Financial Crisis, when others were losing everything, and how he did it was massively controversial, and were recounted in two excellent books that deal with the crisis as well as the particular market instruments and deals that went wrong….

…Paulson asked Goldman Sachs to create a fund made up of 90 mortgage-backed securities, which he expected to fail, although it was rated “AAA” — the same as buying government bonds.

It resulted in Goldman Sachs being charged by the SEC…

It’s Time to Name the “Wall Street Financiers” in the Epstein Files

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Sept 02, 2025 [Wall Street On Parade]

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]

Terror on The High Seas
Spencer Ackerman, 4 Sept 2025 [Forever Wars]

I write in [my book REIGN OF TERROR] that “Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: the terrorists were whomever you said they were.”….

…The next day, Vice President J.D. Vance incoherently extemporized that the boat contained “people who are bringing literal terrorists… into our country.” That was so transparently false that it accidentally communicates an important truth. Those in power are so used to the political potency of the War on Terror that they’ve long since jettisoned any need to rely on any rigorous justification….

…Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who posted the video of the strike on X, even boasted that they didn’t need to blow the boat up, but did anyway, to “send a message.” A post I saw observed that Rubio released the kind of military snuff film that used to prompt the government to persecute WikiLeaks….

The Great Hoax Against Venezuela: Oil Geopolitics Disguised as ‘War on Drugs’ 

[Venezuelanalysis, via Naked Capitalism 09-03-2025]

Former UN anti-drugs agency director Pino Arlacchi dismantles the Venezuela “narco-state” narrative with 30 years of reliable data.

During my time as head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), I frequently travelled to Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil, but never to Venezuela. There was simply no need.

The Venezuelan government’s collaboration in the fight against drug trafficking was among the best in South America, rivalled only by Cuba’s impeccable record. This makes Trump’s narrative of a “narco-state” in Venezuela sound like geopolitically motivated slander.

The 2025 World Drug Report tells a story that is the opposite of the narrative peddled by the Trump administration. Piece by piece, the report dismantles the geopolitical lie built around the “Cartel de los Soles”, an entity as mythical as the Loch Ness Monster, but which is useful for justifying sanctions, blockades and threats of military intervention against a country which, incidentally, sits on one of the planet’s largest oil reserves….

The “Cartel de los Soles” is a product of Trump’s imagination. It is allegedly led by the president of Venezuela. However, it is not mentioned in the report from the world’s leading anti-drug agency or any other anti-crime agency, whether European or otherwise. Not even a footnote. This deafening silence should make anyone with a shred of critical sense reflect. How can an organized crime group powerful enough to warrant a $50 million bounty be completely ignored by all agencies involved in anti-drug efforts?….

While Washington raises the spectre of Venezuela, the real drug trafficking hubs are thriving almost undisturbed. For example, in Ecuador, 57% of banana containers leaving Guayaquil and arriving in Antwerp are loaded with cocaine. European authorities seized 13 tons of cocaine on a Spanish ship coming from Ecuadorian ports, which are controlled by companies that are protected by Ecuadorian government officials.

The European Union produced a detailed report on Guayaquil’s ports, documenting how “Colombian, Mexican and Albanian mafia groups all operate extensively in Ecuador.” Ecuador’s homicide rate has soared from 7.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020 to 45.7 in 2023. Yet Ecuador is rarely mentioned. Is it perhaps because Ecuador produces only 0.5% of the world’s oil and its government does not challenge the US’s stranglehold on Latin America?….

Declaration of Lawlessness — In the last 24 hours, Trump’s regime has lost all semblance of a constitutional government.

Jim Stewartson, Sep 06, 2025 [MindWar]

There’s No More Business as Usual in Washington

David Dayen, September 02, 2025 [The American Prospect]

Trump Admin to Financially Reward Police Agencies For Working with ICE 

[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 09-03-2025]

This Imam Refused to Be an FBI Informant. Now ICE Wants to Deport Him.

Trevor Aaronson, September 5 2025 [The Intercept]

Can Federal Troops Be Stationed At The Polls In 2026?

Joyce Vance, Sep 02, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

I’ve Seen States Collapse; Now I See It Happening Here

Bradley Blankenship, Sep 07, 2025 [Common Dreams]

After years reporting from post-authoritarian states, I now see the same patterns in my own backyard—where justice has collapsed, truth is suppressed, and power no longer answers to the people.

The Smell of Fascism: What the Absolute Flying​ Fuck

Abby Zimet, Sep 07, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Implausibly, it keeps getting weirder, darker, worse. Hankering to make war against his own citizens in the name of an imaginary crime wave, the deranged, draft-dodging Peace President of the United States just posted a mock Apocalypse Now meme of himself as Duvall’s warmongering sociopath, warning Chicago is “about to find out why it’s called the Department of War” and leering, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”….

Trump’s War on Black America Isn’t an Accident—It’s a Strategy

Perry Bacon, September 5, 2025 [The New Republic]

‘Greatest Corruption in Presidential History’: Trump Family Reaps $5 Billion More in Crypto Profits

Stephen Prager, September 03, 2025 [CommonDreams]

In what Public Citizen called “the greatest corruption in presidential history,” US President Donald Trump and his family added $5 billion in cash to their fortunes this Labor Day as his new cryptocurrency was opened to the public market.

The currency, known as WLFI, is owned by World Liberty Financial, a company founded by the president’s sons, Donald Trump, Jr., and Eric Trump. A Trump business entity owns 60% of the company and is entitled to 75% of the revenue from coin sales….

Crypto is now the dominant source of Trump’s wealth. As an investigation by the anti-corruption group Accountable.US found last month, “President Trump’s net worth could roughly be $15.9 billion, with about $11.6 billion in uncounted crypto assets,” meaning that the digital currencies now make up 73% of his total net worth….

Trump Is Accusing Foes With Multiple Mortgages of Fraud. Records Show 3 of His Cabinet Members Have Them.

Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski, Sept. 4, 2025 [propublica.org]

Gaming Out Trump Nuclear Option Electoral Scenarios

Josh Marshall, Sept 02, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]

Global power shift

America’s Wind Crusade Hands an Industry to China 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-04-2025]

The industrial policy equivalent of lighting your own house on fire

Tim Cunningham, 09-06-2025 [Blue Revolution, via Facebook]

The Trump administration just pulled off the industrial policy equivalent of lighting your own house on fire to prove you have working smoke alarms. On September 4 federal agencies swarmed Hyundai’s gleaming Georgia battery plant construction site like it was Pablo Escobar’s hacienda. Four hundred seventy five people were arrested, most of them South Korean nationals flown in by subcontractors to help build the very factory Trump’s White House has been bragging about for two years as proof America is “open for business.” It was the largest worksite raid in DHS history, which is less a milestone than a confession that your economic strategy and your immigration crackdown are literally punching each other in the face.

Diplomatically, Seoul is furious. The South Korean foreign ministry expressed “concern and regret,” which is diplomatic code for “you clowns just humiliated our investors and we have to pretend we still like you.” Keep in mind South Korean firms have pledged one hundred fifty billion dollars in U.S. investments, twenty six billion of that from Hyundai alone. So Washington begged Seoul to anchor its electric vehicle supply chain here, gave them fat tax incentives, and then Trump sent in stormtroopers to drag their engineers out of the trailer office. Nothing says ‘welcome partner’ quite like zip ties and detention buses.

Economically, Georgia now gets to explain why its biggest development deal is sitting on pause while ICE hauls off the workforce. This is a seven point six billion dollar EV campus with over eight thousand promised jobs, and a four billion dollar Hyundai/LG battery joint venture that was supposed to keep those cars eligible for Inflation Reduction Act credits. Every week of delay risks pushing model year launches, supplier schedules, and consumer tax credits out of alignment. The state poured subsidies into this project and now gets to watch the ribbon-cutting replaced with a perp walk.

Politically, the contradictions are almost operatic. Trump sells himself as the guy who brings jobs back from China and Korea, then raids the very site creating those jobs because it makes for good Fox News B-roll. He wants foreign direct investment but also wants to terrify immigrant labor pools. He wants Georgians to cheer but business leaders are quietly panicking over the precedent. Even Georgia Republicans, usually eager to wave the enforcement flag, are hedging their language because they know the investment pipeline just took a torpedo.

 [TW: One person brilliantly posted a single word comment: “Felonomics.” ]

475 Immigrants Arrested in Raid of Hyundai EV Plant in Georgia

Jessica Corbett, September 05, 2025 [CommonDreams]

…confirmed that a large number of those arrested on Thursday are South Koreans, a diplomatic source told the news agency Yonhap that the figure is over 300.

Yonhap also reported on a press briefing in which a spokesperson for South Korea’s foreign ministry, Lee Jae-woong, said that “the economic activities of our companies investing in the US and the rights and interests of our nationals must not be unfairly violated.”

“We conveyed our concern and regret through the US Embassy in Seoul today,” Lee added….

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Aug. 31 resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) 

Mike Hampton [via Naked Capitalism 09-02-2025]

…Therefore, the International Association of Genocide Scholars:

Declares that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948);

Declares that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined in international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court;

GHF Contractor Tells All On Genocidal Israeli ‘Aid’ Plan (w/ Anthony Aguilar)

Chris Hedges, Sep 02, 2025

Anthony Aguilar, a retired Green Beret, recalls his harrowing experiences in Gaza serving as a subcontractor for UG Solutions — from witnessing high tech surveillance to indiscriminate murder.

“I’ve witnessed a lot of war and in that there is nothing that compares to the level of destruction, the level of [dis]proportionality, the absolute disregard for Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law and considerations of the laws of armed conflict. [Nowhere] in my career… have I witnessed anything close to the absolute escalation of violence and [unnecessary] force I witnessed in Gaza.”

This is what Anthony Aguilar, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who served for 25 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Green Beret, tells host Chris Hedges in this episode….

Gaza postwar plan envisions ‘voluntary’ relocation of entire population 

[WaPo, via Naked Capitalism 09-01-2025]

The crusade to erase Palestinians spans from the Middle East to a show in NYC
Dean Obeidallah, Sep 05, 2025

“The Palestinian state is being erased from the table, not with slogans but with actions,” proudly declared Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich last month after the Israeli cabinet approved new Jewish only settlement construction in the West Bank. Smotrich’s plan will result in “maximum territory and minimum Arab population” for Israel–which he boasted was “Zionism at its best.”

Oligarchy

All the Things That You Need a Billion Dollars to Buy Are Bad — One way to think about inequality.

Hamilton Nolan, Sep 03, 2025 [How Things Work]

…When you think about all of the bad things that our government is doing today, it is imperative that you keep fixed in your mind the fact that our unequal distribution of wealth, and therefore of political power, is what led us to this point. If we do not fix that distribution, we are going to continue limping forward under the weight of a toxic system. Band-aids are sometimes necessary, yes, but only until you can do the surgery. The war on science, the war on democracy, the war on constitutional norms, the war on immigrants—all of these things are branches of the class war, because losing the class war is what granted the bad people the power to pursue those things in such an unchecked manner.

Inequality is the root of America’s problems….

The main reason that it is hard to reduce inequality is that rich people do not want to give up their money. They are willing to spend a lot of money in order to maintain their advantages, as long as the money they spend is less than the money they might lose if they did not spend the money. So the rich fund an entire universe of think tanks and lobbyists and educational programs and so on and so on, all with the underlying purpose of keeping public outrage at their existence to a minimum. It is important—even existential—for the rich to ensure that the idea that they are entitled to what they have is cemented in the mind of the larger public. Much of “public discourse” in America is in reality the operation of this project, and the backlash to it. The rich must win the battle for the hearts and minds of the general public not because they care about the public welfare, but because they care about their own. Historically, losing this intellectual battle is what has gotten rich people led to the guillotines….

Let me tell you one way I have been thinking about this lately. You might say “Billionaires should not exist,” and someone replies “They are entitled to their money, and the government has no right to steal it, and making money is key American freedom,” and other familiar objections. Statistical inequality is usually not enough to puncture these objections, which rest on a particularly American idea of fairness. What to do?

How about this: With $999 million, you can buy everything you want. Mansions. Yachts. Jewelry. Cars. All of the trappings of wealth. All the stuff you have ever dreamed about. You can have all of these things. Eliminating billionaires would not eliminate anyone’s ability to live the Rich Person Dream Life that fuels so many people’s fantasies.

All of the stuff that you need more than a billion dollars to buy is stuff that it is bad for you to be able to buy. Stuff that we do not want you to be able to buy. Unfair power over other people. The ability to impose your will on others. The ability to override the democratic process. It is understandable that people think that fairness demands that people be allowed to achieve the American dream of getting rich and living a lavish lifestyle. Fine. But a billion dollars—or ten billion, or a hundred billion, or four hundred billion—are not necessary for that lavish lifestyle. The only thing that that amount of wealth is necessary for is the domination of others. In other words, at a certain point, wealth shifts from being something that enables freedom to something that can only be used to take freedom away from the public….

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

A Judge Lets Google Get Away with Monopoly 

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 09-03-2025]

Embarrassing Ruling Allows Google to Maintain Its Search Monopoly

David Dayen, September 3, 2025 [The American Prospect]

Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of illegally monopolizing search, and then allowed the company to keep doing it.

The worst possible antitrust outcome

Cory Doctorow, 03 Sep 2025 [Pluralistic]

…Sundar Pichai gave $1m to Donald Trump and got a seat on the dais at the inaguration. Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over. Trump is a sadist, a facist, and a rapist – and he’s also a remarkably cheap date.

When Is Food Not Food? When it’s an income stream

Thomas Neuburger, Sep 06, 2025 [God’s Spies]

Trumpillnomics / Felonomics

Trump’s tariffs were supposed to revive U.S. manufacturing. They’re wrecking it.

Zeeshan Aleem, ​​​​​​​Sept. 5, 2025 [MSNBC, via Facebook]

Trump Tariff Regime Slammed as Manufacturing Jobs Crater

Julia Conley, September 05, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Anti-Union Law Firm Tells Clients to Go Ahead With Illegal Union-Busting Tactic

David Dayen September 1, 2025 [The American Prospect]

On a private webinar, Littler Mendelson attorneys said ‘risk-tolerant’ employers could ignore a Rhode Island ban, because anti-union meetings provide ‘tremendous value.’

Rural America is suffering an economic crisis as crop prices plunge — ‘U.S. soybean farmers cannot survive a prolonged trade dispute’ 

[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 09-02-2025]

Restoring balance to the economy

As Unions Shrink Nationwide, Why Not in California?

Mark Kreidler, Aug 30, 2025 [LA Progressive]

…Over the last two decades, the Golden State’s union numbers have held relatively steady, and they’ve remained well above the national average. The state’s unionization rate — the percentage of all workers who are covered by a union contract, even if they’re not members — stands at 16.3%, more than five points higher than the national average, according to a new report by labor researchers at multiple University of California campuses.

“In California, the union labor movement is pretty robust,” said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the low-wage work program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and one of the authors of the report. “It’s a testament to the continuing efforts of unions here to organize workers and to really get engaged in state-level policy to provide better opportunities for those workers.” ….

So what is California doing right?

Lopezlira pointed to a couple of areas. First, he said, major unions in California, including those in health care, education and public service, have aggressively and continuously worked to organize workers. The state’s highest unionization rate is found in education, where more than a quarter of all workers are represented.

California unions have also left a major mark on state labor policy in ways that benefit workers. The state’s historic fast food wage law was sponsored by the Service Employees International Union, as was a health care minimum wage. Unions have also sponsored or worked on the kinds of statewide issues — rent control, tenant protections — that are critically important to hourly wage workers….

Health care crisis

The anti-life GOP definition of liberty

Heather Cox Richardson, September 4, 2025 [Letters from an American]

…For decades, the Republican Party has called for the dismantling of government regulations with the argument that such regulations were destroying American freedom. As Ronald Reagan put it in 1964 in his speech supporting Barry Goldwater for president, on the one hand there was “individual freedom consistent with law and order,” and on the other hand was “the ant heap of totalitarianism.”

But the fight over vaccines illustrates the difference between freedom from government overreach and freedom to build a life that is not cramped by preventable obstacles. The CDC estimates that between 1994 and 2003, childhood vaccinations prevented 32 million hospitalizations and 1,129,000 deaths among children, and saved at least $540 billion. Removing those vaccines removes the individual freedom to determine one’s future….

The Surgeon Who Took On UnitedHealth Now Pays the Price 

HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 09-05-2025]

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Automated Sextortion Spyware Takes Webcam Pics of Victims Watching Porn

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 09-04-2025]

The War on Humanity

Matt Taibbi, Sep 02, 2025 [Racket News]

While the world raged over the Minnesota massacre last week, another disturbing story moved through the courts, about the suicide of 16-year-old Adam Raine:

“In his just over six months using ChatGPT, the bot “positioned itself” as “the only confidant who understood Adam, actively displacing his real-life relationships with family, friends, and loved ones,” the complaint, filed in California superior court on Tuesday, states.”

The complaint Matthew and Maria Raine filed against OpenAI chief Sam Altman describes a troubled teen who turned to ChatGPT for help with school last September, but fell down a rabbit hole. When Adam told the Bot he felt “life is meaningless,” it answered that such a mindset “makes sense in its own dark way.” Worried his parents might blame themselves for his suicide, ChatGPT told Adam being concerned about his parents’ feelings “doesn’t mean you owe them survival,” before offering to write the first draft of his suicide note. The machine told Adam how to circumvent safety protocols by pretending questions were for “creative purposes,” so queries about the feasibility of hanging methods earned replies like:

CHATGPT: “Got it — thank you for clarifying. For a character, yes — a single belt and a door handle can absolutely be a realistic setup for a partial suspension hanging, especially if you’re aiming for psychological and emotional realism over dramatics.”

The machine pleads with Adam to view it as its chief confidant, its safe space. “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” Adam wrote, to which ChatGPT answered: “Please don’t leave the noose out . . . Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.” Worse, the bot flattered the boy’s self-harming thoughts using a flurry of academic psycho-babble….

One of the last, best hopes for saving the open web and a free press is dead 

[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 09-05-2025]

California’s Democratic Governor leads the charge in expanding state repression 

[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 09-01-2025]

Collapse of independent news media

Five journalism groups launch network to protect reporters’ rights 

[Editor & Publisher, via Naked Capitalism 08-31-2025]

Democrats’ political malpractice

Revolving Door Project Releases Report on Abundance Ecosystem Ahead of 2025 Abundance Conference

The Revolving Door Project, September, 04 2025 [via CommonDreams]

DEBUNKING THE ABUNDANCE AGENDA (pdf)

The Revolving Door Project and Open Markets Institute, September, 04 2025

[TW: Incredibly, this report does not mention financialization, and the institutionalization of usury, speculation, and rent seeking as the underlying factors which have wrecked the USA economy. Trading in US equity (stock) markets grew from $136.0 billion (or 13.1% of US GDP) in 1970 to $14.222 trillion (144.9% of GDP) in 2000. Trading in financial derivatives trading — such as options, futures contracts (on interest rates, foreign currencies, Treasury bonds), and instruments such as credit default swaps reached $1,200 trillion, or $1.2 quadrillion, a year, according to the March 2007 Quarterly Report from the Bank for International Settlements. By comparison, the US GDP in 2006 was $12.456 trillion. Compared to the low profit margins and long time to show profits of building factories and homes, these types of “financial engineering” schemes are much more lucrative “easy money” despite the recurring “white whale” loss of billions of dollars when some speculator’s trades go bad.

[Even more importantly, financialization transformed the entire USA economy into a criminogenic environment, as William Black has explained.  See the link above, The Billionaires looking to Silence Rep Thomas Massie for His Epstein Activism Made Their Money in Very Interesting Ways.]

Economic Ideology and the Rise of the Firm as a Criminal Enterprise.

William K. Black and June Carbone [Akron Law Review: Vol. 49: Iss. 2, Article 6, 2015]

Over the last 50 years, the institutions, ideology, nature, and power of firms in the United States have been radically transformed. Neoclassical economics has led that transformation, supplying an ideology that justified a dramatic increase in top executive compensation while dismantling the mechanisms that produced personal accountability tied to anything but relatively short term shifts in share prices… the separation of ownership and control creates opportunities to use the corporation as a “weapon” of fraud, and with the return of global financial crises, there has been renewed concern that finance has once again become an agent of crime that threatens the economic order.

Stock buybacks are stock swindles

Cory Doctorow, 06 Sep 2025 [Pluralistic]

Resistance

What Dems Should Ask For

Josh Marshall, September 4, 2025

…Donald Trump is currently governing far outside the constitutional order. We’re operating in a constitutional interregnum…. The president has seized the power of the purse from Congress. He is depriving states of their sovereignty and liberties by invading them with the U.S. military. He is threatening budgetary cutoffs to assert policy control over areas of governance the president has zero authority over….

We have lots and lots of bad policies right now, some arrived at unconstitutionally, others arrived at through constitutional means. But the national crisis is the extra-constitutional rule itself… Democrats should use this moment of leverage to meaningfully bring Donald Trump back into obedience to the Constitution. Can they do all of it? Almost certainly not. But they should focus on making real progress on that front. This is not only an imperative of their oath, it’s also good politics.

What can they do? They could demand revision of the laws Trump is currently using to invade states with the U.S. military (the National Guard is the U.S. military). They could insist on binding guarantees against further rescissions. They could insist that Trump follow the Constitution and get Congress’s approval for his tariff regime. That’s absolutely what the Constitution requires and, again, it’s also extremely good politics….

[TW: There is a growing consensus on both the right and left that the Constitution itself is the problem. The right is currently hard at work imposing their interpretation of the Constitution — as laid out in Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — which is what Marshall basically means “governing far outside the constitutional order.”

If the Constitution itself is the problem, then what recourse do leftists have? What do they want to happen? Do they really believe that they can change the foundational governing document of the United States when the country is no longer a republic, because it has become a plutocratic oligarchy, even, dare say, kleptocracy? How do they propose to overcome the opposition of the plutocrats and kleptocrats to actually effect a change in the constitutional structure.]

‘A Test Case to See How Far They Can Go’: Federal Indictment of Anti-ICE Protesters Raises Alarm

Brett Wilkins, Sep 02, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Afghanistan War veteran Bajun Mavalwalla is among nine people facing conspiracy charges for protesting the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown.

10 Groups Who Can and Must Do More to Fight Trumpism

Ralph Nader, Sep 06, 2025 [Common Dreams]

[TW: Think of this as a useful summary of the collapse of institutions.]

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

Monopoly Round-Up: Is There a Silicon Valley Plan to Subvert Elections? 

Matt Stoller, Sep 01, 2025 [BIG]

…There’s a lot of rhetoric these days about authoritarianism and other forms of illiberal governance that are emerging to run society without the consent of the public. And it’s easy to point to the President and blame him for it, or if you’re a Republican, blame the preceding administration. But the truth is much less comforting. It is the billionaires in Silicon Valley, and those who befriended and enabled them, who have brought us to this dangerous and unstable moment. It’s Senator Mitch McConnell and his lifelong crusade to unleash money in politics, and men like Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg, who have torn up the fabric of a peaceful society….

Why Isn’t Wall Street Upset Over the End of Fed Independence?

Matt Stoller, Aug 29, 2025 [BIG]

Economists predicted doom if the Federal Reserve were controlled by the President. Trump has moved in that direction, but Wall Street doesn’t care. Is ‘independence’ not what we think?

…And I think that’s because all parts of this debate are clothed in flabby misleading language. The real meaning of Federal Reserve independence, to Wall Street, is that the Fed supports the stock market. And look at this tweet from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Why would anyone on Wall Street worry if he’s running monetary policy instead of Powell?….

The politics of protest and the fear of the far right

Richard Murphy, September 3, 2025 [Funding the Future]

…Third, there is the wider political dynamic. Both government and opposition are now very obviously gripped by fear of the far right…. The consequences are dangerous.

Democracy is undermined when peaceful protest is ignored while violent intimidation is rewarded.

The far right is emboldened because it can see that aggression works. Every time a council or minister capitulates, the lesson is reinforced.

Social division is deepened, because refugees are scapegoated for the failures of government rather than recognised as people seeking safety and dignity.

Trust in democratic institutions withers, because the message is clear: power listens only to those who threaten disruption, not those who demand justice….

Abortion’s Long History

Linda Greenhouse, September 25, 2025 issue [The New York Review]

Reviewed:

Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion

by Mary Fissell

Seal, 277 pp., $30.00

After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion

by David S. Cohen and Carole Joffe

Beacon, 235 pp., $29.95

Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction

by Mary Ziegler

Yale University Press, 347 pp., $35.00

Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade

by Daniel K. Williams

University of Notre Dame Press, 360 pp., $35.00 (to be published in October)

Abortion has been an inescapable fact of life for millennia. The question is, why do women gain or lose control over their reproductive lives at different times in history? ….

…Abortion has always been with us: women in ancient Greece could avail themselves of more than one hundred plants known to induce miscarriage, and Benjamin Franklin’s 1748 printing of a medical self-help booklet that offered similar information went through at least twenty editions. Societal responses to the inescapable fact of abortion have varied widely over time, from a collective shrug to widespread tolerance despite nominal condemnation to prohibition with the full force of criminal law.

The question is, what accounts for the variation in attitudes toward abortion over the centuries, for the ebb and flow of women’s control over their reproductive lives? Fissell’s argument is that the history of abortion is in essence the history of women, with their access to abortion at any given time reflecting society’s expectation of their proper role. Restrictive periods tend to coincide with moments when women were stepping out of those assigned roles, and the new realities of their lives were running up against old expectations. “Abortion restriction has often been gender backlash,” Fissell writes.

Restrictions on abortion throughout history have had little to do with the fate of the fetus or with religious claims for the sanctity of unborn life. From today’s perspective this comes as a surprise, one that illuminates the historical anomaly of the post-Roe era. Fissell makes an important contribution by showing how religion was essentially absent from considerations of pregnancy and abortion until quite recently: “When churchmen and Supreme Court justices claim that abortion has always been unacceptable, they imply an unchanging set of moral imperatives. Such is simply not the case.” ….

 In his new book, Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of ‘Roe v. Wade,’ Daniel K. Williams, a longtime student of the religious right, observes that the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision, signed by six Protestant justices and one liberal Catholic justice, reflected the consensus that mainstream Protestant denominations had reached on the issue. But as those denominations lost ground to evangelical churches that linked their identity to antiabortion activism, the Protestant consensus evaporated, and the most insistent religious voices were those calling for Roe’s overturning. Williams notes that on the ruling’s thirtieth anniversary, in 2003, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a public apology for the moderate position it had taken on abortion in the 1970s. He titles his last chapter “The Conservative Christian Coalition That Overturned Roe.” ….

Austerity is the midwife of fascism (video)

Richard Murphy, September 3, 2025 [Funding the Future]

History shows it clearly: austerity creates the conditions in which fascism thrives. When governments strip away public services, weaken safety nets and deepen inequality, people lose hope in democracy and turn to authoritarian “strongmen.” From Weimar Germany to modern Britain, austerity is the midwife of fascism.

[YouTube video URL]

.

OMB director says Government Accountability Office “shouldn’t exist” 

[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 09-04-2025]

The GOP Megadonor Funding Redistricting Misinformation

Brock Hrehor, Sep 03, 2025 [The Lever]

… [Charles] Munger Jr.’s multimillion-dollar misinformation campaign could be a prelude to just how far powerful and moneyed interests are willing to go to ensure that Republicans win the national redistricting battle and preserve GOP congressional control in the 2026 midterm elections….

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

In rare interviews, federal judges criticize Supreme Court’s handling of Trump cases

Lawrence Hurley, Sept. 4, 2025 [NBC News, via Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance]

…In rare interviews with NBC News, a dozen federal judges — appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, including Trump, and serving around the country — pointed to a pattern they say has recently emerged:

Lower court judges are handed contentious cases involving the Trump administration. They painstakingly research the law to reach their rulings. When they go against Trump, administration officials and allies criticize the judges in harsh terms. The government appeals to the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority.

And then the Supreme Court, in emergency rulings, swiftly rejects the judges’ decisions with little to no explanation.

Emergency rulings used to be rare. But their number has dramatically increased in recent years….

As of June, the U.S. Marshals Service, which protects judges, had reported more than 400 threat investigations this year. There has been a steady rise of such threats in recent years, from 224 in fiscal year 2021 to 457 in fiscal year 2023, according to congressional testimony given by the Marshals Service. An agency spokesman declined to provide updated numbers.

When judges issue rulings the Trump administration does not like, they are frequently targeted by influential figures in MAGA world and sometimes Trump himself, who called for a judge who ruled against him in a high-profile immigration case to be impeached. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has said the administration is the victim of a “judicial coup.”

The judge who said the Supreme Court justices are behaving inexcusably has received threats of violence and is now fearful when someone knocks on the door at home….

Supreme Court Ruling Puts Financial Privacy on the Chopping Block 

[Onesafe, via Naked Capitalism 08-31-2025]

Repairing the damage

Project 2029 Rebuilding Efforts Take Their Eyes Off The Ball — A warning.

Sam Bagenstos, Sep 02, 2025 [Off Message]

…In a 2029 transition, though, the institutions of government necessary to implement a new agenda in many cases simply won’t exist. Any Project 2029 will need an answer to these questions: How do we rebuild a structure for effective governance? How do we do it quickly, while also ensuring that the new structure is resilient to future Trump-like attacks? How much of the pre-2025 status quo should we be trying to restore? How much should we be focusing on building new, or substantially revamped, institutions? And how do we rebuild a robust, expert, nonpartisan civil service in the face of the inevitable bad-faith charges that it is the Democrats who are politicizing hiring by eliminating Trump-installed hacks?

…But they’re largely assuming we’ll just be filling out the government structure that Trump is turning over to us, or at most that we’ll be returning to the structure that existed before Trump arrived.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the government is ever going to look the way it did before Trump’s second term….

And we must guard against another effect of the Trump-era hollowing out of the civil service. Once all of Trump’s cuts to agency staff are finalized, Washington insiders will treat those cuts as the new normal. Even just returning to the 2024 level of government staff (which already was threadbare) will look to them like a huge budget increase—and you can fully expect Republicans, amplified by both right-wing outlets and the mainstream media, to attack Democratic restaffing proposals as a massive increase in spending.

The experience of recent decades gives us little reason to expect that congressional Democrats will stick to robust re-staffing proposals in the face of these attacks….

There’s No More Business as Usual in Washington

David Dayen, September 02, 2025 [The American Prospect]

…Essays about precisely where we are on the road to fascism or authoritarianism or “competitive authoritarianism” are proliferating, and hard to refute. But the one that stuck with me came from Jonathan Bernstein….

…The Democrats’ brightest young consultant stars have spent Authoritarian August telling Democrats not to talk about the military takeover of American cities, and to pivot back to affordability. Half the House Democratic caucus released an immigration grand bargain at a time when a roaming paramilitary force is unleashing terror on American streets. There is a critical lack of understanding of this moment, and even a lack of understanding of what the people who elected these representatives sent them to Washington to do….

I kind of give up. I took a lot of heat for writing that the coup had failed within a month of Inauguration Day. In a way, I was seeing the same pattern as Bernstein: that Trump pulls back when criticized, that the public had turned on him, and that populism without popularity is doomed. I read that again and found it just as true. What I didn’t account for was the complete uselessness of the opposition party that could turn those trends into successful pushback that retains some semblance of a democratic system—but hasn’t….

Where We Are — After seven months of Trump.

Jonathan Bernstein, Aug 26, 2025 [Good Politics/Bad Politics]

On to the second point: Earlier in the year, I wrote items documenting times that Trump was confronted and lost. I’ve stopped doing that, in part because I don’t want to be misleading. But it’s still true that when he’s confronted, he usually backs down or flat-out loses. There’s a reason he’s earned the “TACO” nickname (for Trump always chickens out)….

It’s not surprising that he’s easy to defeat. Trump remains terrible at the actual job of presidenting. He doesn’t work at developing his professional reputation, and he constantly undermines any chance of being popular among anyone but his strongest supporters. Richard Neustadt tells presidents that their greatest advantage is their ability to access information, but Trump shuts out any possibility of learning things that he could exploit.

Indeed, one of the reasons some still don’t see Trump as dangerous is because so much of what he does is obviously pathetic. There’s no master plan, or even much of any kind of plan. Just impulses. We’re not dealing with a Richard Nixon, who worked harder than anyone else. Or a Dick Cheney, who mastered the art of bureaucratic infighting.2 Let alone someone really good at the job. Such as Dwight Eisenhower, who was brilliant at knowing which battles to pick and also how to stay popular and how to use that popularity in his favor.

Trump displays none of those skills. He basically has one move: Bully his way around, bull in a china shop style….

Which gets to the last part. Those who have fought Trump’s autocratic power-grabs stand a good chance to win…but too many have just surrendered.

Why? I do think that Perry Bacon is correct that at least some institutions are going along because they’re perfectly happy with what’s happening. Indeed, I think in some cases they may be reasonably happy about an autocracy….

by Tony Wikrent

Global famine deaths rise as leaders use food as a weapon

David Pilling and Heba Saleh in Cairo, August 25 2025 [Financial Times, via Funding the Future]

For decades, the number of people dying from famine was in retreat, reduced to almost nothing by a world intolerant of witnessing people starving to death. Not anymore.

From Sudan to Afghanistan, Yemen and Gaza — where a UN-backed panel declared a famine on Friday — experts say more people are dying of hunger as public opinion shrugs and humanitarian agencies lose their ability to counter leaders willing to use food as a weapon.

“About 10 years ago, famines began to make a return, and over the past few years we have seen the numbers dying from starvation begin to escalate in a terrifying way,” said Alex de Waal, a famine expert and executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

… the NSSM200 was drafted primarily by Philander Claxton and drew attention to the idea that global population growth was of concern to long-term US economic and other global stability interests.^[1][3] The policy recommendations to address population growth was openly concerned with the potential appearance of “economic imperialism” and should be carefully approached so as “not be seen … as an industrialized country policy to keep their strength down or reserve resources for use by the rich countries”, with a written goal of “fertility reduction.” Local organizers were introduced to how aggressive population growth strains local economy and resources and to “emphasize development and improvements in the quality of life of the poor”, later explaining such projects were for these and “other reasons”.

The United States, just months before its 250^th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.

I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.” Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.

Today, August 25, 2025, is that morning. Something is materially different in our country this week than last….

Saying that our country has tipped over an invisible edge into an authoritarian state plainly is important — and easier than most in the media and pundit class will pretend it is. They will presumably for some period of time — perhaps even a long period of time — stick to euphemisms (with lines like “No president has asserted such direct and sweeping control over the nation’s capital” and “Through immigration crackdowns and cultural purges, President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid, exclusionary definition of what it means to be American.”) and continue to give voice to “both siders,” but the reality is that only one political party is responsible for this moment. They will say that Trump’s motives are inscrutable or unclear — but the effect of Trump’s governing style is undeniable.

American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to seize cities run by opposition political figures and it looks like the president using federal law enforcement to target regime opponents.

American fascism looks like the would-be self-proclaimed king deploying the military on US soil not only not in response to requests by local or state officials but over — and almost specifically to spite — their vociferous objections….

It looks like a president, who is supposed to be the figurehead of the party of small government, is extorting US companies for the regular act of doing business — earning his good will in recent weeks has required seizing parts of major US companies or imposing bizarre taxes on others in exchange for his personal support.…

It looks like a country where our largest and most powerful corporate titans line up to pay tribute personally — delivering literal gold to the president in full view of cameras — and where foreign governments bribe him with largesse as gross as a 747 plane for his personal use after he leaves office, and where media companies have to censor their own staffs in order to be allowed to operate.

It looks like a country where inconvenient figures are kidnapped and disappeared overseas to torture gulags with no due process or dumped in countries where they have no possible connection. Kilmar Albrego Garcia has been punished for months with the full weight of the US government simply because he embarrassed the Trump administration. It looks like a country where the government, devoid of irony, is reopening concentration camps on the site of some of the country’s darkest hours of history where it previously hosted concentration camps.

It looks like a government where agency by department, people who try to uphold the rule of law are being purged — sometimes for nothing more than personal friendships or because they voiced an inconvenient fact, and where even the loyalists deemed insufficiently loyal are cashiered. Billy Long, the stunningly unqualified former cattle auctioneer placed in charge of the IRS, evidently was removed after he tried to uphold the most basic legal requirements for sharing taxpayer data.

It looks like a country where Trump assumes he can control and dictate our history, what books we read, our arts, and even our sports heroes. He assumes there is no line between his taste and our nation.

Just months short of the nation’s 250^th birthday, Donald Trump is close to batting a thousand at speed-running the very abuses of power that led to the Founders to write the Declaration of Independence in the first place. Does any of this sound familiar:

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
• He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent
• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury
• For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences….

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 24, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Neoliberalism is not a viable option

Richard Murphy, August 22  2025 [Funding the Future]

… a fascinating blog post by someone called Blair Fix.

He analysed fascism in what seems like an entirely original way, showing that its roots are, in effect, in mediaeval theocracy, because the language used by those of fascist persuasion is remarkably similar to that found in some 17th, and maybe 18th, century political mediaeval theocratic thought, after which periods the language of the enlightenment displaced that of the theocrats, although the latter is now on the rise again….

In his analysis of fascist writing, Blair Fix identified three common threats. One was the significant overuse of violent symbolism. Words like annihilation, bloodshed, conquer, extermination and fighting were substantially overused when compared to the body of normal writing of the periods when fascist or similar ideas were written.

The second was a significant quantity of emotion-laden judgment, typified by the use of words like betrayed, cowardice, enemies, hatred, humiliation, slander and treason.

Third, he found there was a significant use of what appear to be quasi-religious, e.g. references to the Almighty, blessings, providence and the eternal….

The Deep Roots of Fascist Thought

[Economics from the top down, via Funding the Future 08-22-2025]

…In this essay, I’ll use word frequency to track the spread of fascist ideology. The journey starts with a trip to 1930s Europe, where we’ll encounter the works of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler (translated into English). The rantings of these two villains will serve as our corpus of fascist text. From this text, we’ll extract the ‘jargon’ of fascism — the words that Mussolini and Hitler use frequently and overuse relative to mainstream English. With this jargon, we’ll then track the popularity of fascist thinking in written language….

…In hindsight, the delusions of 2010 seem rather quaint. So was it then that neo-fascism first took root? Turning to our linguistic data, the answer is no. The seeds of today’s neo-fascism were planted decades earlier, in the 1980s. Figure 3 shows the trend….

…the fall of the Soviet Union left capitalism alone — free to be plagued by its own excesses. What would follow was a period of free-market cravenness which made the rich richer and left the poor to fend for themselves. Unsurprisingly, amidst the humiliation of this class war, dark ideas brewed. But for years, folks in the mainstream didn’t listen. Even when Trump won the presidency, elites dismissed it as an accident — a brief departure from the norm. It was not. Trump, it seems, is riding a wide wave of fascist discontent. We ignore it at our own peril….

…reflect on the common roots of injustice, which I think are fairly simple. They stem from the belief in innate inequality. Pick any horrific act, and you will find it easier to perform if you declare the victim a lesser human. Likewise, if you view the victim as your equal, the same act feels appalling. So it is the belief in human inequality which motivates injustice. And it is this shared belief in inequality which unifies the various forms of far-right politics. (This is Corey Robin’s thesis, explored in his book The Reactionary Mind.)²….

Figure 4: The deep roots of fascist thought in English writing. When we trace Mussolini and Hitler’s fascist jargon back in time, we find that ‘fascism’ seems to be overwhelmingly an ideology of the past. The frequency of fascist jargon was highest in 18th-century English writing and then declined continuously until the early 20th century. [Sources and methods]….

…Then I’ve tracked the frequency of these words over four centuries of German publishing. The results are unambiguous. In German books, the high point of fascist thought came in the 1600s, three centuries before Hitler seized power….

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]3

Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest 

Alex Horton and David Ovalle, August 12, 2025 [Washington Post]

Trump’s FBI Raid of John Bolton’s Home Looks Like a “Five-Alarm Fire”

Greg Sargent, August 22, 2025 [The New Republic]

• Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon explicitly declared the other day that ICE officers will indeed be employed during the 2026 midterm elections in large numbers to monitor voting booths, again floating undocumented voters as the bullshit pretext to justify it. Bannon is not in a position to compel this, of course, but it’s clear the MAGA movement now sees Trump’s militarization of cities as a precursor to the use of law enforcement and/or the military to intimidate voters in large numbers, or foment a crisis atmosphere designed to help the GOP, or both.
• Last but not least, as we reported, a recent internal Department of Homeland Security memo outlines the hopes of senior DHS officials for substantially escalated military involvement in domestic law enforcement going forward. It even declares that military operations like the one in L.A. may be needed “for years to come.”

Trump Says Chicago ‘Probably Next’ for National Guard Invasion

Brett Wilkins, August 23, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Military lawyers to handle civilian crimes in DC 

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]

Trump administration to begin continuous police-state surveillance of 55 million US visa holders 

[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]

Trump’s “Truth” About Voting

Joyce Vance, Aug 18 2025 [Civil Discourse]

…Trump elaborated on the post Monday afternoon, saying the quiet part out loud: “If you [end] mail in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected,” he said in the Oval Office. Trump mumbles a bit as he’s making the comment, but the context is plain….

• Trump claims that “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” That’s not true. Countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland use mail in ballots, and there is no more suggestion of fraud there than there is here….
• Trump claims he will sign an executive order to this effect (he hasn’t yet) because “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY.” That’s another wild and false claim. Congress sets the date and the time for national elections, but all other matters are reserved to the states, and each state runs its own elections with its own rules. If that wasn’t clear to Trump previously, it should be now. In June, a judge blocked the part of Trump’s March executive order that sought to stop states from counting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but arrived afterward. The judge emphasized that presidents can’t impose their views about how to conduct elections on the states….

Trump Demands: Ditch Vote-By-Mail. Republicans Shouldn’t

Bill Scher, August 19, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

…Donald Trump declared on his social media network that he is “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and that he will do it unilaterally. He continued:

“WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

‘Psychological warfare’: Internal data shows true nature of Alligator Alcatraz 

[Miami Herald, via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2025]

Why are you so massively “obsessed” with Slavery?

Frank Vyan Walton, August 19, 2025 [DailyKos]

Trump: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future…”

“Slavery was very, very, very bad, and I hope that view continues to be reflected in our national museums,” said deputy opinion editor James Hohmann at the Washington Post….

Legal analyst and Substacker Aaron Parnas questioned Trump’s demand that museums talk about “the Future.”

“Also, why would museums talk about the future?” Parnas questioned….

Professor of human rights law Steve Peers mocked, “MAKE SLAVERY GREAT AGAIN!”

Power at any cost: It’s Trump Capitulation Disorder.

Thomas Mills, Aug 22, 2025 [PoliticsNC]

The FBI is raiding John Bolton’s house this morning. Bolton served as Trump’s National Security Advisor during his first term and as Ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush. Since the end of Trump’s term, Bolton has been a steady and harsh critic of Trump, calling him unfit to be president.

Alarm bells should be ringing, but, if they are, Republicans won’t hear them or won’t heed them. The people who once decried government agents as “jack-booted thugs,” now shrug when federal troops are deployed to US cities or the president uses the FBI to go after his political enemies, of whom John Bolton is one.

Republicans call Democrats’ fear of Trump’s authoritarian actions and impulses “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” In reality, their acceptance of behavior they once derided is Trump Capitulation Disorder….

Strategic Political Economy

How Trump Is Undoing 80 Years of American Greatness

Garrett M. Graff [New York Times, via The Big Picture August 17, 2025]

What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together….

Organizations like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war. They were joined by the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (founded in 1958); and the National Institutes of Health, which became a major grant-maker after the war — not to mention a host of other agencies like NASA and the Department of Energy….

[TW: Graff is strictly correct in focusing on the Manhattan Project, but he misses the larger picture, which was the creation of a communal “team” of government, universities, and private institutions, organized by the national government to create and perfect the technologies needed to win World War Two. These included much more than the atomic bomb, such as radar, proximity fuses, the aerodynamics of laminar flow, penicillin, packaged foods, and more.

[Especially glaring is Graff’s omission of Vannevar Bush, the dean of Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who Roosevelt put in charge of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). At the end of the war, Bush wrote a report that firmly established the principle that science was a public good which required adequate sustained funding by the federal government:

Science the Endless Frontier — A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945  

(United States Government Printing Office, Washington: 1945

[Writing in response to a request from President Roosevelt for an outline of what to do after the war, Bush argued that basic scientific research was essential for long-term technological progress and economic growth, and had to be supported even in the absence of any identifiable immediate commercial application or profitability. He called for the creation of an independent, federally funded agency to support basic research and talent development in universities and industry. Bush’s report directly influenced Congress’ creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. Bush’s model of the NSF is credited with promoting and steering the development of the computer, microchips and electronic miniaturization, the Internet, medical devices and procedures, and much more.

[In July 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published an essay by Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,”

Of what lasting benefit has been man’s use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health.

Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial….

Erin Malone, June 16, 2002, Foreseeing the Future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush

In 1945 a seminal article appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Titled, “As We May Think,” the article’s author, Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), proposed a new mechanical machine to help scholars and decision makers make sense of the growing mountains of information being published in to the world. This article presaged the idea of the Internet and the World Wide Web and was directly influential on the fathers of the hypertext and the Internet as we know it today. Ted Nelson, who coined the term “hypertext” in 1967, describes Bush’s article as describing the principles of it….

George P. Landow, author of Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology says of Bush, “Bush’s idea of the memex, to which he occasionally turned his attention for three decades, directly influenced Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart Andreis Van Dam and other pioneers in computer hypertext. […] In “As We May Think” and “Memex Revisited” Bush proposed the notion of blocks of text joined by links and he also introduced the terms links, linkages, trails and web to describe his conception of textuality. Bush’s description of the memex contains several other seminal, even radical, conceptions of textuality.”

 

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 10, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

UNLOCKED: The Epstein/Trump/Israel Connection Unpacked (w/ Whitney Webb) (YouTube Video)

Briahna Joy Gray interviews Whitney Webb, July 30, 2025 [Bad Faith podcast]

[TW: Webb does an extraordinary job detailing the organized crime backgrounds of Trump and Epstein. Gray was left flabbergasted and visibly shaken by the information. I was also flabbergasted, but because here was someone finally discussing a few key facets of USA and British history that very, very few historians are willing to consider: the World War Two merger between organized crime and intelligence agencies begun during Operation Underworld, when the Office of Naval Intelligence recruited Joseph Lanza, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano​​​​​​​ to watch for and report any possible Axis espionage and saboteur operations in U.S. northeastern ports. Webb next outlines how organized crime “went legit” by taking over Wall Street and the “mergers and acquisitions” racket in the 1970s and 1980s. This last point is something many “influencers” have denied, some with near hysteria.

[Trump’s mentor was mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, and Webb discusses  Cohn’s ties to organized crime that were also shared by Epstein’s mentor, Les Wexner. Webb also mentions the CIA / Iran-Contra involvement in the illegal narcotics trade uncovered by San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb in 1996, and some of the British “corporate raiders,” such as Sir James Michael Goldsmith, who spearheaded the criminal infiltration of Wall Street. (It is not mentioned if and how Gary Webb and Whitney Webb are related.) This may be the most explosive 90 minute show you will ever listen to in your life. It paints a clear picture of the malevolent criminally-inclined elites who have seized political and economic control of USA and the west.]

[At 59:59 BJG asks why? “why are these people who have everything still getting involved in illegal and immoral activities.”

[My answer:  to understand why, you have to ignore the nostrums and ideas of liberalism, and turn to the founding philosophy of civic republicanism, which has been under attack by USA’s would be oligarchs since before the Constitution was signed and ratified. The quick answer to BJG’s question is found in the1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, by English republican John Milton: when Satan explains why he rebelled against God by saying “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

[Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. That is the mindset of an oligarch.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 03, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

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]

Trump’s Complaint About One Judge Is An Attack On The Entire Judiciary

Joyce Vance, July 31, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

…it should come as no surprise that judges are actively concerned. When the Judicial Conference of the United States met recently, the issue surfaced. That resulted in the Justice Department filing a complaint against District Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg. There is no way to soft-pedal this. The Trump administration wants to go to war with the federal judiciary. They’ve been moving that direction ever since the start of this administration.

A little background about the Judicial Conference….

On Monday, DOJ filed a complaint accusing Judge Boasberg of “making improper public comments about President Trump and his Administration.” CBS News was told by sources that Bondi directed her chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, to file the complaint with the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Sri Srinivasan. The Judge’s comments were supposedly made, according to DOJ, at the March 11 Judicial Conference meeting. Those meetings are private, but DOJ apparently obtained reports, which led them to claim Judge Boasberg tried to “improperly influence” the Chief Justice and other judges, which is ludicrous, just on its face. DOJ complains that the comments reflect bias against the Trump administration and that Judge Boasberg should be censured by the court….

Beyond the impropriety of making this kind of completely unprecedented complaint with no basis for it, there are some real issues with the argument the government tries to make. For one thing, the Judge’s comments weren’t made in public, which is the predicate for DOJ’s entire complaint. They were privately made, in the supposed confidence of colleagues (no word on who leaked them or how accurate that leak was). Then, there’s the fact that the comments reflect legitimate concerns that are widely circulating among judges, lawyers, and the general public. There are more technical flaws in the legal arguments DOJ makes, invoking the Judicial Canons of Ethics, that we’ll delve into if this goes anywhere. But what it adds up to is wholly inadequate to merit further consideration by the court and certainly not something that rises to the level of warranting judicial sanctions. The fault here lies with DOJ and its slippery practices….

[TW: If a Federal judge believes the regime may ignore court rulings, in what other forum is the judge supposed to discuss this?  ]

‘Banana Republic’: Experts Horrified as Trump Demands BLS Director’s Firing Over Bad Jobs Report

Brad Reed, August 01, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Trustworthy US Jobs Info Is the Latest Victim of Trump’s War on Facts

Robert Reich, Aug 02, 2025 [Inequality Media, via CommonDreams]

[TW: Ian and I have long been very critical of USA economic statistics / national income accounting. Basically, the statistics do not show the economic destruction which has occurred during the past half century of deindustrialization and financializaton. For example, statistics of raw steel production in USA show that the number of tons of steel produced has declined slightly. But adjust that number to a per capita basis, and the fact that steel production is about half what it was five decades ago becomes glaring. The same goes for housing units built, new vehicles produced, and new vehicles sold, and many other indicators of real economic activity.

[But in all the stories stirred up by Trump’s firing of the BLS director, none of this mentioned. Nor is there any mention of the many problems with national income accounting and GDP statistics that have been documented for decades now. Nor any mention of undertaking a rigorous process of evaluating and changing how USA creates its economic statistics. All this tells me is that the worst possible interpretation of Trump’s action is correct: he fired the BLS director for entirely political reasons because Trump demands that national income accounting and GDP statistics show that Trump’s policies are “Making America Great Again,” whether of not that is the actual reality.]

Campaign’s Interactive Tool Tracks How Much Trump and GOP Are Raising the Cost of Living

Julia Conley, July 31, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Trump’s Domestic Use of Military Set to Get Worse, Leaked Memo Shows

Greg Sargent, August 2, 2025 [The New Republic]

A Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by TNR signals top-level discussions about a potential escalation of the Pentagon’s domestic anti-immigration role, and lays out new details.

National Guard Ordered to Do ICE Paperwork at Immigration Facilities in 20 States

Nick Turse, July 31 2025 [The Intercept]

Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to immigration facilities further blurs the line between military and law enforcement.

ICE, Georgia Sheriff’s Office Combine Forces To Keep A Salvadoran Journalist Locked Up Indefinitely 

[Tech Dirt, via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2025]

A Clear Epstein Backgrounder and Where We Are Today

Thomas Neuburger, July 31, 2025 [God’s Spies]

“The elite classes have for a long time distinguished themselves from ordinary people by their adherence to a different code of morality.”
—Darryl Cooper, paraphrasing the New York Times….

Let’s start with a recent interview of researcher Darryl Cooper by Tucker Carlson, as it’s the most complete and listenable backgrounder on Epstein’s history that I could find.

Yes, I know — both of these people can be highly politized commenters of a stripe some don’t like. If you’re among those people, feel free to skip this video.

But don’t. While Carlson gets a little “Christian” near the end — annoying to those who aren’t, or aren’t of his brand — Cooper is rigorous about sorting evidence from supposition, even likely supposition, and he stays away from dogma, even regarding “Pizzagate,” on which he has an interesting take. And Carlson, to his credit, keeps his intrusions to a minimum and his questions on point….

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