By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Why Resistance Alone Will Fail
Les Leopold, February 14, 2025
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-10-2025]
[X-Twitter, Feb 9, 2025]
If he found actual fraud like he claims, where is the law enforcement? Where are the investigators, lawsuits, charges? Isn’t it a little odd that they claim to have found trillions of dollars worth of fraud but nobody is being charged and even the “crime scene” is not taken over by the feds to avoid tampering with the evidence? Unfortunately this seems like a political power play where no crimes have been found but they make enough noise that the public will accept the destruction of the government infrastructure, assuming it’s all rotten.
Speed Up the Breakdown: The future of the government depends on how far the DOGE dynamo spins.
Quinn Slobodian, February 15, 2025 [The New York Review]
For the last month, the US opinion-making class has stared agog as Elon Musk and his minions have stormed the engine room of the federal government…. Buffaloed onlookers have groped for precedent….
None of the analogies are very persuasive. This is because we are witnessing something new: the convergence of three strains of politics that have never simultaneously been this proximate to power. Those projects come from different but related places: the Wall Street–Silicon Valley nexus of distressed debt and startup culture; anti–New Deal conservative think tanks; and the extremely online world of anarchocapitalism and right-wing accelerationism. Within the new administration, each strain is striving to realize its desired outcome. The first wants a sleek state that narrowly seeks to maximize returns on investment; the second a shackled state unable to promote social justice; and the third, most dramatically, a shattered state that cedes governing authority to competing projects of decentralized private rule. We are watching how well they can collaborate to reinforce one another. The future condition of the government—and by extension the country—depends on how far the dynamo spins….
Musk’s hirelings by these lights are less latter-day squadristi than radicalized management consultants. Instead of brickbats and lugers, they wield red pens to mark layoffs and offload inventory. We can take Musk at his word when he said in 2021 that the government is a corporation, but a special one that has a monopoly on violence and cannot go bankrupt. If, as he has claimed, private actors are better at allocating resources than public ones, it stands to reason that a state should be shorn of redundant staff and services….
The second way to understand the DOGEstorm is not through Musk but rather through the more systematic approach of Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau…. Vought has said that America is in the “late stages of a complete Marxist takeover” that needs to be reversed aggressively by putting government employees “in trauma,” treating them as “villains,” and sending “power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.” Trans rights are a particular trigger: Vought has denounced the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions.”….
The third program that underpins the present moment is often described as a project of right-wing accelerationism. That term is usually associated with Curtis Yarvin…. Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.”….
…For sympathetic observers, however, the goings-on in Washington are inspiring the same exhilaration that the anarchocapitalist economist Murray Rothbard felt when he watched the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was, he said, “a particularly wonderful thing to see unfolding before our very eyes, the death of a state.”
Monopoly Round-Up: On Ending the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
Matt Stoller [BIGBIG, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-10-2025]
Last week, Elon Musk and the new Trump Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought stopped all work at the commission, including enforcement of rules, litigation, as well as supervision and examination activity. They are planning to shutter the headquarters and presumably will be laying off most of the staff. By shuttering the CFPB, Trump is not just going back to a pre-financial crisis status quo, but to something actually weaker than that. There is essentially no longer any Federal enforcement of consumer protection rules for financial products….
We can now expect rampant fraud and cheating in banking and fintech, not just a scam here or there, but regular losses of life savings by people who followed the rules, illegal foreclosures, random seizures of the working capital of small businesses, abuse by debt collectors, and routine deception by even respected financial firms.
Elon Musk’s stated goal with X is to create an ‘everything app,’ which you would use to communicate, engage with social media, pay for things, hail cabs, shop, and so forth. All the big tech monopolists want to be the ‘everything app.’ The CFPB was proposing to treat these companies with payment systems as, well, payment systems, and subject them to the same supervisory treatment that banks have. Now that’s out the window, so big tech firms have a competitive advantage over banks….
[D]estroying the bureau strikes me as a long term strategic error for the banking sector and big tech. The banks were already losing to Silicon Valley, and now they are at a regulatory disadvantage to boot. More fundamentally, this shutdown breaks a basic deal. I worked in the House during the great financial crisis, and the arrangement was that the banks would accept some mild oversight via the CFPB, and in return they would get a multi-trillion dollar bailout and make excessive profits. I didn’t like that deal and encouraged the member I worked for to vote against it, but it was forced on liberals by Barack Obama. (This deal was an intra-Democratic Party arrangement; conservative Republicans were in thrall to the banks and wanted nothing but foreclosures and bailouts. And they still do.)
It was an egregiously terrible choice, one that liberals couldn’t acknowledge because then they’d have to admit a whole lot of uncomfortable truths, notably that Wall Street is a malevolent force, that Obama was a malevolent leader, and that the Dodd-Frank reform bill passed in the wake of the crisis, rather than ending bailouts, was a joke. But now they will be faced with the bracing truth, that there is no good faith negotiations with dominant firms demanding coercive governing power. Either Silicon Valley bankers rule America, or the public does. But there’s no middle ground.
Capture of U.S. Critical Infrastructure by Neoreactionaries (pdf)
anonymous [Naked Capitalism, February-5-2025]
…This memo outlines four alarming developments that transcend partisanship. I. II. III. IV.
- Musk-aligned operatives have seized control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), purging career civil servants and installing loyalists with ties to Musk’s private ventures.
- DOGE has deployed unvetted hires—many under 25 years old—who now wield de facto control over sensitive government functions without security clearances. These individuals, drawn from Musk’s orbit and Silicon Valley’s neo-reactionary (NRx) network, operate without legal oversight or accountability.
- DOGE has gained read-write access over Treasury pipes and federal payment systems, granting Musk direct influence over the financial infrastructure of the U.S. government. This unprecedented control over money flows creates a national security risk and a personal power lever for Musk.
- The congressionally mandated divestment of TikTok has been delayed, with reported Chinese interest in Musk as a buyer. If successful, Musk would control not just X (formerly Twitter) but also the largest platform shaping youth political discourse—further concentrating his influence over public opinion.
Rather than operating as an ally of the Trump administration, Musk has hijacked its ambitions for his own purposes. His rapid takeover of federal infrastructure mirrors the broader ambitions of the neoreactionary (NRx) movement—a small group of Silicon Valley elites who reject democracy and seek to install a “CEO Monarch” to rule by technological and financial dominance. This network includes Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, David Sacks, and Curtis Yarvin, among others. Once considered fringe, purveyors of this ideology have now been embedded into the core of government operations….
How Trump’s Firings “Paralyze” the NLRB
[Mother Jones, February 14, 2025]
The shake-up is particularly alarming because—by leaving only two members on the five-member Board—the Trump administration has eliminated a quorum, effectively preventing the NLRB from ruling on cases at the federal level.
