Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 6, 2025

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 6, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself

Nikita Mazurov, Matt Sledge, March 29, 2025 [The Intercept]

Searches of phones and other electronics are on the rise for those entering the U.S. Take these steps to help secure your devices.

Managing Unexpected ICE Visits: Best Practices for Employers

March 19, 2025 [IndustryWeek]

Trump not violating any law

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

‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges

[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]

No Person Shall Be Deprived… 

John Ganz, April 02, 2025 [Unpopular Front]

On Monday, the Trump administration admitted that it had deported a Maryland man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia “because of an administrative error” to El Salvador where he was thrown in the nightmarish CECOT prison. In 2019, Abrego Garcia received protected legal status from an immigration judge who determined he could be tortured if he was returned to his home country. He was denounced by a secret informant as a member of MS-13, a characterization Abrego Garcia denies and local police in Maryland did not believe. But, of course, the entire regime is lying and claiming that Abrego Garcia was a “convicted” gang member. What they are really saying is, “We can declare people unprotected by the law and deport them by fiat.”

But now that Abrego Garcia is no longer in U.S. custody, the government says there’s nothing they can do — and technically they are right: A petition for habeas corpus, a Constitutionally-defined process where the imprisoning jurisdiction to produce justification of detention, only applies to someone who is held under U.S. authority. This is where I strongly suspect that this was not an “error” as such, but part of a deliberate policy experiment. What this regime is attempting to do is to find a way around habeas corpus protections: You spirit someone across the border quickly before their lawyer can file a petition, dump them somewhere—say, a concentration camp run by a friendly client state—and then say, “oopsie, no more habeas for them.” ….

How Donald Gets the Constitution All Wrong

Tom Hall, April 2, 2025 [La Progressive]

The recent deportations of “enemy aliens” from countries with whom we are not at war, and countries which have not invaded us, ignored the actual language of the law which the Donald’s lawyers pretend justify his Orders….

…We are told that the Donald is “relying on” the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. But has anyone told you what those acts actually say, and provide for legally?

The 1798 Congress was the 5^th Congress since the ratification of the Constitution and formation of the new government. Many of the men (it was all men) who drafted and ratified the Constitution were still alive and knew what they had meant by ratifying the Constitution. In the spring and summer of 1798, they passed three laws dealing wth aliens (www.archives.gov-1798 Aliens Acts). They knew what aliens were, and they knew what the powers of Congress, the Presidency and the Courts were.

The first law, Signed by President John Adams, on June 25, 1798, provided that the President could order an alien expelled from the United States, if the President believed the alien was dangerous to, or had committed crimes against the nation. Section I of the act provides that the President’s Order had to be served the alien with an order telling him to get out of the USA, and setting a reasonable time for the alien to do so. The same section provided for aliens to have an opportunity to present a case against removal, and apply for permission to stay. The alien was allowed to “prove…by evidence” that he did not pose a risk. The same section also provided that an alien who had been ordered deported, but had not left, could be imprisoned and permanently barred from citizenship “on conviction” of such a charge.

Missing from this first section of the act was any authority for the President to abduct people from their homes, college campuses or sidewalks and deport them without any hearing, trial or conviction….

PATRICK LAWRENCE: American Freefall 

[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 04-03-2025]

The extent to which the U.S. has embarked on a departure from reality is only a question for empires in their waning decades.

Trump makes history by pardoning a corporation 

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Criminal Corporations Are Not People, But Trump Just Pardoned One Anyway

Brett Wilkins, April 03, 2025 [CommonDreams]

With Detention of Beloved Farmworker Organizer, ICE Comes for the Labor Movement 

[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 04-03-2025]

The Great Grovel: How Trump forced elite institutions to bend to his will

John F. Harris and POLITICO Staff, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Trump’s Attacks on Press Freedom Are Paving the Way for Authoritarianism 

[Vanity Fair, via Naked Capitalism 03-30-2025]

Trump Executive Order Calls for End of Paper Checks for Taxpayer and Government Payments by Sept. 30; Industry Official Snort About Deadline; What About User Payment Charges?

via Naked Capitalism 03-31-2025]

Resistance

Perkins Coie gets 500 lawfirms and 300 retired judges to help battle Trump

Bill Addis, April 5, 2025 [DailyKos]

Over 500 law firms have filed an amicus brief (PDF) in support of Perkins Coie’s case against the U.S. Department of Justice, the named defendants, et. al..

The firms signing on take up 12 pages of the 24 page brief, filed on Friday. As evidence, it lists Trump’s executive orders against WilmerHale, Jenner & Block and Paul Weiss, and the specific suspension of security clearance and contracts at Covington & Burling.

The lead law firm filing the brief is Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP….

Big Law Is Winning in Court—Now Is Not the Time to Fold

John Relman, April 06, 2025 [Common Dreams]

The law firms fighting back against Trump’s executive orders are winning, and those cutting deals with the White House are suffering irreparable damage behind the scenes.

If the Chamber of Commerce is Listening . . .

Gerard N. Magliocca, May 31, 2019 [reposted 04-05-2025 at Balkanization.blogspot]

…The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which is the statutory authority cited by the President, grants two types of authority. One gives the President the power to freeze the assets of foreign nationals and/or foreign governments. The other gives the President the power to suspend commerce (or types of commerce) with another nation. Nothing in the Act suggests that the President is given the power to levy tariffs on another nation. Indeed, there are many reasons to doubt that such a power exists.

First, Congress has delegated tariff authority in other statutes that do not apply here. For instance, the President can (and has) imposed tariffs on China in response to unfair trade practices based on clear statutory authority. The lack of such an express delegation in the IEEPA implies no tariff authority.

Second, there appears to be no precedent for a President using the IEEPA to impose tariffs. (I say appears because I cannot find an example. If there is one, then I would like to know.)
Third, there is no indication from the legislative history of the IEEPA that Congress intended to give the President the authority to raise tariffs.

Fourth, there is no judicial authority for the President’s proposed tariffs. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s careful analysis of the IEEPA in Dames & Moore v. Regan is considerably narrower than the President’s view….

In conclusion, the proposed Mexican tariffs are illegal. Interested parties should prepare to file suit.

DOGEbags at work

Rule by Contractor

Brett Heinz’ April 3, 2025 [The American Prospect]

DOGE is not about waste and efficiency—it’s about privatization.

DOGE’s Pentagon Budget Cuts Don’t Touch Elon Musk’s SpaceX

Nick Turse, April 3, 2025 [The Intercept]

The “total cuts” to the Pentagon amount to “800 million in wasteful spending,” Hegseth said. But these savings, which some experts doubt will even materialize, are trivial when it comes to the Defense Department’s immense $850 billion budget. And there’s one obvious contractor that hasn’t faced a single cut so far: Musk’s space technology firm SpaceX.

A day after his announcement, Hegseth hosted a “private meeting in the secretary’s office” with Musk, who donated almost $300 million to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign — after which the new president tapped Musk to spearhead the administration’s budget-cutting efforts. While Musk has seen his electric car company Tesla face immense consumer backlash and financial headwinds, SpaceX — now the top Pentagon contractor by market valuation — is poised to reap increased rewards from Hegseth’s department.

DOGE Accesses Federal Payroll System Over Objections of Career Staff 

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

The CDC Has Been Gutted 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Trump and DOGE Defund Program That Boosted American Manufacturing for Decades 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 04-03-2025]

The Expert Who Kept Eye Drops From Blinding You Was Fired Yesterday 

[Vanity Fair, via Naked Capitalism 04-03-2025]

HHS fires entire staff of program that helps low-income people afford heat and air conditioning 

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 04-03-2025]

Elon Musk and Tesla: A resource list for activists 

[Red Flag, via Naked Capitalism 04-03-2025]

Strategic Political Economy

Monopoly Round-Up: Tariffs, Abundance and Why America Can’t Build

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 03-31-2025]

[TW: Important. Grab a cup of coffee or tea, sit down, and read the entire post. Stoller’s critique of the Democrats’ current economic thinking is especially important.]

…It’s clear the U.S. has a serious problem in building. Why? And what happened?

The answer is pretty simple. In the 1980s, after 20 years of debate over the U.S.’s roll in the world, we decided that the U.S. shouldn’t make things anymore. We decided to become a ‘service’ economy, focused on design, research, and finance, leaving the grubby work of physical stuff to others….

For 35 years after World War II, the constituency groups who built the New Deal arrangement had a broad understanding that financial consolidation led to fascism; the hot money flows of the 1920s, in the hands of private bankers, had helped raise the stock market, but also bring Hitler to power and break the world. The things required to make a democratic society, such as well-paid workers, communities, domestic production and investment, a robust educational system, a hearty small business apparatus, lots of small banks and farms, et al, are just not consistent with high stock prices and the consolidation of economic power they imply. Power, they knew, corrupts.

Economists have retroactively given this policy framework a name, “financial repression,” meaning that those who had financial capital were heavily taxed and controlled. While the government prints dollars, there is another group that sought to manage bonds, stocks, and credit instruments, without public checks: Wall Street. And that group, enfeebled during the Great Depression but waiting in the wings, bided their time.

Finally, in the 1970s, a group of people on the right and left, today known as neoliberals, attacked New Deal controls over finance and the corporation as silly. They argued, in an age of “microchips, robots, and computers,” mucking around with making things like t-shirts and steel was foolish.

This argument came into politics through both sides of the aisle. The Reagan administration was run by Wall Street, with men like banker William Simon and Chicago Schooler Robert Bork organizing policy. But it was preceded by Jimmy Carter’s deregulation of shipping, banking, trains, buses, trucking, airlines, energy, and even skiing, and his appointment of Wall Street-friendly Fed Chair Paul Volcker.

In 1980, the Democratic-led Senate Joint Economic Committee published a report titled Plugging in the Supply Side. Lloyd Bentsen, who later became Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary during the NAFTA fight, authored it. Everyone from Paul Tsongas, to Gary Hart to Robert Reich bought this frame, as did magazines like The New Republic. By 1980, neoliberalism had become consensus. Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter’s ostensibly “liberal” nemesis, fought to go further than Carter in ending rules on airplanes, and Ralph Nader aligned with Citibank on deregulating finance. Many of the unions, with the exception of the Teamsters, bought into deregulation….

Yet, Trump doesn’t believe in the necessary part of altering our national strategy, which is to move power from Wall Street to people who make things. It’s not just foreigners who screwed America, it’s also high finance. Trump is not displacing the domestic constituency groups who are dedicated to oligarchy, he’s knee deep in crypto, private equity, finance, and real estate. He’s destroying instead of reforming the institutions of a productive society, like universities and schools, public health bureaucracies, unions, and so forth….

…On the other side, Thompson and Klein, who both built their careers lauding the Obama administration, are proposing a path for the Democrats in the book Abundance, where they argue that liberals need to rededicate themselves to building by reforming zoning laws. It’s a short book, mostly reprints of their columns. And it’s basically the platform for what would have been the Kamala Harris Presidency…. Overall, there’s not much substance to the book, it’s a reprint of neoliberal arguments from Democrats in the early 1980s…  this particular book is part of a set of arguments from thinkers and economists, like Matt Yglesias, Noah Smith, Marc Dunkelman, et al, who think that power in America is “largely in the hands of growth-and-change skeptical professionals,” aka homeowners, environmentalists and doctors. Oligarchy and Wall Street, things like patents, monopolies, and the like, are irrelevant to these guys. If Trump doesn’t want to displace Wall Street, Klein and Thompson just ignore it altogether….

…Klein and Thompson, and the Democratic establishment writ large, just will not deal with the real reason the U.S. doesn’t build. And that’s our choice to prioritize “number go up” and the social hierarchy of financiers we have fostered who thwart producing more. Fewer homes means that housing values appreciate, and in a world where asset appreciation is everything, that’s not a solvable political problem. Ultimately, Americans don’t want a world where asset valuations are everything. But that’s the world we’re in….

[TW: I remember clearly during the Bush Jr. regime I engaged in debates on DailyKos with people who saw no problem with deindustrialization and commented that I was crazy for harping on things like steel production.]

“Abundance” Is How Dems Lose To Trump

David Sirota and Aaron Regunberg, April 04, 2025 [The Lever]

Last week, Abundance co-author Ezra Klein went viral on social media. In a widely shared video clip from Jon Stewart’s podcast, Klein described the maddeningly bureaucratic process for deploying rural broadband funding under the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure bill — a procedure so cumbersome that barely any of the entities seeking these grants have even finished the application process, years after the bill’s passage.…

The Kafkaesque nature of Biden’s broadband application process was not, in fact, the result of “everything bagel liberalism,” pressure from doctrinaire leftists, or Democratic politicians’ penchant for governing through checklists, which Klein and his co-author, Derek Thompson, frame in Abundance as the key obstacles to housing security, decarbonization, and other critical 21st century needs.

Rather, this burdensome procedure was created at the insistence of vote-withholding Republican senators and their cable industry donors — companies seeking to block funding to upstarts that might challenge their regional telecom monopolies or force them to provide affordable prices for broadband. After they loaded up the funding legislation with a Byzantine process, telecom giants and GOP-led states — not protocol-obsessed lefties or overly rigid bureaucrats — then manufactured a monthslong fight over what constitutes “affordable” rates, delaying quick funding for the build-out….

In fact, the takeaway from the broadband tale is that the biggest obstacles to efficiency and abundance are often corporate power and its corrupting influence on our politics — factors typically downplayed or unmentioned in the Abundance Discourse….

Meanwhile, there’s also the recurring problem of monopoly. A 2022 Johns Hopkins study spotlighted how more and more local markets are dominated by fewer and fewer housing construction giants. These home-building behemoths are making higher profits while choosing to build fewer homes than they once did, knowing that there aren’t as many competitors to fill the gap. In all, the study estimated that corporate concentration has resulted in $106 billion less housing volume every year….

Shortages of affordable baby formula, eggs, prescription medicine, ammunition, airline tickets, hamburgers, medical supplies, and hospital services are all connected to oligarchs and corporate donors using campaign cash to make sure that for decades there was a lack of consistent and robust enforcement of antitrust laws. Those same donors also used their political influence to create a zealous regime of restrictive patents to enforce profit-maximizing scarcity in technology and pharmaceuticals.

New Projected Cost of Trump-GOP Tax Cuts for the Rich: ‘Staggering’ $7 Trillion

Global power shift

Carney says Canada cannot rely on U.S. any longer, must achieve ‘economic autonomy’

New Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney:

“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.”

“The eighty-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership—when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of good and services—is over.

“While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.” ….

The American Age Is Over: The United States commits imperial suicide

Jonathan V. Last, April 03, 2025 [The Bulwark]

[TW: This is some damn good writing — and I use “damn” precisely, because The Bulwark is the platform for never-Trump conservatives such as Bill Kristol and Mona Charen. When will they begin discussing how Trump was the inevitable result of conservatism? ]

Comac C949: China unveils quiet supersonic jet with 50% longer range than Concorde 

[SCMP, via Naked Capitalism 03-30-2025]

Racist Allied Underestimation Of Russia’s Abilities Led To Its Win 

[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 04-01-2025]

The problem of organizing weak states; and why Africa needs a new model of Pan-Africanism  

[Africanist Perspective, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Netanyahu Promises the “Final Stage” of Gaza Genocide Will Lead to Implementation of “Trump’s Plan”

Jeremy Scahill, March 31, 2025 [Drop Site]

Hours after Hamas announced it had accepted a ceasefire plan, drafted by negotiation mediators from Egypt and Qatar, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out his plans on Sunday for what he called the “final stage” of his genocidal campaign in Gaza. “Hamas will lay down its weapons. Its leaders will be allowed to leave. We will see to the general security in the Gaza Strip and will allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration,” Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday, referring to President Donald Trump’s threat to seize Gaza and remove Palestinians from their land. “This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time.” Netanyahu also boasted, “We have an alliance with the greatest superpower in the world.” He later said the Israeli cabinet had voted in favor of intensifying the military assault on Gaza.

NEWS GRAVEYARDS: HOW DANGERS TO WAR REPORTERS ENDANGER THE WORLD 

[Brown University Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs., via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Chart: Number of Journalists and Media Workers KIlled, per War

Marked for Assassination: Gaza Journalists on Israeli Hit List Refuse to Stop Reporting

Sharif Abdel Kouddous, March 31, 2025 [Drop Site]

The day after the assassination of Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat, the Israeli military openly celebrated his killing. A correspondent for Al Jazeera Mubasher and a contributor to Drop Site News, Shabat was killed on March 24 when the Israeli military targeted him as he was driving in his car in Beit Lahia. He was 23 years old. Earlier that day, journalist Mohamed Mansour of Palestine Today was killed, along with his wife and son, in an Israeli airstrike on his home in Khan Younis.

On its official X account the following day, the Israeli military confirmed it had “eliminated” Shabat, claiming they had “exposed” his role within Hamas six months earlier….

Private groups work to identify and report student protesters for possible deportation 

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 03-31-2025]

Russia / Ukraine

Secret History: ‘Bombshell’ NYT Report Uncovers True Depth of US Involvement in Ukraine War 

[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 03-31-2025]

Oligarchy

On oligarchy: ancient lessons for global politics 

Edited by David Edward Tabachnick and Toivo Koivukoski [Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2011]

Chapter 7. Oligarchs and Democrats.

Leah Bradshaw

…In the descent of regimes catalogued in Book 8 of Plato’s Republic, oligarchy sits squarely in the middle, between timocracy (the rule of the warrior types) and democracy (the rule of the many). At the extremes of the hierarchy are the best regime, the utopian rule of philosopher-kings, and the worst, tyranny. Interestingly for us con-temporary liberal democrats, oligarchy is identified by Aristotle as a better form of rule than democracy in some respects.

I want to explore the connection in this paper between oligarchy and moderation. Starting from from the categorizations in Plato and Aristotle, I compare the rule of the rich in this classical context with John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, in which Locke identifies the pursuit of wealth and property as the foundation of the modern representative state. I believe that Locke really elevates the oligarchic state to the best regime, counting upon state protection of money and property to provide political stability. The paper will argue that Locke’s project fails, ultimately, for reasons identified in the classical teachings of Plato and Aristotle. Pursuit of wealth may be a reasonable goal, when it is understood as a necessary support for political community, but the sanction of unlimited acquisition leads to political ruin. It does so, first, because it prohibits the cultivation of moderation and in fact disparages moderation as an unnecessary restraint upon entrepreneurship, and it does so, second, because the push toward accumulation bursts the boundaries of the political community and pushes toward empire and global markets. As we well know in the West, the notion that markets will regulate themselves, and that the pursuit of wealth will automatically result in a more peaceful and just world, is under serious assault….

Socrates’ condemnation of oligarchy is harsh. Oligarchies allow for wide differences between the rich and the poor. An oligarch is a sort of ‘squalid man,’ seeking always to maximize his own profit, with no care for the broader public good. ‘The stingy man is a poor contestant when with his private means he competes for some victory or any other noble object of ambition in a city; he’s not willing to spend money for the sake of good reputation in such contests. Afraid to awaken the spendthrift desires and to summon them to an alliance and a love of victory, he makes war like an oligarch, with a few of his troops, is defeated most of the time, and stays rich.  Measured against the self-sacrificing courage of the timocrat in time of battle, the oligarch appears an effete and cautious type, preferring to increase his stores of private wealth, even at the cost of his city. The oligarch is really anti-political, using the city for the enhancement of private ends….

The ancient caution against the accumulation of wealth is not one taken seriously by modern liberal democrats for the most part. John Locke, in the seventeenth century, lays the foundations for representative government grounded in the endorsement of unlimited accumulation. Rejecting the classical typologies of politics (rule of the one, the few or the many, based on a variety of ends such as honour, money, power), Locke as we know begins from the premise that we as human beings are by nature solitary and acquisitive creatures. The earth was given by God to all mankind in common, yet Locke establishes that all men have a God-given right to property. Because every man has a property in his own person, ‘the labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. ’36 Labour affords an entitlement to private property by mixing human ingenuity and effort to nature. God gave the world to men in common, but it is clear in Locke that God gave it especially to the ‘industrious and the rational….

The Worst Political Decision Since Nixon Taped Himself Committing Crimes

Les Leopold, April 01, 2025

How the Democrats handed Trump the election on a bitcoin-plated platter—and most still don’t think they did anything wrong….

The attraction to wealth is an even bigger problem. Far too many Democrats are enamored by the rich and famous. They went to school with them. They lean on them for campaign funds. They plan to join them when they leave public office. The wizards on Wall Street and in corporate America form the class they see themselves as part of, or in the class they aspire to….

​​​​​​​Many probably discounted their worries about Trump, thinking that the rich and powerful would tame him. Because that’s where the Democratic Party thinks real power lies. The financial class wouldn’t let Trump wreck the economy, would it? Surely, the corporate class wouldn’t back down on DEI programs or forgo their access to inexpensive immigrant labor. The wealthiest Democratic law firms aren’t going to cave, right? Wouldn’t the elites prevent Trump’s excesses the way they did last time? Hmmm.

Along the way, most Democrats lost their anger. They lost their fight. They lost their connection to the working people who have seen their way of life crushed after 40 years of neoliberalism.

The Existential Threat of Ultra-Billionaires

Ryan Cooper March 25, 2025 [The American Prospect]

A handful of rich guys will burn human society to the ground rather than pay a dime in tax.

[TW: “Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.” — John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) ]

Divergence From the Interests of Capital

Hamilton Nolan, April 01, 2025 [How Things Work]

One of the most interesting things about the current Trump administration is the fact that we have a Republican president who is boldly leading the nation down a path that is contrary to the standard interests of capital. I do not say this in a complimentary sense. This is interesting in the same way that the methods and predilections of a prolific serial killer are interesting. The actions are so far outside the norm that is is fascinating to try to understand why they are happening; and, by understanding them, we might be able to think more clearly about where this is all going, before everyone is dead.

Generally speaking, throughout the history of modern America, the government has worked on behalf of business. Foreign policy has been conducted in service of business interests, and domestic policy has been conducted with an eye towards generating maximum prosperity. The Democratic Party tends to lean a little more towards shared prosperity and regulation, and the Republican Party tends to lean more towards raw unfettered capitalism, but both have operated in service of the basic mandate of “protect and increase America’s wealth.” To say that money controls politics is a little simplistic—history shows that social movements and labor power and other countervailing forces have their impact—but if you are looking to reduce politics to a single variable, money is the one that will produce the most accurate predictions….

Trump is doing something different: He is making decisions that will clearly harm the American economy, in both the short and long term. He is breaking things that are useful to business interests. Casting this as “right wing populism” is, I think, foolish—the media’s habit of describing Trumpism as “populism” reflects mostly a paltry vocabulary. Calling a man whose primary motives are narcissism and revenge and self-enrichment a “populist” does not really illuminate what’s going on here.

But something is going on here. Consider just a few of the ways that Trump is, either implicitly or explicitly, acting against the interests of capital: ….

This is just a quick and dirty sketch of a deep, dark ocean of harm that Trump is doing to the capitalists themselves… Trump is not helping the billionaires, whose wealth is utterly dependent on strong financial markets and transparent legal regimes and smooth global trade and rising asset prices….

I hope that it is not necessary to point out here that this does not make Trump a victory for the left. He is not replacing the interests of capital with the interests of the people; he is replacing them with the interests of Donald Trump. This is in line with the remarkable pattern, seen throughout world history, of great nations finding themselves turned towards the service of a single corrupt ruler….

If you consider yourself politically engaged, if you are the sort of person who believes that you have a coherent theory of how politics works, and for whom, and why, Trump demands an explanation. Shoehorning his actions into the old “money buys power” slot doesn’t cover it. Here we have a rich man, supported by many other rich men, who is rapidly dismantling the system that has made all of them and their nation rich. It’s odd.

The most honest explanation for Trump’s actions are: He is insane. He suffers from a number of pathologies. That is fairly clear. The more important question is: How has this insane man managed to gain control of the government of the world’s richest and most powerful nation? That, my friends, is the unfortunate outcome of an economic system that has so profoundly failed to enforce economic equality, and a political system that so profoundly failed to protect its democracy from the influence of capital that it allowed itself to be totally captured by extreme lunatics backed by extreme wealth….

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Uber’s Bastards II 

Edward Ongweso Jt. [The Tech Bubble, via Naked Capitalism 03-31-2025]

Feeling Broke? Blame Big Oil 

[The Tyee, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Predatory finance

Larry Fink says Bitcoin could replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency because of national debt 

[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Phishing Attacks – Anyone Can Get Pwned 

[JD Supra, via Naked Capitalism 03-30-2025]

New Email Scam Includes Pictures of Your House 

[EFF, via Naked Capitalism 03-30-2025]

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 03-31-2025]

Climate and environmental crises

Arctic warming accelerates to seven times the global average, catastrophic damage “locked in” 

[IntelliNews, via Naked Capitalism 04-05-2025]

Climate-resilient potato farming: Strategies for adapting to extreme weather conditions, drought, and unpredictable growing seasons 

[Potato News Today, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Democrats’ political malpractice

What’s wrong with tariffs 

Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic, via Naked Capitalism 04-04-2025]

…The Dems’ embrace of Reaganomics meant that working people of all types experienced steady decline over 40 years: stagnating wages, economic precarity, increased indebtedness, and rising prices for health care, education, and housing. When Trump figured out that he could campaign on these issues, Dems had no response….

…Trump’s genius was to marry white supremacy to economic grievance, tricking white workers into blaming their decline on women, brown and Black people, and queers – and not on the billionaires who had grown so much richer even as workers got poorer.

But Trump couldn’t have pulled this trick off without the Dem establishment’s total unwillingness to confront the hollowness of their economic policies. From Pelosi’s “We’re capitalists and that’s the way it is” to Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic campaign slogan, “America is already great,” the Dems’ answer to workers’ fear and anger was, “You are wrong, everything is fine.” Imagine having had your house stolen in the foreclosure crisis after Obama decided to “foam the runways” for the banks by letting them steal their borrowers’ homes and then hearing Hillary Clinton tell you “America is already great”….

…The worst-treated workers in America are also its most discriminated-against workers, so the best way to help women, racialized people, and other disfavored minorities is to help workers: protect unions, raise the minimum wage, defend tenants, cancel student debt, and give everyone healthcare. In the same way that a special tax on incomes over $1m will disproportionately affect straight white men, an increase in the minimum wage will disproportionately benefit women and people of color – as well as the majority of straight white men who are also getting fucked over by people with $1m salaries.

Since the Clinton years, Democrats have been trying to figure out how to defend economic policies that help rich people while still somehow being the party of social justice….

In right wing, conspiratorial hands, rage at wage stagnation and lack of parental leave turned into reactionary demands for an economy in which women would be full-time homemakers while their husbands recovered their roles as breadwinners….

It’s a cheap trick, but Dems keep falling for it. When the right declares itself to be against something, Dems can be relied upon to be in favor it, no matter how reactionary, anti-worker and authoritarian “it” is. During Trump 1.0, Dems lit James Comey votive candles and passionately defended the “intelligence community,” a community that gave us CIA dirty wars and FBI COINTELPRO. Anthropologists call this “schizmogenesis” – when a group defines itself by valuing whatever its rivals deplore, and vice versa….

For the most part, the progressive discussion of Trump’s tariffs takes the position that tariffs are always a terrible idea – in other words, that Clinton and Obama had the right idea when they created free trade agreements with countries around the world, and Trump is vandalizing an engine of American and global prosperity out of economic ignorance.

Economists support this analysis. But in a new, well-argued editorial in The Sling, University of Utah economists Mark Glick and Gabriel Lozada present a more nuanced version of the tariff debate, one that dodges the trap of neoliberal economics and schizmogenesis:

https://www.thesling.org/the-failed-assumptions-of-free-trade/

Rejecting tariffs is practically an article of religious faith among economists. As the NYT put it in their reporting of the 2025 meeting of the American Economic Association, “free trade is perhaps the closest thing to a universally held value among economists”:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/business/economy/economists-politics-trump.html

Lever Daily 04-03-2025

What more is there to say? Back in 2021, Democrats refused to empower then-President of the Senate and Vice President Kamala Harris to wield her authority to bypass the chamber’s unelected parliamentarian and force a vote on a federal $15 minimum wage. Now, Senate Republicans in the same position will blow past the Senate parliamentarian to force through an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy.

This progressive leader has a strategy for Dems: Drop the purity tests, and ‘pick villains’ in the GOP

[Politico, 03/29/2025]

It’s a strategy — embracing explicitly populist messaging and using slogans like “Fight Oligarchy” — that’s resisted by some more moderate Democrats. Matt Bennett, co-founder of the center-left group Third Way, said that “demanding economic populism is its own form of purity test.”

“There’s a lot of different approaches to the economy that can appeal to working class voters, that involve honoring hard work, ensuring that everybody has an opportunity to earn a good life and that doesn’t involve ‘fighting the oligarchs,” Bennett said. “If that becomes their litmus test, then we’re right back in the same boat.”

[TW: Do I have to write it? If you’re not fighting the oligarchs, you’re not addressing the source of all the problems afflicting the republic at this point.]

Democratic Party Leaders and “Free Speech” Warriors Shrug as Trump Deports Dissidents 

[In These Times, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Trump’s transactional regime

Trump’s Tariffs Are More Spectacle Than Strategy 

Waleed Shahid, via Naked Capitalism 04-05-2025]

Trump’s proposed tariffs—blanket levies on nearly all imports, from China to Europe to Lesotho—aren’t industrial policy. They’re political strategy. Their purpose isn’t to reindustrialize America, but to reconstruct power: to hurt broadly, then selectively relieve that pain for those who prove their loyalty. This is less an economic plan than a system of incentives and punishments, weaponized to enforce allegiance. It’s not new. It’s textbook Orbánism.

Viktor Orbán built a system in Hungary where taxes, tariffs, and subsidies became political instruments—tools not for growth, but for domination. Infrastructure contracts went to cronies. Foreign firms were taxed arbitrarily unless they struck favorable deals. The media, universities, and civil society were tamed not through open coercion, but through economic dependency. What emerged, as Hungarian author Bálint Magyar writes in The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes, is a “patronal autocracy”—a regime “in which a single-pyramid patronal network has monopolized political power and exercises it through formal democratic institutions,” subordinating the state to the informal interests of a ruling elite.

In this model, tariffs aren’t tools of strategic industrial development. They are the language of fealty. Broad pain is inflicted, then selectively withdrawn—if companies praise the leader, stay silent on abuses, or donate to the right super PAC. The result is what Magyar calls a “mafia state”: a fusion of state and party where economic life flows through loyalty, not markets.

They’re Not Tariffs, They’re Sanctions

David Dayen April 3, 2025 [The American Prospect]

… I think we give too much credit to Donald Trump and his lieutenants when we suggest that they’re pursuing a misguided trade policy, or that they aren’t pairing tariffs with the necessary steps to boost domestic manufacturing. Those things are true, of course: U.S. trade policy has been deeply inequitable for decades, favoring multinationals over workers and the environment, giving benefits to those corporations in free-trade agreements that they could never get through normal legislative channels, and handing over economic decisions to Wall Street. But these careful explanations, however correct, have nothing to do with what we saw on display in the Rose Garden yesterday.

Because these aren’t really tariffs at all….

It is not at all surprising that Trump sees the appeal in sanctions. It is no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business. Trump believes that the U.S. is indispensable enough that it can intimidate every country on Earth by, well, asking for protection money, which would take many forms: curbing migration, taking in more U.S. farm exports or weapons systems, reducing industrial capacity in China and forcing more consumption, buying long-dated U.S. debt on the cheap, siding with a war strategy against Iran, literally anything the White House wants. Trump now has a tool by which he can achieve whatever goals he conjures up, or simply have his leg-breakers beat the global economy to a pulp. It’s a mentality fit for someone repeatedly linked to organized crime.

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

Understanding the Congressional Budget Irresolution

David Super, April 05, 2025 [Balkanization]

In the wee hours this morning, the Senate approved the concurrent resolution on the budget and sent it to the House for consideration next week.  One moderate (Sen. Susan Collins) and one fiscal hawk (Sen. Rand Paul) opposed the measure along with all Democrats.  Democrats forced Republicans to vote down amendments to protect Medicare and Medicaid, to restore the staff that Elon Musk has cut from the Social Security Administration, to rebalance tax cuts more towards the middle class, to avoid explosive increases in the deficit, and, of course, to stop military planning from being conducted over Signal chats.  The outcome was a foregone conclusion.

A congressional budget resolution is a procedural prerequisite to advancing budget reconciliation legislation to make changes to revenue and entitlement spending legislation….

For the Senate moderates, the “compromise” budget resolution establishes a relatively low minimum amount of cuts to safety net programs in the Senate (only).  It thus would allow a reconciliation bill that would fund the tax cuts almost entirely by increasing the deficit.  The resolution allows the Senate to propose deeper human services cuts, but it has little reason to do so as its reconciliation bill will go to conference committee with a House bill with draconian reductions.

For the House “moderates”, the budget resolution offers essentially nothing – because the House “moderates” have repeatedly demonstrated that nothing is required to secure their votes….

The game plan seems to be to obscure the meaning of all votes prior to the vote on final passage of the conference agreement on the reconciliation bill.  The House will pass a bill the “deficit hawks” can stomach (with the “moderates” promising that the human services cuts will come down in conference with the Senate).  The Senate will pass a bill with less headline-grabbing safety net cuts as its “deficit hawks” promise greater “fiscal sanity” in negotiations with the House.  Then the leadership will craft a final agreement that looks essentially like the House bill and ram it through before its contents are widely known.  A few Senate Republican moderates, particularly those up for re-election next year, can vote “no” without endangering its passage; everyone else will justify their votes as necessary to prevent a tax increase at the outset of a recession.

Red-O Pedos: The Right’s favorite accusation is a misplaced confession

Trygve Hammer, April 4, 2025

It started with QAnon, was adopted by MAGA, and is now just mainstream Republican messaging (as if there is some Republican mainstream outside of MAGA). Republicans are more comfortable with this messaging than I am. For them, it is just so easy to baselessly accuse their political opponents of a thing that plagues the Republican party and their allies: sex crimes, and particularly the sexual exploitation of minors. Right-wing preachers and youth pastors, Republican office holders and campaign personnel, Republicans in positions of authority, Republicans pardoned by Donald Trump, and self-righteous Republican loudmouths on social media have all been arrested for sex crimes against kids. Some of these Republicans possessed or produced child pornography. Some of them sexually assaulted children they knew. Others went abroad to have sex with kids, which is a crime in the United States even if it’s not a crime in the country a Republican sex tourist travels to.

Here in North Dakota, I have Republican friends who, in their social media posts, often attach “Pedo” to the names of prominent politicians with whom they disagree. Also here in North Dakota, a retired Republican state legislator was just sentenced to ten years in prison for traveling to Prague to have sex with underage boys….

Right next door in Minnesota, Republican state Senator Justin Eichorn was arrested on March 17th for soliciting prostitution from a person he thought was a 17-year-old girl, but who was actually a detective in a sting operation. Earlier that same day, Eichorn and four of his Republican colleagues had introduced a bill classifying “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness suffered by those who dare to criticize Donald Trump. Karma works fast in Minnesota, apparently….

Also in Minnesota, Jason Yates, former CEO of My Faith Votes, a pro-Trump evangelical get-out-the-vote nonprofit, was charged with eight counts of possessing child pornography….

A little farther east, in Mike Pence’s home state of Indiana, Sylvester Driscoll, A former Southport police chaplain and Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department civilian employee, was arrested in September for allegedly sexually abusing a child for three years. Driscoll, a MAGA Republican, started showing the girl videos of adults having sex when she was 5 years old….

Joel Koskan was a Republican candidate for the South Dakota state senate in 2022. He went to jail for incest, because his victim was his adopted daughter. Koskan found that being a father simplified the grooming process. He had cameras in the girl’s room, tracked her with GPS, and began having sex with her when she was 17 years old….

So, let’s talk about a Republican J6 insurrectionist pardoned by Donald Trump. Theodore Middendorf pleaded guilty last May in Illinois to Predatory Criminal Sexual Assault of a Child. His victim was 7 years old. A charging document specifies that Middendorf “committed an act of sexual penetration” with the victim. Another J6 Republican pardoned by Trump was David Daniel. He was indicted in October in North Carolina for production of child pornography….

Heather Cox Richardson, April 3, 2025 [Letters from an American]

J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, is to destroy the current government, business, educational, cultural, and scientific pillars of the United States in order to replace them with a new system, although there is tension between the Project 2025 wing of MAGA and the technocrats’ wing over whether that new system will be a theocracy or a technocracy. In either case, it will be an authoritarian government in which power and money concentrate in a very few hands.

The administration’s crusade against the state of Maine shows what this looks like. After Maine governor Janet Mills told Trump the state would follow state and federal law rather than bow to his demands, acting Social Security Administration commissioner Leland Dudek canceled contracts permitting Maine parents to apply for Social Security numbers for their newborns from the hospital and for Maine families to report deaths from funeral homes. Told such a change would risk identity theft and wasteful spending, Dudek told the agency to do it anyway in order to punish Mills.

After an outcry, Dudek backtracked, but yesterday the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, announced she was freezing federal funds for Maine educational programs. The Trump administration would stand against “a leftist social agenda,” Rollins wrote.

Confederates in the courtroom

Thomas Mills, March 31, 2025 [politicsnc]

A photo has surfaced of Jefferson Griffin wearing a Confederate uniform when he was in college. Like the rebels he admired, Griffin refuses to accept his loss in the North Carolina Supreme Court case he’s contesting. And like those losers, he believes he can change history if he just holds out long enough.

Griffin is a member of the Kappa Alpha Fraternity, an order that venerates the Myth of the Old South. They consider Confederate General Robert E. Lee to be their spiritual founder. For years, they held Old South balls where members dressed in Confederate regalia and women dressed in period dresses. The photo of Griffin is from one of those events.

Griffin says his cosplay was a mistake and that he recognizes that it was inappropriate. In a statement, he said, “Since then, I have grown, learned, and dedicated myself to values that promote unity, inclusivity, and respect for all people.”

Except voters. Especially Black ones. He still doesn’t seem to respect them. He’s trying to strip their votes away from them. While White voters made up almost 64% of the electorate, they make up only about 34% of the ballots Griffin is trying to disqualify….

While reverence for the Confederacy is usually associated with White Supremacy, it’s more than that. It’s a story about power and entitlement without accountability. Jefferson Griffin comes from a tradition deeply ingrained in the South, particularly in rural areas where a landed gentry and the legal community conspired to reverse, as much as possible, the gains for equality and justice won in the Civil War.

After the Civil War, the perpetrators of the rebellion were never held accountable and the victims of the unjust system never received restitution. Thirty-five years after the end of the war, the descendants of secessionists stripped voting rights and power from poor people, both Black and White, while fomenting racial division to maintain control of society. They imposed a reign of terror to suppress African Americans and denied them equal justice under the law. Using legislative strategies and legal maneuvers, they fought off civil rights and voting rights to rule over the South until the 1960s. They never paid a price for their sins….