Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 31, 2025
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”.
“We live in a Fascist nation, what now?”- by Chris Armitage
kumarplocher, August 25, 2025 [Daily Kos]
“I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%. Once they win elections, it’s already too late.”“In 1933, German conservatives thought they could control Hitler. Two years later, they were being executed in their own homes. I spent weeks researching this question, desperately looking for counter-examples, for hope, for any time in history where people successfully stopped fascists after they started winning elections.Here’s what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think….And here’s the part that breaks your heart. Violence works. For them. Fascists use violence while claiming to be victims. They create chaos that “requires” their authoritarian solution. Then they purge anyone who opposes them. Meanwhile, democrats keep insisting on following rules that fascists completely ignore. They file lawsuits. They write editorials. They vote on resolutions. And fascists just laugh and keep consolidating power….The statistics are brutal. Fascist takeovers prevented after winning power democratically: zero. Average length of fascist rule once established: 31 years. Fascist regimes removed by voting: zero. Fascist regimes removed by asking nicely: zero. Most were removed by war or military coups, and tens of millions died in the process….Based on the historical record, there are exactly three ways this goes. Option one: Stop them before they take power. Option two: War. Option three: Wait for them to die of old age….So let’s stop pretending we’re in the “prevention” phase and start talking about what you do when fascists already control the institutions but haven’t fully consolidated power yet. Because historically, nobody’s been here before, not like this….
The United States, just months before its 250th 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 250th 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….
Trump not violating any law
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Josh Marcus, August 20253 [independent.co.uk]
Thinking Ahead to the Full Military Takeover of Cities
Hamilton Nolan, Aug 27, 2025 [How Things Work]
…This executive order is meant to create a standing military force that will go wherever Donald Trump tells them to go and do what he tells them to do. It is meant to smooth over any bureaucratic, legalistic, or technical objections to this sort of dictatorial use of force. It is meant to see to it that Donald Trump can point to any city and say “Send in the troops” and have that happen, notwithstanding the opposition of any governors or mayors or disgruntled military officers or stray courts.
The possibility of Trump using the military to take full political control of an American city is very, very real. The logistical barriers to this happening are getting close to nonexistent. Furthermore, the sheer outrageousness of such a thing happening is, I think, greater now than at any time in the past century. The National Guard and the military have, in the past, been used to crush strikes, popular uprisings, and protests—but at least in those cases those things were happening. Today, there is no crime emergency or riots in the street. There is only a president who wants to be a dictator, and who has purged all traces of opposition from the federal government….
…When I read this executive order and realized how bad things may get, I admit that my first thought was (as it often is) “Why aren’t the stupid Democrats doing something about this?” On further reflection, though, I had the sobering thought: “Do what?” While it is a fact that the leadership of the Democratic Party is spineless, asleep at the wheel, and far too compromised to rise to the occasion at this moment, it is also true that we are entering a period in which elected officials will have few if any useful options….
Ask yourself, as soberly as possible: What would stop this scenario from playing out? Will the mayor fight the troops? No. Will the police chief fight the troops? No. Will the city’s police force get in a shooting war with the National Guard? No. Will the troops refuse to carry out their (technically lawful!) orders? No. Will the courts put a stop to all of this? Well, there would certainly be a lawsuit after it was already done. Quite possibly the courts would eventually sign off on the actions, even if it went to the Supreme Court. Even if they didn’t, their ruling would only come after everything described above had already happened. And how positive are you that Trump would acquiesce? How positive are you that the man with all of the guns would voluntarily cede the new power he had taken, when so many more pretexts not to do so are there to be used? ….
All of us, myself included, need to think seriously about what all the rest of us would do in situations like this. I love to harangue piece of shit Democratic politicians as much as anyone, but at a certain point that becomes an indulgent activity. Events in the real world may supersede our feelings of moral superiority. The relevant question, at least in the moment, is not “Whose fault is this?” but instead “What will actually stop this?” ….
John Marks, Aug 30, 2025 [Common Dreams]
…This is not only about immigration. It is about what happens when disappearance becomes policy, not error. It is about how authoritarian systems succeed, not through spectacle alone, but by presenting themselves as orderly, legal, and necessary. History offers its warning: Absence becomes normal, silence becomes institutional. If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions….
ICE has already blown past its legal detention limits, booking more than 31,000 people in June alone. Overflow has been moved into tent camps on military bases and newly leased private facilities. But the real innovation lies beneath the numbers: the wiring of the system. Department of Motor Vehicle records, school rosters, medical files, protest photos—all are now drawn into ICE’s databases, where AI-driven analytics map not only who people are, but who they know.
That wiring has corporate architects. Palantir. Amazon Web Services. Anduril. Palantir’s AI engines feed the machine with millions of cross-linked records, turning raw fragments into actionable targets. Anduril watches from autonomous towers. Amazon stores the data that makes it possible. Each contract transforms misery into revenue, turning deportation into a line item on a balance sheet. Together they prove a brutal truth: Deportation is not just policy. It is profit….
Once the machine is in motion, it does not deliver justice. It delivers absence. Disappearance is not a malfunction. It is the product the system is built to deliver.
When ICE takes someone, the trail goes dark by design. Families call and hear nothing. Lawyers search and find no records. Facilities deny they are holding anyone. Transfers happen within hours, often across state lines. A man leaves for work and never returns, his vehicle still running, lunch packed, a child’s car seat strapped in. Fields go unharvested, animals untended, trucks unloaded. This is not error. It is method. Not accident. Design.
New Trump Order Among ‘Scariest Things I’ve Seen in US Politics,’ Civil Rights Attorney Says
Stephen Prager, August 26, 2025 [CommonDreams]
The new order, he says, would essentially allow “random fascist vigilantes” to “sign up to be a Brownshirt” for Trump’s militarized occupation forces….
Monday’s order calls for the creation of “an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience.” Agency heads then “shall each deputize the members of this unit to enforce federal law.”
Alec Karakatsanis, the executive director of the Civil Rights Corps, described it in a post on X as “an online portal to permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers,” adding that it was “one of the scariest things I’ve seen in US politics in my adult life.”….
A Watergate Everyday — Two scandals just this week that are worse than what Nixon did.
Garrett Graff, August 27, 2025 [Doomsday Scenario]
…Georgetown Law School professor Adam Levitin wrote plainly what no one in the media seems to be willing to say: This isn’t normal—it’s corrupt and an out-and-out abuse of power.
”I want to emphasize how absolutely extraordinary this is. Pulte’s letter to DOJ with a criminal referral is curiously silent on how FHFA learned of the alleged occupancy fraud. Dollars to donuts, however, issues with Cook’s loan file weren’t caught in some routine audit or the like. No one ever goes back and examines loan applications on performing loans for occupancy fraud; that would entail expenses for no benefit. Instead, the only way anyone would have noticed a problem with Cook’s loan application is that Pulte, as head of FHFA, directed Fannie or Freddie to pull her application. That is unheard of.”
…As many of you know, I wrote a book about Watergate (a well-received one, in fact!) and through my research came to see what we call “Watergate” as far more than just a burglary on June 17, 1972. It was a broader umbrella encompassing nearly a dozen specific, related but separate scandals, from the Chennault Affair — one of the most serious allegations approaching treason we’ve ever seen in US politics — as well as the Huston plan, the Kissinger wiretaps and the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the Pentagon Papers, ITT and the Dita Beard memo, the Vesco donation, milk-price fixing, campaign “rat-fucking,” Spiro Agnew’s bribery case, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, plus a little bit of presidential tax fraud. (In fact, Nixon’s most famous line in history, “I am not a crook,” came not because of the Watergate scandal but because of an associated and concurrent tax investigation.)
Overall, Watergate is best thought of not as an “event” but as a mindset, a criminal and conspiratorial posture that emanated from the Oval Office and corrupted Nixon’s operation from top to bottom.
One of the major parts of that scandal was how Nixon had tried to weaponize the IRS against his enemies….
Most people don’t realize that the associated investigations of Watergate eventually encompassed criminal charges against a total of 69 people — including George Steinbrenner! — and companies from Goodyear Tires to Gulf Oil to American Airlines and 3M pleaded guilty to illegally financing Nixon’s reelection.
Just imagine how wide the criminal liability will be after this Trump administration — if we’re able to get back to a normal functioning Justice Department.
Therein lies a big danger to me.
The longer the Trump administration continues, the more grave the future criminal, civil, and legal liability for nearly all involved will be — from ICE officials facing civil rights and abuse of force charges to White House and administration officials facing bribery investigations to random officials and appointees who, say, enabled DOGE data pillaging or Pentagon leaders who might face courts-martial for actions in the coming military occupations that violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).
The deeper we get into this morass of corruption and criminality, the more people are going to confront their own future legal liability and will worry about what happens if and when Trump leaves office. That goes right to the top. Whereas Mike Pence spent four years as Trump’s vice president appearing to avoid ever participating in a meeting or a decision, Vice President JD Vance is right in the middle of many of these conversations and will presumably be among that crowd — it’s not clear that vice presidents get blanket criminal immunity, after all….
Adam Levitin, August 20, 2025 [Credit Slips, via Doomsday Scenario]
The media coverage about President Trump’s demand that Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook resign based on alleged occupancy fraud on a 2021 mortgage application has missed the real story: how terrifyingly inappropriate FHFA Director William Pulte has behaved. Pulte is using control of the GSEs to pursue a political enemies list. That is an incredibly dangerous abuse of office. We do not tolerate this with the IRS, and we should not tolerate it with FHFA. Pulte should resign….
What troubles me here is not the possibility of garden variety fraud by a federal official in her personal capacity. Instead, the real problem here is that Pulte used the apparatus of the FHFA to target a political opponent. Pulte’s abuse of office is a far, far greater offense than any personal mortgage occupancy fraud by a federal official….
James Baratta, August 28, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…Pulte has announced changes in mortgage underwriting that could easily lead to confusion and error in assessing creditworthiness. If there’s more mortgage fraud in the future, Pulte could be to blame.
On June 25, FHFA ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which package and securitize loans for investors in the housing market, to develop proposals allowing them to “count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage” during the application process. As a result, prospective homebuyers may soon be able to put up their volatile crypto holdings as collateral without needing to convert those assets to cash….
Why Trump’s Attack on the Fed Isn’t Spooking Wall Street. And why that’s a big mistake.
Nathan Tankus, 08/26/2025 [Politco, via Notes on the Crises]
…The second Trump administration has been consumed by two central themes. The first theme is the unprecedented pace at which this administration has attacked the rule of law and the constitutional system on which it is built. The second theme is the unprecedented weakness of the response from major institutions to the Trump administration’s actions. Wall Street’s passivity amid Trump’s unprecedented attack on the Fed is only the latest example….
For many years, business groups and conservatives argued regulatory and tax uncertainty would disrupt the economy and lead to a sharp negative reaction from markets. These were allegedly major factors preventing the recovery from the Great Financial Crisis. Of course, there were always doubters to such narratives — myself included — but they have never appeared as farcical as they do today. In addition to Trump’s attacks on the Fed, he upended global trade and made tariffs a matter of his erratic and personal discretion. He is concentrating control over the federal government’s budget and claiming power to not spend what Congress has ordered to be spent. He claims widespread authority to control agencies, including agencies legally designated as “independent.” This is without even commenting on his use of the military in U.S. cities. But the markets don’t seem to care about such massive uncertainty about the future.
The threat to the rule of law emanating from a second Trump term was clearly not part of investors’ calculations. It’s important to pause on this point. Stock market traders are neither legal experts, nor scientists. But for too long, “market judgment” has been treated as, if not infallible, at least the best judgment given the evidence and information available. The response of the stock market to events of the past year shows how false that is. The reality of Trump’s threat to the very system that investors depend on has failed to become the conventional wisdom among traders, and thus Wall Street continues its muted response to the cataclysmic.
Which brings us back to the Federal Reserve. The fact is, the looming death of the Fed’s independence came in February with the Trump administration’s attack on independent agencies writ large. In the U.S. legal system, the Federal Reserve’s leadership has no special protections against removal that other independent agencies do not have (even if the Supreme Court might contort itself to suggest otherwise). If Trump’s initial executive order to rein in independent agencies was not sufficient to raise alarm among investors, Trump’s firing of two Democratic appointees to the independent Federal Trade Commission in March should have been. Yet the conventional wisdom on Wall Street that the Fed was safe has not budged….
ICE Continues to Detain Award-Winning Journalist Who Filmed Immigration Raids
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2025]
Jeff Hauser, Timi Iwayemi August 29, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Inside the Trumpian Plot to Rig the Midterms… and Every Election After
Bill Blum, Aug 28, 2025 [Truthdig, via CommonDreams]
Joyce Vance, Aug 26, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
Armed National Guardsmen have been deployed in the District of Columbia to keep American citizens in line. Trump is trying to normalize the militarization of our country. This is where it starts, not where it will end. Trump is dropping the pretense of abiding by the rule of law. Sure, he still drapes himself in it enough that anyone who wants to can turn a blind eye and pretend that he’s complying with his oath of office, which requires him to support and defend the Constitution. But everyone who is paying attention and being honest with themselves understands that we are in a dangerous moment where Trump’s path toward authoritarianism is accelerating, and Americans need to wake up.
Trump trumps up excuses to justify doing as he pleases, which mostly involves accumulating more of the power of government in his own hands. A national emergency here, an invasion there. No matter what the truth is, he makes it up as he goes along, shamelessly lying about crime going up, when it’s in fact going down, and accusing agencies that release the statistics that contradict him of fraud when he’s called on the lies….
Monday, Trump signed a new executive order that is a thinly disguised effort to expand the use of the National Guard nationwide, a new leaf in the would-be autocrat’s playbook. It’s titled, “ADDITIONAL MEASURES TO ADDRESS THE
CRIME EMERGENCY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.”….
Breaking Down the White House’s Lies and Distortions About Crime in DC
Radley Balko, August 28, 2025 [Mother Jones]
..This seems like a good time to remind everyone that when he first entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump inherited the lowest murder rate of any president in 50 years. Four years later, he was the first president in 30 years to leave with a higher murder rate than when he started….
Trump’s Pick to Help Run the FBI Has a History of Prosecuting Influential Democrats
Jeremy Kohler, Aug. 27, 2025 [propublica.org]
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s targeting of Democrats is legally questionable, experts say, but it’s helped to further his career nationally: “The more outrageous you are, the more you are going to attract the attention of Donald Trump.”
Doug Bock Clark, Aug. 26, 2025 [propublica.org]
Heather Honey has been appointed to a senior position in the Department of Homeland Security. State election officials and voting experts are concerned.
Men DOGEbags at Work
Social Security Data Chief Who Blew Whistle on DOGE Resigns, Citing ‘Culture of Fear’
Brad Reed, August 29, 2025 [CommonDreams]
A federal worker who filed a shock whistleblower report alleging that employees of the Department of Government Efficiency had potentially compromised Americans’ Social Security data abruptly resigned on Friday….
The report, whose existence was made public earlier this week, contends that Borges has evidence of a wide array of wrongdoing by DOGE employees, including “apparent systemic data security violations, uninhibited administrative access to highly sensitive production environments, and potential violations of internal SSA security protocols and federal privacy laws by DOGE personnel.”
At the heart of Borges’ complaint is an effort by DOGE employees to make “a live copy of the country’s Social Security information in a cloud environment” that “apparently lacks any security oversight from SSA or tracking to determine who is accessing or has accessed the copy of this data.”
Should hackers gain access to this copy of Social Security data, the report warns, it could result in identity theft on an unprecedented scale and lead to the loss of crucial food and healthcare benefits for millions of Americans. The report states that the government may also have to give every American a new Social Security number “at great cost.” ….
Strategic Political Economy
China decouples from US energy as key exports crash to zero
Kevin Walmsely [via Naked Capitalism 08-26-2025]
In June, US energy exports to China collapsed to zero in crude oil, coal, and liquefied natural gas.
That followed a similar plunge in exports of liquefied petroleum gases and propane.
Key BRICS members Russia and Iran have stepped in, and along with other Middle East trade partners easily supply China with energy previously sourced from US markets….
The trade wars have done a lot of damage in a short time, to American farms exporters of soybeans and corn. Now the same is happening in energy, a decoupling of American suppliers from Chinese demand. We believed—very wrongly—that because China had always bought our soybeans and our energy, that they always would. That chart is almost impossible to believe: October 2024 wasn’t that long ago, and we probably thought that China was dependent on us for their supplies of coal, crude, and LNG. We thought they needed our LPG else their plastics industry would go out of business….
US companies are ‘staying put’ in China, none plan to move manufacturing to US
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2025]
How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes
Annie Lowrey, August 25, 2025 [The Atlantic]
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the richest of rich Americans pay an average tax rate of 34 percent, higher than any other cohort’s. In reality, as everyone has long known, they pay less than that. A new study by some of the country’s most preeminent economists has finally put concrete numbers to the disparity. The average rate that the richest Americans pay, they find, sits at just 24 percent….
The new study is a technical feat, combining data on corporate earnings, private wealth, and individual tax payments. And it confirms that the country’s tax code is regressive, not progressive, at the very top. Every year, America’s richest citizens paper over their earnings with losses and use other creative accounting strategies to shelter their fortunes, as the tax code allows them to do. As a result, the country’s billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals.
The study, by the UC Berkeley economists Akcan Balkir, Emmanuel Saez, Danny Yagan, and Gabriel Zucman, examines the wealth of Americans on the Forbes 400—not the 1 percent or even 0.01 percent, but the 0.0002 percent, a group including Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Trump himself. As of this year, these individuals have a minimum net worth of $3.3 billion….
Technocrats as handmaidens to authoritarianism – Pt 1
Ann Pettifor [via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2025]
…The only beneficiaries of these economic policies [austerity] – whether they are implemented or not, whether the present government falls or not – are likely to be France’s authoritarians, led by Marine Le Pen and the far-right National Rally Party.
This is a sorry economic state of affairs repeated everywhere authoritarianism is on the rise.
Peep into the austere corridors of any central bank, economics department or finance treasury anywhere in the world, and you will find the real powers behind any throne: technocrats that favour private markets over public markets; that prefer private spending to public spending and austerity over full employment and prosperity.
They proliferate throughout Africa, Latin America and Asia, courtesy of the IMF and World Bank. But they can also be found in all OECD central banks and finance ministries.
Democracy as overrated
Many technocrats are trained by orthodox economists at the Chicago School of Economics, or influenced by the Chicago School.
Like the most prominent monetarist of all – Milton Friedman – most regard democracy as overrated and a potential threat to the efficient functioning of the market order. In fact they owe their power over the global economy to Hayekian and Friedmanite ideology: namely that democracy distorts the capitalist economy; that markets are better at decision-making than democracy; that international trade should be ‘free; that public spending crowds out private spending, and must be slashed to restore stability to the market economy. That monetary institutions should stand aloof from fiscal institutions; that fiscal contraction must be amplified by monetary tightening. Finally that inflation is a dragon that must be slain with deflationary policies, and the way to do that is to ratchet up interest rates – and tighten credit conditions – regardless of the state of the economy and levels of private and public debt….
The effect of President Trump’s racist and crude attacks on both the governor of the Federal Reserve, and the only black member of the Board, Ms Lisa Cook, has been to galvanise defenders of central bank technocracy, who have rushed to to lionise the governor.
The Economist promptly obliged with an article on of “the insidious threats to central bank independence” by “meddling politicians”. Andy Haldane – ex-chief economist of the Bank of England, took aim at ‘fiscal populism’ – by which is meant I assume, public political pressure. Haldane raised the scary bogey of ‘fiscal dominance’ which, he argued in the FT….
Jim Stewartson, Aug 29, 2025 [MindWar]
On Thursday, venture capitalist and libertarian extremist Jim O’Neill was summarily installed by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Acting CDC Director after then-Director Susan Monarez—a Trump appointee less than a month on the job—was fired by RFK Jr. when she refused his “reckless directives.” When Monarez resisted, Trump himself stepped in to finish the job.
This was no ordinary replacement of a principled scientist with an unqualified crony, it represents an open declaration of war on Americans’ health. O’Neill, it turns out, is even more of a Peter Thiel creation than JD Vance. Jim O’Neill wants to rip apart the healthcare system and rebuild it as an engine for eugenics….
“Make Live, Let Die”
The other approach to wielding biopower in Foucault’s model is “make live, let die.”“The sick ones die.” —Donald Trump on immigrants
This is the approach that most modern governments take—regardless of their politics—when they want to encourage one group of people to grow, and another group to shrink. To shrink a group, instead of killing people in rice fields like the Khmer Rouge, you deprive the targeted groups of societal benefits, and you systematically make their life stressful, dangerous and unhealthy—you make the environment inhospitable. For the group you want to grow, you encourage them—or force them—to have more children and reward them for their biopolitical performance….
American Year Zero
Peter Thiel said last year that America in the 2020s was like Weimar Germany in the 1920s where “conventional ideas had failed” and it was a requirement to “look outside the Overton Window”—the range of acceptable public discourse from the political right to the left. In other words, Thiel believes America needs something unacceptable to most people….
Trump Picks Nightmare Peter Thiel Acolyte to Replace CDC Director
Robert McCoy, August 29, 2025 [The New Republic]
…[O’Neill ] does have a history of feverish advocacy of deregulation and libertarianism, as the progressive group Public Citizen highlighted when he was nominated for his current role at Trump’s health department.
In a 2014 speech, for instance, O’Neill—then managing director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital—proposed allowing drugs onto the market without first determining whether they even work. “Let people start using them, at their own risk,” he said. “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”….
The Techlords and Their Ideology Are Mortal Enemies of Humanity
João Camargo, Aug 27, 2025 [Common Dreams]
The techlords intend to bring humanity to the brink of collapse and then, in a magic trick, rise to power, saving the species or themselves as the last specimens….
Thiel is one of the main promoters of the archaic ideology that dominates the thinking of men such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Andreessen Horowitz, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates. Although these tech moguls are presented as neutral or technology driven, reality is different. Their adaptation to the far-right is no longer surprising. The techlords have laid some of the cornerstones of authoritarian politics and provided the means for the rise of the new ideology of a return to the past.
So what do Thiel and the other techlords stand for? Their ideological base revolves around something called the “Dark Enlightenment”, also known as the “Neo-Reactionary Movement.” It is a mixture of libertarian doctrines with scientific racism, an anti-historical vision of a return to feudalism and an acceleration toward social and environmental collapse. According to Curtis Yarvin, another of its ideologues, this shadowy enlightenment is the formal recognition of the realities of existing power, aligning property rights with current political power and defending that “corporate power should become the organizing force in society.” They seek to assert inequality not as an accident, but as a structure. For all practical purposes, the ideology of the techlords aims to overthrow any democratic illusion and install in its place a feudal division of territories, under which the supreme lords, technological monarchs, President-CEOs, the Techlords, would rule…..
The ideology of the techlords is directly opposed to democracy, which they see as an obstacle to the accumulation and maintenance of wealth and power by the rich. They advocate corporate monarchies and authoritarian city-states controlled by themselves, praising Singapore as a model. To destroy democracy, they advocate dismantling the institutional apparatus of nation states, not because of any oppression or inequality, but to ensure that injustices have no social opposition and that, if opposition does arise, it can be strongly repressed. They advocate the removal of almost all public officials and services, increasing the numbers of the armed forces and police, building up the capacity for repression by the powers that be, no longer public, but corporate and business. The Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, combined with the expansion of a militia-style political police force such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is a trial run of this. This month, the US government announced a $10 billion contract with Palantir to create a super database that aggregates information from all federal agencies and a platform to detect migratory movements in real time….
Capital, Capitalism, and the Capture of Democracy: A Conversation with John Christensen
Richard Murphy, August 27 2025 [Funding the Future]
…the summary that follows, this was produced with the assistance of AI, which did a good job of it.
- Capital is not the same as land. Capital is man-made and finite; land and resources are natural and limited. Neoclassical economics blurred the two, with disastrous consequences.
- Power and morality were stripped out of economics when it became mathematical, allowing elites to claim markets were “efficient” while monopolising resources.
- The post-war settlement showed another way. Welfare, infrastructure and equality flourished when democracy constrained capital.
- Neoliberalism reversed this. From Friedman to Thatcher and Reagan, the rules were rewritten to prioritise profit and deregulation.
- Tax havens epitomise capitalism’s hypocrisy, undermining markets and fuelling a race to the bottom.
- Today’s capitalists don’t build; they enclose. Monopoly, branding, patents, and financialisation matter more to them than production.
- The solution lies in governance. Accountability, antitrust, transparency, and alternative models of ownership can restore capital to public purpose.
- Markets are social constructs. They only work with rules and referees — democracy must reclaim that role.
Cory Doctorow, 28 Aug 2025 [Pluralistic]
[TW: worth reading in full — click the link]
…In other words, tariffs only work to reshore production where there is a lot of careful planning, diligent data-collection, and review. Governments have to provide credit to key firms to get them capitalized, provide incentives, and smack nonperformers around. Basically, this is the stuff that Biden did for renewables with the energy sector, and – to a lesser extent – for silicon with the CHIPS Act.
Trump’s not doing any of that. He’s just winging it. There’s zero follow-through. It’s all about appearances, soundbites, and the libidinal satisfaction of watching corporate titans bend the knee to your cult leader….
Trump is risking the economic future of every person in America (except a few cronies), but that’s not the only risk here. There’s also the risk that reasonable people will come to view industrial policy, government stakes in publicly supported companies, and antitrust as reckless showboating, a tactic exclusively belonging to right wing nutjobs and would-be dictators….
After we get rid of Trump, America will be in tatters. We’re going to need big, muscular state action to revive the nation and rebuild its economy. We can’t afford to let Trump poison the well for the very idea of state intervention in corporate activity.
Global power shift
How ‘Human Rights’ Became Western Weapon
Kit Klarenberg, Aug 25, 2025 [Global Delinquents]
Why China Builds Faster Than the Rest of the World
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2025]
In his new book Breakneck, Dan Wang argues that if the US really wants to compete with China, it needs to focus more on engineering and less on litigating.
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2025]
…In South America, China, Brazil, and Peru are building a major rail project that will transform the interior logistics systems of South America. Its construction will be critical in integrating logistics and infrastructure in South America. The port at Chancay allowed to shipping to transit from South America to Asia in 10 days, and the new rail system will hook up the plumbing to the rest of the continent.
So this railway will cut across Brazil, from the Atlantic to Pacific. Brazil is a huge country. It’s bigger than the lower 48 states, so this would be the South American equivalent of the transcontinental railroads.
The project allows Brazil to export commodities to China via the Pacific, instead of using Atlantic ports, which will cut ten days of shipping time. 60% of Brazil’s exports to China are iron ores and soybeans, and transport by rail to Peru will be vastly more efficient than by truck to Atlantic ports, then through the Panama Canal.
This is the BRICS statement. The railway will have capacity of 18 million tons of cargo when it opens, and within ten years will haul 50 million tons of cargo a year. $50 billion of the project cost will come from China, which cuts the distance by 10,000 kilometers—over six thousand miles—and bypassing the Panama Canal….
US extends loophole to keep banned Russian diamonds coming
[RT, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israeli Airstrike Kills Houthi Prime Minister in Yemen’s Capital
Jessica Corbett, August 30, 2025 [CommonDreams]
As one Houthi leader pledged that “we shall take vengeance,” Israel’s defense minister said that “this is just the beginning.”
Abdel Qader Sabbah, Aug 27, 2025 [Drop Site]
Gaza Tribunal Calls for Urgent Armed Intervention to Stop Israel’s Genocide
[Defend Democracy Press, Aug 24, 2025, ]
The Gaza Tribunal, led by Richard Falk, has called for immediate international armed intervention through the UN General Assembly to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, warning that silence in the face of genocide amounts to complicity.
All UN Security Council Members, Except US, Say Famine In Gaza Is ‘Man-Made Crisis’
[DD News, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
X thread on US manufacturing dependence on foreign robots made by FANUC etc.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-26-2025]
Today ~70% of the world’s robots are built in:
🇯🇵 Japan
🇨🇳 China
🇩🇪 Germany
🇰🇷 South KoreaJapan alone = nearly half.
America = 0%.
If supply chains fracture, U.S. factories risk losing the machines that keep them alive.
The “Big Four” companies dominate global industrial robotics:
• FANUC (Japan 🇯🇵)
• Yaskawa (Japan 🇯🇵)
• KUKA (Germany/China 🇩🇪/🇨🇳)
• ABB (Switzerland 🇨🇭)Again:
There are ZERO major American players. From pioneer to a mere customer in just a few decades.
[24/7 Wall Street, via Naked Capitalism 08-26-2025]
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Aug 25, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
“Today, President Trump said he wants to destroy our holy ground of Oak Flat so a foreign-owned corporation can send copper to China,” Wendsler Nosie told the Arizona Republic last week. “Whether you’re Republican, Democrat, or neither, that is a terrible deal for the American people.”
Donald Trump calls Nosie and others who want to save Oak Flat “un-American” for wanting to protect the holy ground where the San Carlos Apaches worshiped long before there was a United States of America. Trump posted this on social media last week after meeting with executives from the corporations that stand to profit from mining the copper from beneath Oak Flat.
Because San Carlos Apaches for generations have worshiped the Creator while drawing water at Oak Flat, it is holy ground—a place for prayer and sacred ceremony, not unlike the Temple Mount for Muslims, Christians and Jews. For Nosie, an elder in the San Carlos Apache tribe, the wisdom of his people and their relationship with the Creator is inextricably tied to this place….
Trumpillnomics
A fresh executive order aims to ban unions at more federal agencies
[Government Executive, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2025]
…Thursday’s order would ban collective bargaining at the International Trade Administration and the Patent and Trademark Office within the Commerce Department; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service and the National Weather Service; as well as NASA and the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It states that all these agencies “have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative or national security work.”….
Predatory finance
This Is How Wall Street Could Buy Your Power Company
Katya Schwenk, Aug 15, 2025 [The Lever]
Aug 27, 2025 [The Lever]
New research into how homeowners’ insurance companies determine premiums has found that some consumers are being penalized for their credit scores and forced to pay thousands of dollars more than their better-credited counterparts. A recent issue brief from the Consumer Federation of America finds that the typical U.S. homeowner paid 99 percent more for insurance — an additional $1,996 per year — just for having a low credit score.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
The Big 4 offshore: Transparency arbitrage across legal and geographical boundaries
Richard Murphy, August 28 2025 [Funding the Future]
How do global firms manage conflicting constituencies in complex markets? The Big 4 accounting firms have expanded their size and scope to the extent that they need to relate to different constituencies simultaneously, sometimes on controversial issues. This is particularly relevant given their engagement in aggressive tax planning services alongside their traditional professional obligations, as this generates a conflict between discretion offered to “offshore” clients and accountability offered to other stakeholders. This requires strategic duplicity—sending differentiated signals to different stakeholders. We suggest that firms use organizational partitioning across legal structures and geographies to enable strategic duplicity. We test this by collecting a unique data set on the Big 4’s ownership structures and staff numbers across all locations, showing that their organizations are heavily segmented. We show that the Big 4 use this geographical and legal differentiation to send contrasting signals to constituents about their organizations, engaging in a type of strategic duplicity that we term transparency arbitrage, in which “onshore” stakeholders receive a signal of transparency and “offshore” stakeholders receive a signal of discretion. This duality enables them to engage in controversial issues with conflicting stakeholders.
The paper is free to access and can be found here.
Disrupting mainstream economics
This Is The Most Important Video About Economics You’ll See This Year
Dougald Lamont, Aug 27, 2025
Professor Steve Keen’s Description of the Economy Is a Must-Watch whether you’re a Capitalist, Centrist, Liberal, Marxist, MAGA, Socialist or Social Democrat.
I was really excited to see Professor Steve Keen’s recent video where he shows off his software, Ravel, which models the macroeconomy in more complex and accurate ways than the orthodox economic formulas that developed nations like Canada, the UK, the US and others have been relying on since the 1970s….
Why Milton Friedman’s Theory of Inflation is Fundamentally Unsound
Dougald Lamont, Aug 29, 2025
Do you live in a world where machines last forever, there’s no debt, and nothing ever changes?
There’s been a lot of talk and debate about inflation and hyperinflation recently, including fights over what causes it. In the U.S., there are insane debates about tariffs, and whether they would cause inflation. As an import tax paid by Americans, it is driving up prices, but Trump’s defenders have denied it by citing Milton Friedman’s textbook definition of inflation, which Friedman argued was only ever caused by government.
There needs to be a much better debate and more clarity about all of this, because Milton Friedman’s explanation – which makes a kind of intuitive sense in conversation, makes no sense whatsoever when you look under the hood….
Health care crisis
Brad Reed, August 29, 2025 [CommonDreams]
The administration, warned two union leaders, “is inserting private AI companies, which have a giant financial stake in the denial of care, into the doctor-patient relationship.”
How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies
Brandon Roberts, Annie Waldman and Pratheek Rebala, Illustrations by Sam Green, Aug. 21, 2025 [ProPublica]
In total, more than 20,500 workers, or about 18% of the Department of Health and Human Services’ workforce, have left or been pushed out, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal worker departures using public information from the HHS employee directory.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
How To Argue With An AI Booster
Ed Zitron [via Naked Capitalism 08-26-2025]
How AI and surveillance capitalism are undermining democracy
[Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2025]
OpenAI Says It’s Scanning Users’ ChatGPT Conversations and Reporting Content to the Police
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2025]
Tech Elites Go FULL EUGEN*CS (video)
[Breaking Points (Video), via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2025]
[What We Lost, via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2025]
…Mark Zuckerberg is a man who is, from the outset, someone who is deeply removed from the thoughts and feelings of normal people — which is a terrifying prospect when you consider that he controls a company that’s used by billions of people to share their thoughts and feelings, and to connect them to the thoughts and feelings of those who matter most to them.
Mark Zuckerberg is like a cat that just dragged a mouse onto your brand new carpet — except he isn’t bothered about whether you’re impressed with his hunting skills, or even angry about the fact that bubonic plague is now leaking from the puncture holes from when he bit into its belly. He’s feeling satisfied about the “discovery engine algorithm” he used to corner it, and the “real, deep, nuanced” way he killed it….
Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Effects of Artificial Intelligence
[Stanford, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2025]
There Is Now Clearer Evidence AI Is Wrecking Young Americans’ Job Prospects
[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2025]
Before You Pump Gas, Look For These Signs Of A Card Skimmer
[]Jalopnik, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2025]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Optogenetics And Photopharmacology: Controlling Cellular Activity With Light
John Oncea, July 25, 2025 [photonicsonline.com]
Optogenetics and photopharmacology are both light-based techniques used to control cellular activity with high precision, offering unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution in manipulating biological processes….
Optogenetics inserts genes for light-sensitive ion channels or pumps (opsins) into target cells, enabling millisecond electrical control with specific wavelengths, according to Frontiers in Neural Circuits. Karl Deisseroth’s 2005 proof-of-concept ignited the field, and a 2025 Frontiers in Neural Circuits review recounts subsequent protein-engineering strides such as red-shifted “Jaws” inhibitors and dual-color bidirectional opsins.
Photopharmacology, by contrast, keeps endogenous biology intact and instead adds photo-cages or photoswitches to drugs. Light flips these small molecules between inactive and active states, producing spatially precise pharmacology without genetic modification. An April 2025 Medical Research Reviews article labels the strategy “neuro-photopharmaceuticals” and catalogs photoswitchable modulators for GABA, dopamine, and serotonin circuits, the National Center for Biotechnology Information writes….
On the photopharmacology front, Spanish and U.S. groups unveiled a battery-free, NFC-powered μ-LED implant that photo-uncages morphine inside the dorsal horn, providing on-demand analgesia without systemic opioid exposure, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Thermal output stayed below 0.3 °C during 30 mW cm⁻² illumination – data of immediate interest for thermal-management designs in bio-optoelectronics….
Democrats’ political malpractice
Les Leopold, Aug 25, 2025
The New York Times recently released a report showing what we already know – the Democrats are in decline as more voters now register as Republicans or Independents. This is especially the case for young voters.
It’s not hard to figure out why. Just ask yourself this simple question: What is the Democratic Party vision for our country? What message of economic justice do they have for working people who have suffered mass layoffs and job insecurity in recent years and are finding themselves left behind? What is their plan to help hard-working undocumented immigrants secure citizenship? How will they keep the wealth of the nation from gushing to the top one-tenth of the one percent?
Epstein!
That seems to be the current plan. The Democrats believe they can gain ground against Trump by forcing the release of the Epstein files. Supposedly this will split Trump from his conspiratorial base.
But what’s the chance of that helping the Democrats attract more registrants and votes?
Zilch….
The Democratic Party establishment is so fearful of “moving to the left” (meaning they do not want to attack the interests of their wealthy donors) they are having a tough time supporting Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City, who is breathing new life into the party with a progressive and popular appeal to regular people and their economic concerns. How can party elites not support the man who won the Democratic primary and is leading in the general election?
If the party isn’t rallying around a bright new face with a knack for pitching attractive economic policies, please tell me why new voters should register as Democrats? ….
Detailed Report Exposes Serious Threat of the Neoliberal, Trump-Lite ‘Abundance’ Agenda
Julia Conley, Aug 27, 2025 [Common Dreams]
The much-discussed ‘Abundance Agenda’ is not the solution its proponents claim it be, according to a devastating report published this week by a pair of progressive watchdogsdraw which argues the policy framework is more of a neoliberal Trojan Horse than anything else….
But in addition to beginning their book with a “glaring error,” said the authors of a new report by the government watchdogs Revolving Door Project (RDP) and Open Markets Institute on Tuesday—asserting that “supply is how much there is of something” without accounting for the fact that private corporations decide how much of a product they want to sell to make a profit—Klein and Thompson ignore the fact that long before they put pen to paper, right-wing politicians and think tanks were already pushing an “abundance” agenda….
Is Cory Booker For Real? We Asked His (Fake) Political Consultant
[Zeteo, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2025]
[Yves Smith: “Trust me, watch this.”]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2025]
Lying, cheating, and stealing — The GOP reveals its game plan to defeat Cooper in North Carolina.
Thomas Mills, Aug 27, 2025 [PoliticsNC]
The News & Observer lede read, “When U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders held rallies in Greensboro and Asheville earlier this month, the North Carolina Republican Party saw an opportunity. The party falsely claimed in a post on X that Sanders was coming to campaign for former Gov. Roy Cooper, who is running for U.S. Senate in 2026.”
It’s a telling story because that’s what we’re going to see for the next fourteen months—Republicans lying about Roy Cooper. The lies won’t be confined to X. They’ll be splashed across TV screens, the internet, and radio, wherever gullible eyes and ears can be found.
These lies weren’t perpetrated by some nefarious third-party group. They were the product of the North Carolina Republican Party. They don’t care anymore. They’re introducing alternative facts backed up by imaginary images produced by AI to hoodwink an often gullible public. That’s not campaigning. It’s just lying….
Zack Beauchamp, Aug 27, 2025 [theunpopulist]
Beauchamp: The new right has shared principles: a preoccupation with gender, strong support for Trump, a general disinterest in abiding by the traditional norms of democratic politics, and a commitment to unremitting culture war against the left. These are the new right’s defining traits. But there are huge divisions between the different sub-factions that make up the new right. If you were to divide the new right into camps, what would you say the fault lines are?
Field: I have three main camps: the Claremonters, the postliberals, and the National Conservatives. I also talk about the hard right, but the hard right travels alongside all three of them ideologically. The hard right is the hardcore, manosphere, fascist types. Each of these groupings are different.
The Claremonters are the West Coast Straussians that I was speaking about before. They are really committed, at least in theory, to the American Founding. They have this very grandiose vision of what the American Founding was that goes beyond even ordinary patriotism. It’s that this is the best regime of all time. They’re also at the very cutting edge of the culture war. So, to them, America is the best regime of all time, but we’ve completely lost the plot and liberals—and the liberal way of thinking—have taken over to such a degree that we need a counter-revolution. They’re really far gone in the culture warring. They’re the Jan. 6 types….
Then there are the National Conservatives, which I treat as an umbrella group. They’re a little more vanilla, with nationalism as their core thing. But it turns into ethno-nationalism in some cases and Christian nationalism. They’re a big tent….
Beauchamp: You argue that the right—not just the radical right, but the American right in general—operates with an “ideas first” approach, believing that ideas have a tangible, causal impact on politics. I think that’s true in a really important sense—in a way that’s actually underappreciated by a lot of people on the left….
Field: Yeah, I call it “ideas first,” but it’s also a kind of intellectual fanaticism. Each different camp has a commitment to a certain vision of politics, of the good, of how we ought to live, and each camp becomes very attached to its ideas. But in the United States the conservative movement as a whole has had, for quite some time now, a similar understanding of why ideas matter and how ideas shape the world….
Beauchamp: I really loved the passage from your book where you chided liberals and Democrats for putting ideas last—where you described them as having incubated them into an AI lab, tested them against a dozen polls, and assigned them to a celebrity to rehearse. And you recounted how one of the most frustrating experiences for any liberal observer of the new right has been to witness again and again the incredible contrast between the “coarse brazenness” of the right’s ideologues and the tepid intellectual cluelessness and cowardice of so many centrist and liberal leaders both within academia and beyond….
Field… What they’re talking about is a regime that is dedicated to being virtuous. That’s old Platonic and Aristotelian language; its civic republicanism. And there’s a sense in which it’s very appealing, but the modern regime, liberal democracy, does not focus on that. But these types think that to have a healthy politics, to have a good politics that people can participate in and flourish in, requires doctrines that shape us in those ways, in our education, in our laws, all the way down. You can find quotes from the Founding, from John Adams and others, about the need for a virtuous citizenry. It’s not completely foreign to the tradition—but they are really running with it.
But it’s also fair to say that their perspective is often very detached from the empirical world of what life is like in the United States, from just any sort of good faith understanding of what liberal democracy is and how liberals live their lives. They think we all live tawdry, amoral lifestyles, but they’re quite delusional about that….
[TW: This points to one of the weaknesses of conservative ideology: a strong focus on individual morality as a marker of virtue, while ignoring institutional and systemic bases of immorality and evil — such as use psychological manipulation in mass advertising. ]
The Leader of Trump’s Assault on Higher Education Has a Troubled Legal and Financial History
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 08-28-2025]
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