Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 29, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Remembering Bill Moyers: A Colossus of Journalism and Public Service
Jonathan Alter, June 28, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
‘We Have Lost a Giant’: Broadcast Legend Bill Moyers Dies at 91
Jessica Corbett, June 26, 2025 [CommonDreams]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Amy Coney Barrett and the Supreme Court Give Birth to a Disaster
Garrett Epps, June 27, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
…Three federal district courts concluded that the birthright citizenship order is almost certainly unconstitutional and barred the executive branch from enforcing it pending a final decision. The issue seemed headed to the Supreme Court, where it would be decided in the normal course of American law.
The administration, however, did an end run around that process. It filed an application with the Supreme Court that denied any interest in the issue of the order’s constitutionality. Instead, it said, it wanted the Court to look at whether district courts can tell the president he can’t do something he wants to do—to issue “universal injunctions” barring the government from, for example, stripping citizenship from any baby until the constitutionality of the order can be settled. The two things, the government suggested, have nothing to do with each other….
The Supreme Court Just Gave Trump Three Victories in One Ruling
Matt Ford, June 27, 2025 [The New Republic]
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday in Trump v. CASA is a disastrous moment for the American constitutional order. In a 6–3 decision, the court’s conservative justices curbed the judiciary’s power to prevent the executive branch from carrying out blatantly unconstitutional policies and orders.
The court effectively granted Trump three major victories in one stroke. First, the ruling severely narrowed federal judges’ power to temporarily halt the Trump administration’s actions in general, freeing the president from a major constraint on his policy agenda.
In response to lawsuits, lower courts had often issued what are known as “nationwide injunctions,” which blocked the executive branch from enacting a new policy while litigation continued in court. Those injunctions typically applied beyond the plaintiffs in a particular case. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the court, held that courts had acted unlawfully by granting relief to anyone beyond the plaintiffs themselves….
The Real Judicial Coup: How the Supreme Court Just Redefined Presidential Authority
Mike Brock, June 27, 2025 [Notes From The Circus]
…Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, has created what amounts to a doctrine of presumptive executive constitutionality. The Court ruled that when a president issues an order that appears to violate the Constitution, courts must assume the president is correct until proven wrong—not once, but individually, circuit by circuit, plaintiff by plaintiff.
Let’s be absolutely clear about what this means: the Supreme Court has ruled that birthright citizenship—guaranteed by the plain text of the 14th Amendment—can be suspended nationwide based solely on a president’s claim of authority, and anyone who wants their constitutional rights restored must file individual lawsuits seeking individual relief.
This isn’t judicial restraint. This is a fundamental rewriting of how constitutional rights work in America….
This represents a systematic advantage for executive power over constitutional constraint through procedural manipulation. It’s not that rights disappear—it’s that protecting them becomes exponentially more difficult and expensive….
“No Right Is Safe”: SCOTUS Bars Judges From Reining in Trump
Shawn Musgrave, June 27 2025 [The Intercept]
The Supreme Court halted courts from issuing national injunctions, forcing “judges to shrug and turn their backs to intermittent lawlessness.”
By Limiting Nationwide Injunctions, Supreme Court Declares ‘Open Season on All Our Rights’
Jessica Corbett, June 27, 2025 [CommonDreams]
In a ruling that stems from the president’s birthright citizenship order, the “conservative supermajority just took away lower courts’ single most powerful tool for reining in the Trump administration’s lawless excesses.”
It’s Not Just a Constitutional Crisis in the Trump Era. It’s Constitutional Failure
Jack Rakove, June 27, 2025
[TW: Rakove is a leading scholar of the creation of the American republic. His 1996 book Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution dismantled many of the claims of the Constitutional originalism of conservatives, and was awarded the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for History.]
…Our ongoing constitutional crisis began with the presidential election last November 5. Reelecting an individual culpable for January 6 who has twice made a mockery of the presidential oath of office is itself a constitutional crisis. Nothing in his past or current behavior suggests that Trump has ever felt fidelity to his constitutional duties.
Once a constitutional crisis becomes an endemic condition, the term no longer usefully describes our collapsing system. Instead, we live in an era of constitutional failure when the relevant institutions cannot fulfill their responsibilities….
…When audiences at constituent meetings repeatedly shout, “Do your jobs,” they have a better grasp of Congress’s responsibility than their feckless representatives….
In the face of this congressional passivity, what path of constitutional repair is left open? Unsurprisingly, the best answer remains the courts. Although it has taken time to respond to the turmoil Trump has unleashed, the judiciary’s actions have been encouraging. Remarkably, the difference between Republican and Democratic-appointed judges has been slight, suggesting that judicial independence enshrined in Article III may be fulfilled amid this grave situation.
Yet, with the current Supreme Court, one cannot be too confident. Why? Its responses to the two 2024 critical election cases remain deeply troubling to anyone who takes the injunctions of the Constitution seriously. The Court handled one case with striking expedition. But it manifestly stalled the other with a run-out-the-clock set of procedural delays that deprived voters of findings they were entitled to possess before November 5. The decisions in Trump v. Anderson (which involved the application of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to Trump’s eligibility to appear on the Colorado primary ballot) and Trump v. U.S. (the presidential immunity case) should sit atop any hit list of constitutional failures….
…The second condition seems more surprising. It is the stunning inadequacy of the majority’s understanding of constitutional history and core concepts of American constitutionalism….
In our fractious polity, fresh insults to constitutional norms and settled practices of governance occur daily. That is why the phrase constitutional crisis no longer describes our situation. The Constitution has failed, and we no longer know which institution will rescue it.
Sotomayor joined by Jackson, Kagan on fiery birthright citizenship dissent
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 06-28-2025]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Trump’s ICE Agents Are Arresting US Citizens. GOP Budget Would Hire 10,000 More.
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2025]
Justin Glawe, June 27, 2025 [Public Notice]
Militarized LA: troops here to stay as Trump doubles down on deployments
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2025]
Justice Dept. whistleblower details senior officials’ efforts to stonewall judges, ignore decisions
[CBS News, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
How To Talk To Your Senators About Emil Bove
Joyce Vance, June 25, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
Meet the D.C. Bigwigs Literally Profiting Off Trump’s Deportations
[The Bulwark, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
Strategic Political Economy
Solving America’s Chip Manufacturing Crisis
Kenneth Flamm and William B. Bonvillian
American Affairs Volume IX, Number 2 (Summer 2025): 41–68.
[TW: Flamm documented the origins of the U.S. computer industry in his 1998 book, Creating the Computer: government, industry, and high technology, published by the Brookings Institution and available in full online. This book should be required reading for all courses of study in economics and American history because it devastates the myth of “entrepreneurial free enterprise” by showing how it was carefully created and targeted U.S. government programs and funding which allowed the risky new technologies required for computers to reach commercial success and create an entire, new industry. This new article is long and brimming with technical industrial information very few people have mastered, making it an extremely important and informative read. ]
…Economies of scale are the fundamental economic force reshaping industrial structure in leading-edge chip fabrication. For context, note that at the peak of its market power in the global computer processor (CPU) market in the third quarter of 2014, Intel alone produced a record 100 million x86 processors (x86 is Intel’s famous foundational architecture and instruction set for computer processors), implying an annual Intel production rate of somewhere between 300 and 400 million processors….
Intel’s current problems are in part linked to the relentless increase in fabrication equipment costs at every new technology node as well as to the increasing volume of production needed to reach minimum efficient scale at the new nodes. In 2014, Intel’s dominant market position gave it massive volume that was produced at multiple Intel fabs (using the “copy exactly” strategy Intel invented in the 1980s). But by 2023, Intel’s annual x86 processor volumes appear to have dropped 30–50 percent, to 190–230 million sold annually….
…in the early 2000s, Intel began to stray from the vision of its legendary early leaders Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove, who focused on fielding the most technically advanced, complex, and capable products on the market.… The connection to Intel’s current woes is that the first decade of the twenty-first century was a distracting one for Intel management. The firm’s resources and managerial attention were diverted into sales and marketing initiatives aimed at defending an entrenched position of market power. The company had lost its singular focus on technical innovation that had been its hallmark under Noyce, Moore, and Grove’s early vision for Intel….
Intel Foundry is not really a case of “too big to fail”; it is a case of “too intertwined with national security to fail.” There are no other U.S. company alternatives to Intel Foundry: the capital costs of entering advanced chip manufacturing, R&D, and production are staggering, the technology challenges and risks are massive, and all of Intel’s former U.S. competitors have by now exited advanced chipmaking. The national security imperative requires that the U.S. government backstop Intel Foundry,…
In addition to the task of supporting Intel Foundry’s commercial success, there is a longer-term financing task.58 The chips Act is a stopgap measure. It assures some production in the United States of the pending generation of advanced chip processes, but not the following generations of chips.59 It was a onetime law with the authorization running out, as noted, in 2027; and the funding for new fab construction is already committed. The U.S. semiconductor challenge is a long-term one, and CHIPS was an important but decidedly short-term fix….
…Because the federal government refused to engage in a subsidy competition to finance the massive costs of new semiconductor fabs, no new leading-edge logic fabs had been built in the United States for over a decade, and no new leading-edge memory fabs for roughly two decades, before the chips Act.80 Congress passed the chips Act in recognition of this major security vulnerability.
But the chips Act is only authorized for five years, expiring in 2027, and it is not at all clear that it will be renewed….
Congress Is Pushing for a Medicaid Work Requirement. Here’s What Happened When Georgia Tried It.
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2025]
…Georgia, the only state with a Medicaid work mandate, started experimenting with the requirement on July 1, 2023. As the Medicaid program’s two-year anniversary approaches, Georgia has enrolled just a fraction of those eligible, a result health policy researchers largely attribute to bureaucratic hurdles in the state’s work verification system. As of May 2025, approximately 7,500 of the nearly 250,000 eligible Georgians were enrolled, even though state statistics show 64% of that group is working.
Global power shift
Thomas Neuburger, June 24, 2025 [God’s Spies]
Who’s really in charge of all these wars, the U.S. or Israel? Which is the client state and which the master?
…Many assert that the tail (Israel or Netanyahu) is wagging the dog. Jeffrey Sachs is one of many with this opinion. Others, like Michael Hudson, believe that we are the boss and Israel is our “landed aircraft carrier” in the Near East.
Iran, China and America’s Great Game: Part 2 of 3: Why is Iran so important to U.S. global strategy?
Thomas Neuburger, June 26, 2025 [God’s Spies]
China has been kept in a box by Western sea power since the 1840s. The box is still there. The land road is China’s way out….
…The Belt and Road Initiative — China’s plan to create land routes that bypass Western sea power, a modern Silk Road for goods and energy — runs right through Iran and the first station opened in May.
China’s reusable rocket Zhuque-3 completes major engine cluster test
[CGTN, via Naked Capitalism 06-22-2025]
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 06-22-2025]
Because we need to know and remember …That Grace and Sanity existed in a President
OnenessWarrior, Apr 27, 2025
“In a moment that should’ve stopped time, Jimmy Carter—quiet as a monk, sharp as a scalpel—offered a truth so unassuming, most missed the incision. He was speaking to Trump, but really, he was speaking to all of us.Carter’s point was this: While China has spent decades laying tracks for the future, we’ve been digging graves in the past. They’ve built cities, schools, trains that move faster than thought. We’ve built military bases, debt, and an empire of rust.It wasn’t a boast. It was an autopsy.China chose infrastructure. We chose interference. They built railways across continents. We bombed bridges across borders. They invested in AI, medicine, and education. We invested in overthrowing oil-rich governments, branding it freedom….
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 06-28-2025]
[TW: An important summary that dispenses with much misinformation. For example, four of the Iranian military leaders Israel claimed to have killed have returned to public view.]
Mark Sleboda – What the Hell Just Happened in the Middle East You May Ask?
[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
Israel Suffered Extensive Damage
Larry Johnson [via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2025]
US Missile Defenses Heavily Depleted in Shielding Israel: report
[Newsweek, June 27, 2025 [via Moon of Alabama]
The U.S. drew down a significant portion of its advanced anti-missile system to bolster Israel’s defense against Iranian aerial attacks during a 12-day conflict in which Israel and the U.S. struck nuclear facilities and Iran retaliated with missile launches, according to defense news outlets and independent analysts…. the United States used an estimated 15 to 20 percent of its global THAAD missile interceptor stockpile, incurring unprecedented costs exceeding $800 million, according to the Bulgarian Military News and Military Watch Magazine outlets.
Humiliation: Israel Tucks Tail After Failing All Objectives in War against Victorious Iran
[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 06-25-2025]
Yesterday, Iran retaliated for the US ‘strikes’ on its nuclear facilities, concluding the final act of the choreographed play we’ve been witnessing…. The US claims everything was intercepted, and of course, again it was revealed that the entire act was ‘agreed upon’ between both sides….
The reasons were obvious, as the above article titles hint at: Israel was being attritioned, its economy ravaged, its largest seaport and airports shutdown, and some sources claim, its fuel and ammo stockpiles dwindling. Technical ‘superiority’ aside, Iran is a country of 90+ million (to Ted Cruz’s eternal chagrin), and Israel’s 9 million would be hard pressed to wage a war of attrition against it, with or without US’ help.
Iranian attacks were beginning to add up, devastating Israeli neighborhoods and turning citizenry against their government….
Tallying the Costs to Israel of Its Failed Iran Regime Change Operation
Yves Smith, June 26, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
Israel entered the 12-day exchange convinced it could absorb costs; the ledger now shows a nation bleeding cash, talent, and confidence. Direct military outlays hit $5 B in the first week, then ballooned to $725 M every 24 hours, $593 M on offensive strikes that failed to silence Iran, $132 M on frantic mobilisation and missile intercepts that still let 400 warheads through. Iron Dome batteries alone inhaled $10 M to $200 M per day while Iranian salvos sailed past them and erased $1.47 B in civilian property, triggering 38 700 damage claims, 11 000 evacuations, and 30 condemned high-rise skeletons across Tel Aviv’s financial spine.
The Weizmann Institute, Israel’s prestige export, lies in shards, 45 labs gone and $500 M in biomedical IP incinerated, pulling decades of grant pipelines and pharma partnerships off the table overnight. Intel’s Kiryat Gat fabs froze mid-wafer, choking a supply chain that feeds 64 % of Israel’s exports and 1/5 of its GDP; the high-tech sector now runs on skeleton crews because 300 000 reservists were yanked from R&D floors and data centers to guard empty runways at Tel Nof. Commercial flights halted twice at Ben Gurion, insurers jacked premiums, and foreign airlines rerouted around a country that once sold itself as the region’s safe hub.
Capital is already in flight. More than 80 000 Israelis emigrated in 2024, the largest outflow since 1948, pushing the two-year total above 500 000 and forcing Netanyahu’s cabinet to slap a travel ban on Jewish dual nationals to stem the leak. Investor confidence cratered: venture funds paused term sheets, construction sites stand idle, and mega-projects wait on credit that no longer clears. The finance ministry, staring at a deficit set to shove public debt past 75 % of GDP, begged for an extra $857 M in defence cash while slicing $200 M from hospitals and schools.
Analysts peg Israel’s aggregate loss between $11.5 B and $17.8 B, up to 3.3 % of GDP, before counting long-tail hits from halted exports, cancelled IPOs, and sovereign-risk downgrades. Iran, still sitting on its uranium stockpile, spent a fraction of that yet forced the self-styled “Start-Up Nation” into a liquidity scramble, an insurance panic, and a brain-drain spiral. Tel Aviv promised deterrence; Tehran handed it a balance sheet in red ink and the visible stamp of strategic humiliation.
Marco Rubio Says It’s ‘Irrelevant’ Whether Iran Decided To Build a Nuclear Weapon
[Antiwar, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2025]
Nir HassonYaniv KubovichBar Peleg, June 27, 2025 [Haaretz, via CommonDreams]
Seymour Hersh [via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
[Military Watch Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Argentines reel from health care cutbacks as President Milei’s state overhaul mirrors Trump’s
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 06-22-2025]
[Equal Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2025]
Trumpillnomics
Has Trump’s FTC Abandoned Fair Markets?
[Washington Monthly, via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2025]
Restoring balance to the economy
Montana’s Bid To Undo Citizens United
Inci Sayki, June 28, 2025 [The Lever]
Former state officials from Montana have launched an ambitious effort to ban dark money and corporate spending from local politics.
The Transparent Election Initiative, a campaign-finance reform nonprofit founded by former state Commissioner of Political Practices Jeff Mangan, has announced what it calls “The Montana Plan,” a constitutional initiative that would bar corporations and anonymous individuals from using political action committees to funnel unlimited, untraceable funds into election campaigns. The ballot measure is slated to go before voters in 2026.
The plan would bypass the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which allows unlimited amounts of money from special interest groups, including corporations and unions, to flood political campaigns. According to the Transparent Election Initiative’s website, unlimited corporate spending in politics “drowns out voters’ voices,” and Mangan told NBC Montana in May that people, regardless of their political leanings, are tired of nonstop, excessive money in politics.
‘Housing Unaffordability Is the Primary Cause of Homelessness’
[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 06-23-2025]
CounterSpin interview with Farrah Hassen on criminalizing homelessness
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2025]
In June 2023, the annual meeting of Kroger shareholders heard a motion requesting the company to annually report pay gaps across race and gender among its 430,000 workers. Introduced by Sam Dancy, an African American worker at the company and thirty-year member of the Seattle-based United Food and Commercial Workers’ Local 3000, the motion resulted in the unusual interruption of the meeting by Kroger’s then-CEO Rodney McMullen, who personally apologized to Dancy for discrimination he had faced in the workplace. However, McMullen then urged the shareholders to vote down Dancy’s proposal, arguing that such reporting was unnecessary because Kroger’s employees were represented by the UFCW.
Despite the CEO’s protest, the motion passed with 51 percent of votes. In response, Kroger has for the past two years been engaged in enhanced disclosure, issuing financial and corporate statements and data necessary to comply with the shareholders’ decision….
Disrupting mainstream economics
[Post-Neoliberalism, via Naked Capitalism 06-23-2025]
…To research the economic policy of the far right in the early 21st century, I set up a database which explores the economic-policy goals of the far right in eight advanced market economies (US, UK, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, and Italy). I systematically gathered statements far-right parties made over the past twenty years to see if certain goals (e.g., financial regulation or deregulation) are presented consistently over time and whether those goals are also pursued in legislative initiatives (i.e., did the parties not just “say” they supported those initiatives but actually tried to implemented them). The database places a particular focus on the realm of finance because of its critical relevance in contemporary economies and because vote shares for the far right increased considerably since the Global Financial Crisis….
There is also some evidence for the second feature of State Authoritarian Capitalism—the far right’s seeking to truncate the power of democratic institutions. While supporting the expansion of welfare spending in their programmes, these parties also seek to reimplement the gold standard (i.e. backing the national currency with gold reserves, thereby limiting the government’s ability to alter the value of the currency) which will critically hamper their ability to expand government spending –the gold standard restricts the amount of money a government can issue. Furthermore, the parties have criticised bailout programmes implemented during the Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19 as irresponsible and inhibiting market forces. They also tend to object to strong roles for trade unions and do not support workers’ participation in industry/finance….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
The New Face of Surveillance Doesn’t Need Your Face
[Reclaim the New, via Naked Capitalism 06-25-2025]
Andreessen Horowitz Backs AI Startup Whose Motto Is ‘Cheat at Everything’
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 06-25-2025]
A moral crusade against AI takes shape
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 06-23-2025]
How artificial intelligence controls your health insurance coverage
[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 06-23-2025]
The Hot, New Plan to Bribe States Into Deregulating Artificial Intelligence
[Boondoggle, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
Uncovered: How UK police are hiding their Palantir work
[Democracy for Sale, via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2025]
Robodebt: When automation fails
[Can We Still Govern?, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2025]
From 2016 to 2020, the Australian government operated an automated debt assessment and recovery system, known as “Robodebt,” to recover fraudulent or overpaid welfare benefits. The goal was to save $4.77 billion through debt recovery and reduced public service costs. However, the algorithm and policies at the heart of Robodebt caused wildly inaccurate assessments, and administrative burdens that disproportionately impacted those with the least resources. After a federal court ruled the policy unlawful, the government was forced to terminate Robodebt and agree to a $1.8 billion settlement.
Collapse of independent news media
Zephyr Teachout, May 28, 2025 [The American Prospect]
In a time of eroding journalistic freedoms, a new book chronicles the deliberate effort to use libel law to bankrupt the independent media we have left.
Climate and environmental crises
Scientists Pitch $117 Trillion Wind-Solar Super Network
[OilPrice, via Naked Capitalism 06-28-2025]
Scientists propose a $117 trillion global wind-solar grid, arguing it could provide constant, clean power by connecting regions with surplus renewable energy to those in need.
Globally interconnected solar-wind system addresses future electricity demands
[National Library of Medicine, 2025 May 15]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
HOW THE RUBIN OBSERVATORY WILL REINVENT ASTRONOMY
[IEEE Spectrum, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2025]
…Rubin is unlike any telescope ever built. Its exceptionally wide field of view, extreme speed, and massive digital camera will soon begin the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) across the entire southern sky. The result will be a high-resolution movie of how our solar system, galaxy, and universe change over time, along with hundreds of petabytes of data representing billions of celestial objects that have never been seen before….
The telescope’s enormous 8.4-meter primary mirror is so flawlessly reflective that it’s essentially invisible. Made of a single piece of low-expansion borosilicate glass covered in a 120-nanometer-thick layer of pure silver, the huge mirror acts as two different mirrors, with a more pronounced curvature toward the center….
Originally, Rubin was intended to be a dark-matter survey telescope, to search for the 85 percent of the mass of the universe that we know exists but can’t identify. In the 1970s, astronomer Vera C. Rubin pioneered a spectroscopic method to measure the speed at which stars orbit around the centers of their galaxies, revealing motion that could be explained only by the presence of a halo of invisible mass at least five times the apparent mass of the galaxies themselves. Dark matter can warp the space around it enough that galaxies act as lenses, bending light from even more distant galaxies as it passes around them. It’s this gravitational lensing that the Rubin observatory was designed to detect on a massive scale….
…Rubin will complement other observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Webb’s Near Infrared Camera have fields of view of less than 0.05 square degrees each, equivalent to just a few percent of the size of a full moon. The upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will see a bit more, with a field of view of about one full moon. Rubin, by contrast, can image 9.6 square degrees at a time—about 45 full moons’ worth of sky….
Democrats’ political malpractice
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
Who’s Afraid Of Zohran Mamdani?
David Sirota, June 27, 2025 [The Lever]
Democratic Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral primary victory in New York City has prompted an elite panic, the likes of which we’ve rarely seen: Billionaires are desperately seeking a general-election candidate to stop him, former Barack Obama aides are publicly melting down, corporate moguls are threatening a capital strike, and CNBC has become a television forum for nervous breakdowns. Meanwhile, Democratic elites who’ve spent a decade punching left are suddenly trying to align themselves with and take credit for Mamdani’s brand (though not necessarily his agenda).
On the surface, this freak-out can seem as if it’s about policy. Mamdani’s proposals for free buses, universal free child care, faster small-business licensing, higher taxes on the rich, some publicly owned grocery stores, a higher minimum wage, and rent freezes are indeed shocking to oligarchs conditioned to getting everything they want. When you’re so accustomed to privilege, the most minimally humane policies for others can seem like oppression — and Mamdani’s agenda probably feels that way to New York’s billionaires, CEOs, and neoliberals.
And yet, the intensity of the nervous breakdown over his win suggests this is about way more than one mayoral candidate’s important-but-hardly-radical agenda for a single metropolis. This is about power — specifically, the power of money and establishment authority to control outcomes.
Mamdani won despite being vastly outspent and despite being targeted for defeat by both the Democratic machine and the elite liberal media megaphone. His victory is a “system defining” moment, not because a charismatic underdog was victorious in one race, but because it was the first time the oligarchy was unable to buy the political results it wanted in such a high-profile contest….
Zohran Mamdani: “This Is The Heart Of The Battle For The Future Of The Democratic Party”
David Sirota, June 25, 2025 [The Lever]
A week before 33-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani shocked the world by defeating Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for New York City’s mayor, he sat down with David Sirota on the Lever Time podcast to discuss why he thought he had a shot and his plans for City Hall….
Zohran Mamdani and the false promise of “Vote Blue No Matter Who”
Matthew Adarichev, June 27, 2025 [Daily Kos]
Since 2016, progressives like myself have been told to “Vote Blue No Matter Who”. When our preferred candidates, like Bernie Sanders, were defeated, we were told by moderate Democratic candidates to put our differences aside, not be selfish, and support them. Even if we had policy disagreements, it would be for the greater good to support those candidates to avoid electing a Republican.
We obliged.
The New York City Democratic mayoral primary has illuminated what I suspected to be the case: this agreement only went one way….
What I take from all this is that “Vote Blue No Matter Who” always went one way. It was a slogan to badger progressives into supporting moderate candidates, but now that the shoe is on the other foot, moderate politicians are suddenly unwilling to put aside their differences. To them I say the same thing they told me:
I am sorry that your preferred candidate lost. I understand you may not agree with all of the positions taken by Zohran Mamdani. Nevertheless, it is time to support our Democratic nominee for the sake of maintaining Democratic Party unity as we fight against fascism.
This Is The Beginning of The End of The 9/11 Era
Spencer Ackerman, 25 Jun 2025 [forever-wars.com]
…And tonight, against all odds, against DoorDash, against Michael Bloomberg, against Bill Ackman, against Palantir’s Alex Karp, against Andrew Cuomo, against the Murdoch media behemoth, against Bill Clinton, against Jim Clyburn, against the entire Democratic Party, Zohran Mamdani will win the Democratic nomination for mayor. The ranked-vote total will confirm it; Cuomo stunningly conceded the nomination.
For three weeks, every time I turned on the local news, every time I turned on a basketball or a baseball game, every time I loaded a YouTube video, every time I went to my mailbox, I saw those forces call Zohran Mamdani a dangerous, antisemitic jihadi. When I went out to do some poll visibility for Mamdani earlier today, one of the very few people who expressed hostility to Zohran hissed at me that Mamdani was flirting with a slogan that meant killing Jews. They threw 9/11 Politics, in both its 2001 version and its 10/7 variant, at Zohran….
It is important, it is revealing, and it is crucial to observe who played 9/11 Politics against Zohran. Who made a deliberate point of trying to make Jews like me hate and fear Zohran….
They will do all of this because they see what the people of New York did tonight as a test case. And they are correct. If a socialist can wrest power from the servants of oligarchy in the financial capital of the world—well, my friends around this country, around this world, what can you do to take the power back from them where you live?
And the advancement of that movement—for socialism, for freedom, for social peace, for the unity of the multiethnic working class—is how we end the 9/11 Era. Not shallow declarations by Security State-allegiant politicians funded by AIPAC that merely look toward the next war. By organizing and outcompeting them.
Coffee Break: Is Mamdani’s Win Over Cuomo The End of Democratic Party Neoliberalism?
Nat Wilson Turner, June 25, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
David Sirota disected the already begun battle to control the narrative and decide the meaning of Mamdani’s win for The Lever:
in the media class that exists to interpret these moments for the political mainstream, a different story is already being written. And it reveals something deeper: not just confusion, but ideology — one that insists democracy is a performance, not a transfer of power or a mandate for a different set of policies.
For months, pundits dismissed Mamdani as championing too radical, too fringe, too unserious an agenda. But now that he’s clinched the nomination, the narrative is shifting: Mamdani, they say, succeeded not because of his policy program, but because of his energy, his style, his vibes. On Pod Save America — a proxy for the entire Democratic political class and its liberal followers — Tommy Vietor praised a video of Mamdani walking across Manhattan for giving him “Obama 2007 feels,” calling it “nimble and fun.”
Then came the pivot.
“I do think it’s worth separating out the style of politics from the policy,” co-host Jon Favreau said. “Because we could have a whole debate about what policy positions can win… but if there’s a center-left candidate who campaigns like Mamdani, that person could be president.”
That’s the tell.
This is not a new trick. When liberal elites feel threatened by a winning candidate whose politics could actually challenge capital, they seek to depoliticize the victory and attribute it to vibes, marketing savvy, and brand. It’s a containment strategy: Treat the insurgent’s style as admirable while ignoring — or quietly discrediting — their policy platform. That way, the establishment gets to appropriate the energy without having to endorse the demands.
What It Took To Win: Thoughts on Zohran Mamdani’s Popular Front
John Ganz, June 26, 2025 [Unpopular Front]
…The lesson Mamdani and his strategists evidently took from the presidential election and the return of Trump was that the weakness of the Democratic establishment with its traditionally loyal constituencies signalled an opening for another kind of protest politics entirely, one that was constructive and positive, rather than rancorous and divisive. Those groups had not been permanently seduced by the right so much as not mobilized and activated by a progressive alternative. And they noticed there was an entire universe of motivated voters (and, importantly, volunteers) out there just waiting to be reactivated: Veterans of Bernie 2016, 2020, Warrenistas, and all the civic movements of the 2010s who had not given up but were simply dormant, waiting for new leadership. Then he diligently added to this base.
What I found particularly notable is Zohran’s outreach to small business owners, which in New York, contains a lot of recent immigrants. Rather than treat them as “petit bourgeois reactionaries” ensorcelled by Trump’s politics of resentment, his campaign saw them as small-d democrats who were not wedded to either party….
…Something else needs to be said about the Mamdani’s “M” and the Cuomo’s U” on this chart. It reflects Old New York vs. New New York and therefore two different forms of civil society. Mamdani captured more recent arrivals in New York, across cultural and class lines: post-college professionals on the make (or, in many cases, downwardly mobile white-collar workers who are being proletarianized or bohemianized) and recent immigrants from abroad. Cuomo appealed to the old gentry and business oligarchy (now more Wharton School than Edith Wharton) on the Upper East and West Sides and the old working class in the outer boroughs. And in many cases, they are quite literally old: the youth broke strongly Mamdani. But they also represent an earlier form of social organization: Cuomo campaigned at union halls and churches. Traditionally, these are good places to meet the electorate. But the clear lesson of the past decade was that the old civic associations’ power to control and mobilize the electorate has been steadily weakening. Remember that the “machine” as it is called, was built in another epoch; it pre-dates even the labor union, the radio, and television! It has survived in an etiolated form but is no match for the instantaneous powers of communication available in our era. Machine bosses were considered a throwback already by the 1970s. In his entitlement and laziness, Cuomo thought this tenuous structure would be enough. It wasn’t. It simply doesn’t serve or talk to enough voters anymore. The machine broke down because it’s old and rusty….
Jordan Zakarin, June 27, 2025 [www.progressreport.news]
Challenging the status quo is not antisemitic
Using antisemitism as a cover is particularly egregious because it continues to be used to silence dissent against what has become a wildly unpopular war in Gaza, one of the issues where Democratic leaders ignore their voters most. Democratic voters are overwhelmingly opposed to the war, want to see a cease-fire, and vehemently disagree with the country’s attacks on Iran, but leadership cannot even bring itself to condemn Donald Trump’s decision to enter the United States into the war.
In fact, “antisemitism” has been so warped and weaponized that it is now being used as code to discredit entirely unrelated policies that excite the base but so inconvenience the Democratic elite. Earlier today, Peter Orszag, who served as the Obama administration’s OMB director and is now the head of financial megafirm Lazard, spoke out against Mamdani as evidence that the Democratic Party is “increasingly antisemitic and anti-capitalism.”
He made the smear to CNBC, a network that has devoted itself to trashing anyone who so much as suggests that the wealthiest Americans should pay a bit more than subterranean tax rates. That’s the network’s prerogative — on Wednesday, anchor Jim Cramer fretted that billionaires in NYC would be shot under Mayor Mamdani, and they’re welcome to continue to sound idiotic — but the only reason to insert antisemitism onto the mix is to discredit popular, populist economic policies by association.
How To End Democrats’ Civil War
David Sirota, June 23, 2025 [The Lever]
…A brief recap for those just tuning in: Abundance is a new bestselling book by The New York Times’ Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, as well as a catchall term for a group of billionaire–boosted think tanks, pundits, and Democratic operatives aligned behind those authors.
The book’s much-ballyhooed opening narrative describing a utopian future mimics a 2019 short film by Naomi Klein and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — only the abundance version does not aim to conjure an updated version of a far-reaching New Deal. On the contrary, abundance presents itself as the practical idealism of The West Wing, offering a liberal-flavored version of Ronald Reagan’s quip that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
Across tomes, articles, think tanks, and symposia, the abundists argue that oligarchy isn’t really America’s big problem. Instead, they assert that government, regulations, unions, and the American Left are the creators of scarcity and the primary obstacles to prosperity — because those forces are allegedly too unfriendly to business on stuff like housing, energy, and health care policy. From that claim flows the abundance movement’s insinuation that the deregulatory assault on the New Deal hasn’t gone far enough.
A growing anti-oligarchy movement on the center-left disagrees, citing evidence that shortages are often caused by the billionaires and corporations who use monopoly power and legalized bribery to control everything.
To sum up anti-oligarchy’s case: The drivers of affordable housing scarcity are real estate moguls algorithmically jacking up rents, monopoly developers limiting supply, Wall Street hucksters running mortgage finance, corporate landlords buying up housing stock, and corrupt politicians helping those powerful interests legislate limits on public-sector construction. The primary problem is not lefty do-gooders’ annoying zoning laws or requirements that apartment owners provide adequate air filtration to their renters, as Abundance implies.
In anti-oligarchy’s telling, the drivers of health care scarcity are the insurance middlemen rationing care, hospital monopolies’ price gouging, and private profiteering off publicly financed medical inventions. The primary problem is not (yet) a lack of public resources for scientific innovation, as Abundance seems to suggest….
Anti-oligarchy also disagrees with abundance on how to win elections, and for good reason: Kamala Harris appeased her donors by eschewing anti-oligarchy and was hailed by The Washington Post for “running on an abundance agenda” — and she was then defeated by President Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Now, new polling data show the abundance argument about red tape is a far weaker Democratic argument than a sharp case against plutocrats….
Rust Belt Voters Want a New Political Formation Does Anyone Have the Guts to Build It?
Les Leopold, June 24, 2025
…But the combination of widespread disaffection alongside extreme party polarization has put more and more races outside the realm of possibility for any Democrat. Even economic populist Dems, like former Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, who avoid most of the pitfalls that plague Democrats’ reputation among working class voters, are unable to overcome this dynamic. The Democratic brand is now simply too tarnished and polarization too strong among working-class voters in many purple and especially red states.
Today most Democrats simply can’t win — and there is increasingly little that can be done about it. As Bernie Sanders has recently argued, it is “highly unlikely” that the Democratic high command will “learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class and is prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests that dominate our economy, our media, and our political life.”
Resistance
Lessons for protesters from Standing Rock
[HEATED, via Naked Capitalism 06-23-2025]
During the high-profile demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016, the FBI sent several informants disguised as protesters to infiltrate activist communities.
The FBI wasn’t alone. The pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners, hired a private mercenary and security firm called TigerSwan to conduct a sweeping protester surveillance operation. Part of that operation included sending undercover operatives “to collect information on the protesters, explicitly targeting those who were down on their luck,“ according to a 2018 investigation published by the Intercept.
The information collected by these surveillance operations was not only used to set up individual protesters during the demonstrations, which were led by the Standing Rock Sioux. It was eventually used to justify a massive conspiracy lawsuit against the environmental group Greenpeace. The lawsuit accused the group of inciting the protests in a bid to increase donations….
University Unions Stand Up to Trump’s Research Cuts While Administrators Waver
Brock Hrehor, Jaelyn Rodriguez, K.M. Slade, Nic Suarez, June 26, 2025 [The American Prospect]
While some universities have capitulated to Trump’s NIH cuts, there are faculty and graduate student union leaders on the frontlines pushing back.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Mike Brock, June 28, 2025 [Notes From The Circus]
…I watched the latest All-In Podcast so you don’t have to. Consider this a public service—a guided tour through the moral wasteland that four wealthy men have constructed around themselves, complete with corporate sponsors and millions of devoted followers who mistake nihilism for wisdom.
What you’re about to read is not entertainment. It’s forensic analysis of how civilizational collapse sounds when it’s performed by people who profit from the wreckage. It’s documentation of how moral depravity presents itself when it has enough money to buy respectability and enough sophistication to make destruction sound like progress.
These are not good men having bad days. These are not decent people making regrettable choices. These are moral vampires who have discovered that there is considerable profit in packaging sociopathy as insight, nihilism as sophistication, and the systematic destruction of democratic civilization as just another investment opportunity….
…But the most dangerous figure in this moral wasteland is David Sacks—the man who represents everything wrong with how intelligence can be weaponized against wisdom, how sophistication can be corrupted into sedition.
Sacks is brilliant. This makes him infinitely more dangerous than his co-hosts because he understands exactly what he’s doing. When he provides legal justifications for authoritarian overreach, when he constructs constitutional arguments for unconstitutional behavior, when he uses his Stanford Law credentials to legitimize the systematic destruction of democratic institutions—he knows precisely what he’s enabling.
Listen to him defend federal military deployment against American citizens….
How Pharma, Oil, And Wall Street Funded Trump’s Tax Scam
Tony Carrk, June 26, 2025 [The Lever]
…But as Senate Republicans now scramble to try to pass the bill by the July 4 deadline demanded by President Donald Trump, the majority aren’t taking their cues from their constituents. They’re listening to the wealthiest Americans and big businesses who’ve gamed the political system to their benefit.
How do we know? Just look at who’s funding the fight.
One of the leading groups running advertisements supporting the “Big Beautiful Betrayal” is the American Action Network. The conservative dark money group spent $4 million to assert that the tax bill will help ordinary Americans, conveniently leaving out the cuts the bill would make to Medicaid and how it would sunset Affordable Care Act subsidies.
It’s no coincidence the group is peddling a narrative endorsed by big drug companies. Since 2020, the lobbying group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America has funneled a staggering $17.5 million to the American Action Network….
[Protect Democracy, June 25, 2025, downwithtyranny.com]
A Tulane University environmental researcher, Dr. Kimberly Terrell, was forced to leave her position with the university’s Environmental Law Clinic after years of publishing results of her research that documented, totally unsurprisingly, racial bias in location of highly-polluting industries, racial bias in hiring, and the health impacts of polluting industries being located in populated areas. The Clinic supports communities that are engaged in legal disputes with polluting industries, many of which are located along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge; in the part of the state commonly known as “Cancer Alley.”
Brian Beutler, June 25, 2025 [Off Message]
Mike Johnson Suggests War Powers Act Is Unconstitutional
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
Voters Will “Get Over It,” McConnell Tells GOP Colleagues About Medicaid Cuts
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
Civic republicanism
The Common Sense of a Wealth Tax: Thomas Paine & Taxation as Freedom from Aristocracy
Jeremy Bearer-Friend, Vanessa Williamson, 1 January 2022 [Scholarly Commons]
…this article provides a close examination of Thomas Paine’s wealth tax proposal in the second volume of The Rights of Man. Unlike Paine’s proposal to tax inheritances, his 1792 proposal to tax wealth on an annual basis is often overlooked. The article identifies Paine’s various design specifications, provides original estimates of the impact of Paine’s wealth tax proposal within his own time period and as applied to billionaires today, and discusses ambiguities in the proposal. The article then places Paine in conversation with the contemporary wealth tax policy debate and demonstrates how Paine informs both the design and evaluation of tax policy. Lastly, the article clarifies the relationship between democratic ideals and taxation, portraying tax policy as a normative expression of republican ideals….
Paine’s work encourages us to consider tax policy as a primarily political endeavor. Rather than a set of technocratic nudges, Paine proposes we assess a tax’s effect in terms of the polity, rather than simply the economy. This standard for evaluating tax policy is remarkably prescient, as 21stCentury proposals to tax wealth again invoke the challenge of concentrated political power as a central rationale. And to the extent that addressing concentrated political power is a central focus for evaluating the desirability of a tax, then tax policy that targets concentrations of wealth becomes the ideal form of tax. If the corruptions of political and economic life that Paine criticized are with us today, his proposal warrants serious consideration.
Indeed, Paine’s proposal seems especially relevant to the contemporary moment if we directly compare the wealth distribution of late 18th Century Britain with that of the contemporary United States. At the start of the 19th Century, the top one percent of British households received about 15 percent of the total national income. In the United States today, the amount of income received by the top 1% of earners has risen from 10 percent in 1980 to 19% in 2019. Similarly, the top 1% of estates in Paine’s Britain held 24% of all wealth; the top 1% of American households have 27% of total wealth. The level of economic inequality in the contemporary United States is strikingly similar to the level that Paine believed corrupted British politics. And, just as Paine claimed, extremes of wealth corrupt American elections and distort American politics. The level at which Paine believed “there ought to be a limit to property, or the accumulation of it by bequest,” is directly comparable to the highest levels of wealth in America today.
KT Chong
Jiang Xueqin, a Beijing-based historian, has recently gained viral attention for his remarkably accurate predictions regarding major geopolitical events. I’ll let his videos and his own words speak for himself.
All these videos were uploaded over a year ago, but people have only recently discovered them:
• How Empire is Destroying America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_blj8zKdKgA
“In this class in this semester, I am making three big predictions. First is that Trump will win in November. Second is that United States will go to war with Iran. And the third big prediction is that…”
• America’s Imperial Hubris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JieFC4Yww4o
“… in [Trump’s] second term, there will be a very strong likelihood that the United States will go to war with Iran… I want to make the argument today that the military will go along with the war…”
• The Second American Civil War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go1bMQKnJBQ
“… given that nature of the civil war, I think that once the war ends, the outcome will be that America will become a CHRISTIAN ISOLATIONAIST THEOCRACY. And the reason is very simple…”
• The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gH4PvIni5E&t=53m35s
“Where am I getting these ideas? Am I just making these stuff up? … History tends to repeat itself. By studying history meticulously and thoroughly, we can get insights into the future. What I’m gonna show you now is there is a direct analogy between what’s happening today and what happen today and what happened in Greece in about 400 B.C…”
– – – – –
So far, only one US media outlet has picked up the news:
Newsweek: The Professor Who Predicted Trump’s Return and War With Iran (Jun 24, 2025)
https://www.newsweek.com/jiang-xueqin-trump-iran-viral-video-youtube-2090047
KT Chong
Here is the whole Geo-Strategy series from Professor Jiang:
• Geo-Strategy #1: Iran’s Strategy Matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEEpOxqdU5E
• Geo-Strategy #2: Christian Zionism and the Middle East Conflict: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkKrZq4YdqY
• Geo-Strategy #3: How Empire is Destroying America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_blj8zKdKgA
• Geo-Strategy #4: Saudi Arabia’s Trump Card Against Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LctUcVqhhns
• Geo-Strategy #5: Why Trump Will Win (And Pick Nikki Haley as VP): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exRK-85630k
He missed, BUT at 39:36…
“I’m not sure that Nikki Haley will be his Vice President. I’m just making a guess. It’s possible that in August, Trump will pick someone else. Possibly someone named JD Vance. The only thing you need to know about JD Vance is that he’s very loyal to Trump. I think he’ll pick Nikki Haley. But I often think that there’s a very good chance that he’ll JD Vance as well…”
Back then, people’s reactions were: “who the hell is JD Vance?”
• Geo-Strategy #6: America’s Imperial Hubris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JieFC4Yww4o&pp=0gcJCcMJAYcqIYzv
• Geo-Strategy #7: Who Killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsRGvKxfLts
• Geo-Strategy #8: The Iran Trap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y_hbz6loEo
• Geo-Strategy #9: Putin’s War for the Soul of Russia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEPSUC-UQ5k
• Geo-Strategy #10: Putin’s Strategic Imagination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_al2wgk49Y
• Geo-Strategy #11: The Second American Civil War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go1bMQKnJBQ
• Geo-Strategy END: Psychohistory (The Science of Imagining the Future): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_k6esWheqA
somecomputerguy
Re; Intel.
Devotion to technical excellence is not the Intel I remember.
First, when IBM decided use Intel chips in the PC, instead of the vastly superior Motorola 680000 (used in the later Apple Mackintosh) my understanding is that it was because Motorola stupidly said they would need time to ramp up production, and Intel said no problem, which turned out to be a lie.
Though the ’90s, Intel produced maybe couple of ‘new’ processors a year, not new designs, usually just overclocked versions of their existing products, astronomically priced.
Then came AMD. At first AMD produced Intel designs, significantly cheaper and Intels marketing cycle doubled, and their prices dropped.
Then AMD started producing their own designs, and for about five or six years, through AMDs entire product line, their processors were both faster, because technologically better, and cheaper. That included AMDs server chips, which should have secured AMD position. Instead, Intel crushed AMD while marketing significantly inferior products.
Like & Subscribe
Where’s ICE in deporting these Chinese-funded criminals? Cowards.
Hey Donny, you want to send a message to Beijing? Round these scum up and ship them back to China where they belong. Nah, instead you’ll pick on defenseless men, women and children as is your cowardly wont.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chinese-organized-crime-us-marijuana-market
An alliance with the virginal Chinese state? Never. Nah. It can’t be. It could never be. How dare you.
someofparts
KTChong – Great links, thanks