Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 20, 2025

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 20, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

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

ICE Is Planning Mass Extraordinary Renditions

Spencer Ackerman, 14 Jul 2025 [FOREVER WARS]

AT THE START of this newsletter nearly four years ago, I wrote about how what is widely presumed to be the largest part of the post-9/11 CIA torture program has simply vanished from the historical record. That’s the part where the CIA didn’t do its own torture, but instead sent people it kidnapped off the streets to countries like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria or Moammar Qaddafi’s Libya, where their security apparats would do the dirty work….

Many of us who track the War on Terror have spent literal decades warning that without accountability for these atrocities, they will recur and intensify. It’s one of the main points of REIGN OF TERROR. And now, extraordinary rendition, albeit without the name, is under contemplation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with a crucial assist by the Supreme Court. More than a decade after the CIA got away with it, ICE will perform mass extraordinary renditions at scale….

‘Horror Story’: Flight Logs Reveal Dozens Disappeared on El Salvador Deportation Trips

Julia Conley, July 17, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Trump administration hands over Medicaid recipients’ personal data, including addresses, to ICE 

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 07-18-2025]

82 Year Old Green Card Holder Disappeared And Deported By ICE

KeithDB, July 19, 2025 [DailKos]

…Luis Leon is an 82 year legal immigrant (green card holder) who has lived in the United States for nearly 40 years. He doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket on his record. He has cleaner record than most of us.

His one “mistake” was losing his wallet with his green card in it. Doing the right thing, he made an appointment with the nearest immigration  office to have it replaced. On June 20th he arrived at the immigration office as scheduled. Instead ICE officials led the 82 year old away in handcuffs with no explanation.

With that Luis Leon was disappeared by the Trump Regime. His family could not find out anything about him, to include where he had been taken. His name did not appear on the database of ICE detainees. Calls by his family to prisons, immigration officials, even hospitals got no answers.

But Luis Leon was in ICE custody. ICE first disappeared him to a detention center in Minnesota and then shipped him off to Guatemala with no due process, and no notice to his family. 82 years old and suffering from a variety of ailments, including diabetes and a heart condition, Leon ended up in a Guatemalan hospital which is who contacted the family….

ICE memo outlines plan to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens 

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2025]

ICE LAWYERS ARE HIDING THEIR NAMES IN IMMIGRATION COURT 

Debbie Nathan, July 15 2025 [The Intercept]

What We Need to Learn from Idi Amin — The dictator of Uganda had a “mass deportation program” too

Jim Stewartson, July 20, 2025 [MindWar]

“I’m giving Uganda back to ethnic Ugandans.”

—Idi Amin, August 1972

This precise message has been echoed throughout history by racist demagogues.

“Germany is not the land of refuge for criminals and Jews from all over the world. Germany is for the Germans.”

—Joseph Goebbels, “Der Angriff,” 1933

“America is for Americans, and Americans only.”

—Stephen Miller, Madison Square Garden 2024

Meet the Disaster Capitalists Behind Alligator Alcatraz 

Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect.

Trump says he’s considering revoking Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship, reigniting decades-long feud 

[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2025]

O’Donnell wrote on Instagram, “you want to revoke my citizenship? go ahead and try, king joffrey with a tangerine spray tan.

Trump quietly claimed a power even King George wasn’t allowed to have

[Vox, via The Big Picture July 14, 2025]

A truly scary new revelation about Trump’s effort to circumvent the TikTok ban.

“‘Even God Cannot Hear Us Here’: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison,”

[politico.com/playbook, 07/19/2025]

Rümeysa Öztürk for Vanity Fair: “Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk opens up for the first time about her shocking arrest and 45 days in a South Louisiana processing facility. She recalls the generous and compassionate women who helped her through this harrowing ordeal.”

Pete Hegseth Announces Dangerous Expansion of ICE’s Powers

Edith Olmsted, July 18, 2025 [The New Republic]

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is now allowing ICE to use U.S. military bases to detain undocumented immigrants as part of Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts….

ICE Agents Are Harassing the Courthouse Volunteers Who Assist Besieged Immigrants

Samantha Michaels, July 17, 2025 [Mother Jones]

“They want to be doing this with no witnesses.”

Men DOGEbags at Work

The IRS Is Building a Vast System to Share Millions of Taxpayers’ Data With ICE 

William Turton, Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro, July 15, 2025 [ProPublica]

When Expert Advisors Are Sent Packing, Who Picks Up the Slack? 

[SciLight, via Naked Capitalism 07-16-2025]

…science doesn’t disappear just because a government committee is disbanded. Expertise remains. The question is where it goes, how it continues to function, and who steps in to organize and use it.

When the EPA dissolved its particulate matter advisory panel in 2018, a remarkable thing happened. The former members reconvened independently, without government funding or official authority. They produced the same kind of rigorous, transparent recommendations they had before. Their work was widely respected and ultimately helped steer public debate. It proved that scientific advisors don’t need a federal stamp to make meaningful contributions. But it also underscored something else: without formal structures, such efforts are fragile, unsustainable, and dependent on personal initiative….

Strategic Political Economy

The Power Gap – How China Outpowered the U.S. 

Lau Vegys [Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing, via Naked Capitalism 07-15-2025]

…What you’re seeing here is nothing short of an economic revolution. China has skyrocketed from around 1,000 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2000 to over 10,000 TWh today. That’s a 10x increase in just over two decades. Meanwhile, U.S. electricity generation has remained essentially flat around 4,000 TWh. China surpassed the U.S. around 2010 and hasn’t looked back—today, it generates roughly 2.5 times more electricity than we do….

 Electricity generation is one of the best real-time indicators of industrial strength. When you can produce 2.5x more power than your rival, you can run 2.5x more factories, smelters, fabs, data centers—and everything else that makes a modern industrial economy tick.

That power gap helps explain why manufacturing has steadily migrated to China. Consequently, it also shows up in the vast disparity between the two countries in output of key industrial goods. Consider the following 2023 figures:

• Steel production: China 1.02 billion tons vs. U.S. 80 million tons.
• Cement production: China 2.02 billion tons vs. U.S. 90 million tons.
• Electrolytic copper: China 13 million tons vs. U.S. 1.1 million tons.
• Electrolytic aluminum: China 41.6 million tons vs. U.S. 2.1 million tons.
• Coal production: China 4.7 billion tons vs. U.S. 520 million tons.
• Shipbuilding: China 42.32 million tons vs. U.S. 600,000 tons.
• Automobile production: China 30.16 million vs. U.S. 10.61 million.
• Industrial robots: China 430,000 units vs. U.S. 44,000 units.
• Computer production: China 330 million units vs. U.S. 70 million units.
• High-speed rail: China 45,000 km vs. U.S. 2,500 km.
• Highways: China 184,000 km vs. U.S. 106,000 km.
• Rail freight: China 5 billion tons vs. U.S. 2 billion tons…..

​​​​​​​Over the past 30 years, the U.S. has been steadily deindustrializing—financializing its economy, offshoring its factories, and burning through nearly $13 trillion on endless wars. Meanwhile, China was doing the opposite: quietly and methodically building the industrial base of the future….

[TW: One of the three founders of Intel was Andy Grove, who served as Intel’s first COO, and later as its third CEO from 1987 to 1998 when he began a battle with cancer.

[Grove wrote in July 2010,  How America Can Create Jobs, in which he ripped into outsourcing and free trade, and asked a fundamental question: “what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?” (below)

It should also be noted that Grove was an immigrant from Hungary. Both the fact that Grove was an immigrant, and that he repudiated free trade, should be rubbed in the faces of Republicans, conservatives, and neo-liberals until they squeal.

How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late: Andy Grove
By Andy Grove – Jul 1, 2010

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?….

How could the U.S. have forgotten? I believe the answer has to do with a general undervaluing of manufacturing—the idea that as long as “knowledge work” stays in the U.S., it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs. It’s not just newspaper commentators who spread this idea. Consider this passage by Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder: “The TV manufacturing industry really started here, and at one point employed many workers. But as TV sets became ‘just a commodity,’ their production moved offshore to locations with much lower wages. And nowadays the number of television sets manufactured in the U.S. is zero. A failure? No, a success.”

I disagree. Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today’s “commodity” manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.

Our fundamental economic beliefs, which we have elevated from a conviction based on observation to an unquestioned truism, is that the free market is the best of all economic systems—the freer the better. Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief, largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better….

The story comes to mind of an engineer who was to be executed by guillotine. The guillotine was stuck, and custom required that if the blade didn’t drop, the condemned man was set free. Before this could happen, the engineer pointed with excitement to a rusty pulley, and told the executioner to apply some oil there. Off went his head.

We got to our current state as a consequence of many of us taking actions focused on our own companies’ next milestones. An example: Five years ago a friend joined a large VC firm as a partner. His responsibility was to make sure that all the startups they funded had a “China strategy,” meaning a plan to move what jobs they could to China. He was going around with an oil can, applying drops to the guillotine in case it was stuck….

[TW: In light of Trump and MAGA’s hostility to immingrants:  Grove was born in 1936 in Budapest, Hungary, as Gróf András István and arrived in USA as a penniless 20-year old refugee from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.]

Elon & Trump are wrong on $3T US budget deficit” (YouTube video)

Another casualty of the trade wars: now we don’t have transformers 

Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 07-16-2025]

What would a return to the gold standard really mean?

Richard Murphy, July 18 2025

Reform UK published ‘Our Contract with You’ a while ago, and although the idea is not fully formed, there are hints, including from public statements from Richard Tice MP, that they are toying with the idea of a return to the gold standard. I have been explicitly asked to comment on this, and given the importance of the issue, I am happy to do so.

The idea of returning to the gold standard is pure economic fantasy. It is, however, a fantasy with dangerous consequences, not least because of the increase in inequality that would result in the UK. That needs explanation….

Second, this has nothing to do with the modern economy. The gold standard was abandoned for good reason: it made democratic management of the economy nigh-on impossible. If money cannot expand with the needs of a growing population and economy, the only way to redistribute or reallocate is through deflation and forced austerity, both of which are deeply harmful. There is no macroeconomic space for discretion under the gold standard: someone must lose for someone else to gain. Everything is a zero-sum game, but the real economy is nothing like that at all. It is dynamic, but the gold standard is linear.

Third, and most crucially, this scarcity promotes inequality. A gold standard might restrict the money supply, but not the number of people, or their needs. As the population increases, or as the economy demands investment, or the government wishes to supply more services, the limited quantity of money would lead to increasing competition for increasingly scarce money because of the deliberately imposed constraint on its availability. Unsurprisingly, those with power and assets, who already have the most money, would win since they would already hold all the aces, and so inequality would grow….

The enshittification of American hegemony 

Henry Farrell, July 15, 2025 [Programmable Mutter]

…So what we did in the WIRED piece was to bring together our argument together with Cory’s, to explain what is happening to American power under Trump. The networks and infrastructures that we described, could just as well be described in Cory’s language as global platforms, which support the dominance of the United States of America. If you, as a US ally, buy into the F-35 weapons platform, or Starlink, or the US dollar, you are making yourself dependent on the goodwill of a foreign government that doesn’t even pretend to have your interests at heart any more. In the second Trump administration, America has entered into the stage of “hegemonic enshittification,” when it barely even bothers to pretend that its actions are in the collective interest. Instead, it uses its control of global finance to sanction the International Criminal Court, and threatening to deny Starlink access to Ukraine to force concessions on minerals….

Global power shift

China Makes Historic Leap in Energy with the World’s First High-Temperature Superconductor Tokamak

[Paris2018, July 12, 2025, via Naked Capitalism 07-15-2025]

In a groundbreaking development from eastern Shanghai, China has unveiled the world’s first high-temperature superconductor tokamak, marking a revolutionary advancement in clean energy technology. This innovative device, known as the HH70, represents a significant milestone in fusion energy research and positions China at the forefront of sustainable power generation solutions….

China’s HH70 tokamak distinguishes itself through its innovative use of high-temperature superconductors (HTS) manufactured from Rare Earth Barium Copper Oxide (REBCO). This technical advancement represents a paradigm shift in tokamak design and operational capability, enabling more efficient performance while reducing both size and cost requirements.

The Scale of China’s Solar-Power Projects

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture July 19, 2025]

As the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind and solar power, reportedly accounting for 74 percent of all projects now under construction worldwide.

Balancing Act — How Allies Have Responded to Limited U.S. Retrenchment 

[RAND, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2025]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Israeli Minister: ‘Gaza must be in Ruins for Decades,’ as Airstrike Kills Children seeking Water 

Juan Cole [via Naked Capitalism 07-16-2025]

Israel seeks U.S. help on deals to move Palestinians out of Gaza

Barak Ravid, July 18, 2025 [Axios, via politico.com/playbook]

The director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency visited Washington this week seeking U.S. help in convincing countries to take hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, two sources with knowledge of issue tell Axios.

• The spy chief, David Barnea, told White House envoy Steve Witkoff that Israel has been speaking in particular with Ethiopia, Indonesia and Libya.

Oligarchy

How to invest your enormous inheritance

[The Economist via Elm, via The Big Picture July 14, 2025]

What do you stand to inherit? It still feels like a question from a different age, despite its growing importance today. In 2025 people across the rich world will inherit some $6trn, or around 10% of GDP — a figure that has climbed sharply in recent decades. French bequests have doubled as a share of national output since the 1960s; those in Germany have tripled since the 1970s; Italian inheritances are now worth around 20% of GDP

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Five Companies Now Control Over 90% of the Global Food Delivery Market 

[Ramnz, via Naked Capitalism 07-15-2025]

The Number Go Up Rule: Why America Refuses to Fix Anything 

Matt Stoller [via Naked Capitalism 07-19-2025]

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal dropped a salacious story involving the relationship between Jeff Epstein and Donald Trump, one that is throwing the political world into a tizzy. And for good reason, it speaks to a two tier system of justice. One class in America is composed of billionaires and elites with super-yachts and no accountability, the other is composed of the rest of us who have to deal with increasingly enshittified goods and services….

Two other headlines from the WSJ yesterday are also worth mentioning. First, rail giant Union Pacific is considering buying Norfolk Southern, a historically important merger would harm farmers and shippers, and push up prices of food, energy, and a whole set of goods on which we rely. And second, Chevron is closing its deal for Hess, completing the consolidation of the oil sector, and they are going to move engineering work to India.

Things in America, in other words, are getting worse, very quickly, for most of us, while a small group does quite well. The Epstein saga is just a gossipy way to convey that narrative. The question I want to ask in this piece is why that is….

The reason behind the rule is simple. The biggest generation in American history, the baby boomers, are still in power. Boomers have in aggregate $80-100 trillion in financial assets, far more than any other group. As a result they are culturally and politically dominant. The average American billionaire is a boomer in his early 60s. Donald Trump is a boomer, most of his key advisors are boomers, so is Democratic Senate chief Chuck Schumer. Key business leaders – like Apple CEO Tim Cook and JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon – are boomers, as are most CEOs of Hollywood studios, who have traditionally skewed younger. The average S&P 500 CEO is in his late 50s, and the number of young people serving on corporate boards keeps going down.

Asset control and power in America is centered among old people with lots of assets. And they associate protecting the stock market with protecting America….

How Google Ruined Your Phone

Jairaj Devadiga, July 16, 2025 [The Lever]

Google has sabotaged its phones’ open-source technology in order to stamp out its competitors and intensify surveillance of its customers.

Trumpillnomics

Lina Khan Slams Trump FTC for Giving Oil Executives a Free Pass After Price-Fixing Scandal

Julia Conley, July 18, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Khan accused the administration of “letting off the hook oil executives caught trying to collude with foreign countries to inflate how much people pay at the pump.”

Monopoly Round-Up: Jeff Epstein, MAGA, and Monopolies 

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2025]

Galloway: ICE Age

No Mercy / No Malice, via The Big Picture, July 14, 2025]

President Trump is no longer fighting inflation, China, or AI. Instead, he’s declared war on a manufactured threat: the “enemy within” — immigrants, journalists, and professors. Our biggest threat, apparently, isn’t Russian aggression or economic inequality; it’s your Uber driver or anthropology professor. This is not only cruel (and depraved) but stupid, as the chill being cast across the agriculture, services, and construction sectors will likely be more inflationary than the tariffs (more stupidity). Trump’s goal is to deport 4 million undocumented people over four years — that’s about 3% of the U.S. workforce; 10% to 15% in several sectors dependent on immigrant labor.

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

The significance of the Epstein files

Richard Murphy, July 19 2025

…This story has the capacity to destroy Trump. Without in any way taking away from the significance of the actions of Epstein and the suffering of those who were victimised, this capacity for the story to destroy Trump is also important. What that capacity reveals is why people are so angry in the USA, UK and elsewhere with those in power.

As Robert Reich suggested today in a Substack video that is behind a paywall (and I acknowledge his inspiration for some of my thinking that follows on this issue), since 2008, people have been very appropriately angry with the powerful elites in our society.

In that year, those powerful elites brought down much of the Western world’s banking system, and none of them ever paid the price for doing so.

Millions of people lost their homes in the USA and elsewhere as we bailed them out.

Millions of people worldwide lost their jobs as a result of their recklessness.

And, all around the world, it is likely that millions of people also lost their businesses.

Since then we have suffered more than 15 years of austerity, and paid an enormous price for that, none of which was necessary, but all of which was supposedly justified by those who imposed it upon us because of the crash that the wealthy elite of the world created through their own recklessness, foolishness, and ultimately, lack of accountability.

That elite thought before 2008, and to a substantial degree still do, that they were the gods of the universe. They believed, and still do, in their right to command, their right to influence, their right to own, and their right to unaccountability. As a consequence, they also believed in their right to abuse, and abuse they did, and still do.

I am not, of course, accusing most of the rich and powerful in the world’s financial elite of paedophilia, or any form of sex abuse, come to that. Some might have done that, and I hope that all those who did will be held accountable. Instead, what I am accusing them of is economic abuse, which they think they have had the right to perpetrate with impunity

At the same time, I am also accusing the political power elite, who were so obviously in the pocket of the financial power elite in the run-up to 2008 and have undoubtedly remained so since, of precisely the same thing. They, too, are, I think, guilty of economic abuse that is ongoing still….

Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump. 

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 07-18-2025]

Why didn’t Pam Bondi as Florida AG investigate Jeffrey Epstein?!

Dean Obeidallah, July 17, 2025

…Trump’s current Attorney General Pam Bondi was Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019 in the very state that was ground zero for Epstein raping and trafficking children. Why didn’t she investigate and prosecute Epstein for these heinous crimes committed in Florida?!

Taking a quick step back, Epstein received in 2008 the “deal of a lifetime” from local Florida prosecutors and George W. Bush’s Department of Justice. At the time, Bush’s DOJ had identified 36 underage girls who were victims of Epstein. But they offered the well-connected Epstein a deal to plead guilty to just two prostitution charges in state court. He was then sentenced to 18 months in jail–which he served in a private wing of the Palm Beach County jail where he was allowed daily work release. In addition, Bush’s DOJ agreed not to prosecute him for federal crimes. Worse, Epstein’s victims were not even told of the deal in advance so they could object….

Why They’re Protecting Jeffrey Epstein’s Secrets

Perfectly timed trades shorting the Dollar and then longing the Dollar right before*Trump leaked that he was firing Powel

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2025]

Spencer Hakimian

@SpencerHakimian

Well would you look at that.2 *perfectly* timed trades shorting the Dollar and then longing the Dollar *right before* Trump leaked that he was firing Powell, and then TACO’d 30 minutes later.

Restoring balance to the economy

Hard Truths About the US Labor Movement: An Interview with Chris Townsend 

[MR Online, via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2025]

Health care crisis

Health Insurers Push Huge Premium Hikes As Profits Soar

Veronica Riccobene, Helen Santoroc, July 18, [The Lever]

The six largest health insurers reported more than $1 trillion in revenue and more than $31 billion in net income last year — and are now pushing to raise Americans’ premiums by as much as 66 percent for some policies, according to recent state regulatory filings. The proposed increases come as insurers dole out billions to further enrich top brass and shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends.

In all, Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplaces across the country are projected to see the largest rate hikes in more than five years, driving up out-of-pocket premiums for individual plan policyholders by more than 75 percent on average, according to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation….

What happens when a neurotropic virus repeatedly infects the population

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-18-2025]

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Project Nectar: Another Palantir Special -A honey-filled database. What could that be used for?

Thomas Neuburger, July 16, 2025 [God’s Spies]

…Bedford in the UK is a decent smallish town. Its population is about 200,000. It sits north of London, west of Cambridge and halfway between London and Birmingham. Very British in the new cosmopolitan sense. Diverse; nothing terribly special; nothing terribly notable, save to its residents, who may happily love it to death.

Except Bedford now is a testing ground for a new Palantir program called “Nectar” (remember that name). From the Bedford local paper:

Bedfordshire Police using AI tool to profile political views, sex life, race and health data

Elon Musk’s Grok Is Calling for a New Holocaust

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture July 13, 2025]

The chatbot is also praising Hitler and attacking users with Jewish-sounding names.

How exactly did Grok go full ‘MechaHitler?’ 

[Engadget, via The Big Picture July 13, 2025]

Collapse of independent news media

Stephen Colbert’s Cancellation Is Exactly What It Looks Like

Parker Molloy, July 18, 2025 [The New Republic]

Mock a Trump bribe on Monday, get canceled by Thursday. The Late Show’s death reveals how billionaires and presidents are reshaping American media.

Trump celebrating the cancelation of Colbert is what petty tyrants/scumbags do

Dean Obeidallah, July 19, 2025

Donald Trump has long wanted Stephen Colbert fired—as CBS and its parent company Paramount knows. Trump has not only publicly whined for years about Colbert’s comedic barbs at his expense, calling Colbert a litany of names. But in September 2024, Trump went even further demanding that Colbert be fired after Colbert called him “boring.” At the time, Trump wrote point blank about Colbert, “CBS should terminate his contract.”

And on Wednesday, CBS did exactly what Trump had demanded from them just nine months earlier. Obviously, CBS’s parent company Paramount is trying to please Trump because they are seeking the Trump regime to approve a merger with Skydance–which is primarily funded by billionaire and huge GOP donor, Larry Ellison. So when Paramount executives says the decision to fire Colbert is a “financial decision” –they are being accurate in that this about the finances of these Paramount executives who want the deal to close so they can rake in even more money for themselves.

While millions were outraged that Paramount cancelled the top-rated late-night show host, Trump was giddy. Trump took to his social media platform to write, “I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.” He then added, “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.”

Let’s be blunt. Trump celebrating Colbert being cancelled and calling for Jimmy Kimmel to be next is NOT what a U.S. President says. It’s what a petty tyrant/scumbag says. And that is exactly who Trump is.

This is the same Trump who has in the past tried to stop comedians from mocking him by way of lawsuits and even in his first term demanding the FCC investigate “Saturday Night Live.” But in his second term, Trump is openly embracing the tyrant playbook by using the power of government to punish media outlets, universities, law firms and any who dare to defy him….

How a Free Press Threatens Trump’s Manhood

Rob Okun, July 14, 2025 [laprogressive.com]

Climate and environmental crises

‘Final nail:’ Trump administration memo could strike fatal blow to wind and solar power

[Politico, via Clean Power Roundup 07-18-2025]

The department’s new policy requires Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s office to weigh in on virtually every permit for solar and wind projects with a nexus to Interior.

Democrats’ political malpractice

Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death

Reid Epstein and Shane Goldmacher, July 19, 2025 [New York Times, via politico.com/playbook]

The Democratic National Committee’s examination of what went wrong in the 2024 election is expected to mostly steer clear of the decisions made by the Biden-turned-Harris campaign and will focus more heavily instead on actions taken by allied groups, according to interviews with six people briefed on the report’s progress.

The audit, which the committee is calling an “after-action review,” is expected to avoid the questions of whether former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. should have run for re-election in the first place, whether he should have exited the race earlier than he did and whether former Vice President Kamala Harris was the right choice to replace him….

Centrist Democrats Are the Actual Traitors to Their Party

Aaron Regunberg, July 17, 2025 [The New Republic]

While progressives often get accused of undermining the Democratic Party, the evidence shows that it’s the moderate wing that most often violates the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” principle.

No One Is Too Powerful To Primary— The Case Against Hakeem Jeffries Starts in Brooklyn — Safe Seats, Stale Leadership: Structural Rot Protecting Dan Crenshaw & Hakeem Jeffries

Howie Klein, July 13, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

How the Left Lost the Working Class—and How to Win Them Back

David Kusnet, July 17, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

To avoid becoming the foil for Right Populism, Left Populists need to respect working-class values of work, family, community, patriotism, and the aspiration for stability and security….

Visiting factory towns, rural areas, and exurban communities—and so many diners that their motto might be “No lunch counter left unvisited”—scholars, journalists, and political strategists have sought the sources of Trump’s appeal. Is the root cause “economic anxiety” about stagnant living standards or “racial resentment” about the declining white majority? This isn’t just an academic argument: If you believe stagnant living standards are the problem, you probably think economic populism is the solution. But, if you think racism, sexism, and nativism are decisive, you’re likelier to stress democracy, diversity, and national unity, as in Hillary Clinton’s slogan in 2016, “Stronger Together.”

After ten years of this deadlocked debate, a leading scholar of right-wing populism is urging progressives to move forward. In her new book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, the feminist psychologist and law professor Joan C. Williams presents a complex explanation: Political polarization results from a chain reaction where economic inequalities feed social differences, thereby fusing class conflicts with culture wars….

Mamdani Nets Record Fundraising Haul While Adams and Cuomo Strike Out on Matching Funds 

[THE CITY, via Naked Capitalism 07-16-2025]

Resistance

When Do You Need to Quit Your Job?

Hamilton Nolan, July 15, 2025 [How Things Work]

…There are, broadly speaking, two categories of people who should consider quitting their jobs immediately: Those who are doing irredeemably evil jobs within larger organizations; and those who work for organizations that are, in practice, irredeemably bad.

In many cases, the most productive thing to do at your immoral company is to try to change it. Indeed, one of the most compelling reasons to unionize the tech industry is that unions could be one of the only levers strong enough to force these enormous companies to be less evil. One of the speakers at yesterday’s protest was a former Meta employee who was fired for trying to organize against the company’s more unsavory work. She cite UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s recent report on the economic facilitation of the genocide in Palestine, which makes it clear that major tech companies are directly enabling Israel’s violence against civilians. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others build and administer the technological infrastructure used by the IDF. Not to mention the protest’s target: “There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making,” the report says. “In January 2024, Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv ‘in solidarity’; in April 2025, Palantir’s CEO responded to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza by saying, ‘mostly terrorists, that’s true.’”

Where do you locate the dividing line between “trying to change a bad organization” and “time to quit to protect your own soul?” These judgments are not clear-cut. Those big tech companies have not been shy about firing employees who have tried to organize or protest. It is no coincidence that unionizing these companies is difficult. They make it difficult. I want my email account to work, but I don’t want to facilitate quadcopter assassinations of starving civilians. Reining in huge tech companies from within is a noble aspiration that should continue as long as practically possible….

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

The Common Thread Between Epstein Denial and Climate Denial

Kate Aronoff, July 18, 2025 [The New Republic]

…In order to understand why a strategy that’s historically been so successful for Republicans is now tearing them apart, consider the function climate denial has had for the party. Republicans have spent years deriding policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and incentivize renewable energy as “Green New Scams,” and long called climate change itself a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese government. The strategy, which has roots in the tobacco industry’s efforts to cover up the harm caused by its products, serves the material interests of reliable Republican donors in the fossil fuel industry. Although oil and gas executives have known for decades that their companies’ products contribute to global warming, they funded right-wing think tanks, advertising campaigns, and politicians spouting a contradictory array of talking points: that climate change isn’t real, is overblown, or is actually good….

The War on Women

Joyce Vance, July 20, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

…The party that claims to be pro-life isn’t. It’s not just the misbegotten refusal to provide abortion, which can be lifesaving in a pregnancy gone wrong. The culture war against women is in full-blown progress.

But now in Tennessee, they’re taking it a little bit further. Unmarried? Pregnant? Sorry, no healthcare for you. According to footage shown by the Tennessee Holler, an unmarried woman who was pregnant was denied medical care by a doctor who didn’t want to treat her. She didn’t want an abortion. She wanted to carry the baby to term. He denied her care because she wasn’t married. It offended his Christian beliefs. We’ve heard about Christian bakers not wanting to bake cakes for gay couples. This is the next logical step in the Supreme Court’s permissive politics towards Christianity. Except that this doctor seems to have forgotten that Mary was an unmarried, pregnant woman when Jesus was conceived….

Trump, Epstein, and the GOP’s Planned Rape Culture

Jesse Mackinnon, Jul 15, 2025 [Common Dreams]

This tax testifies to the utter corruption of conservative thought: Congress is coming for your EV — and what’s left of conservatism.

[Washington Post, via The Big Picture July 13, 2025]

Congress is proposing that the federal government slap a tax on something you have already purchased, whether you drive it or not, just because you own it. It’s no different from saying you now have to start paying an annual tax on that second refrigerator in your basement or the computer in your backpack.

Conspiratorialism and neoliberalism

Cory Doctorow, 19 Jul 2025 [Pluralistic]

If “there is no such thing as society” then all evil must be the fault of evil individuals….

Trump’s day-one Executive Order blitz contained a lot of weird, fucked-up shit, but for me, the most telling (though not the most important) was the decision to defund all medical research whose grant applications contained the word “systemic”:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/02/04/national-science-foundation-trump-executive-orders-words/

Now, this is an objectively very stupid thing to do. As someone with a recent cancer diagnosis whose illness is still “localized” – and who will need a lot more intensive care should his cancer become “systemic” – I would very much like my government to continue to fund systemic research.

But of course, Trump wasn’t intentionally killing research on systemic forms of cancer. Rather, he was indifferent to the collateral damage to this kind of research that arose in the pursuit of his real target, which is killing systemic explanations for social phenomena.

This is absolutely in keeping with neoliberal dogma, best expressed in Margaret Thatcher’s notorious claim that “there is no such thing as society.” In neoliberalism, we are all atomized individuals, members of homo economicus, driven to maximize our personal utility. All acts of seeming generosity are actually secretly selfish: you only tell your partner you love them because you hope it will make them fuck you and/or take care of you when you get sick; you only give alms to the poor in order to seem virtuous before people who can steer profitable business your way; you donate to cancer research as an insurance policy against your own eventual sickness.

This selfishness is a feature, not a bug. It’s only by pursuing our selfish utility-maximization that we allow the market – a giant, distributed computer – to correctly assess who should be given the power to allocate capital and direct the activities of the lesser among us. When the invisible hand helps these born monarchs to pull capitalism’s sword out of the market’s stone, they are elevated to the position of power they were destined to hold, from which they can maximize all our social and material progress.

The project of neoliberal economics is to transform the social science of economics into a “hard science” grounded in empirical, mathematical proofs. Economism is a political philosophy that says that human society should only be considered through a lens of mathematical models. As such, it vaporizes all factors that can’t be readily quantized and represented in a model:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

It’s a political philosophy with no theory of power, built on just-so stories….

Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel and The Crypto Fascists of Silicon Valley

Dougald Lamont, July 16, 2025

In October, 2023, [Marc Andreesen] published his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” an incoherent mess of ideas and quotes scraped off the internet that combines the worst elements of a bloated and pompous sermon with a corporate motivational speech, and the research and fact-checking skills of a 14-year-old, all with shout-outs to actual fascists.

It’s sanctimonious, self-congratulatory and un-self-aware, while attacking “enemies” with imagined grievances. It’s all based on a shallow and largely fictional understanding of the subjects being discussed….

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Executive Lawlessness: Leah Litman on the Supreme Court Enabling Presidential Overreach

July 18 2025 [The Intercept]

During Donald Trump’s first term, the Supreme Court made some effort to check his power. But that era is over. The court has ruled that Trump cannot be prosecuted for actions he took as president, including for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and it just wrapped its latest term by restricting lower courts’ power to block his unlawful orders on issues like birthright citizenship, abortion care, and immigrants’ basic rights.

“What the Supreme Court did is it limited lower courts’ ability to use what has been the most effective tool that lower courts have to reign in the Trump administration’s lawlessness, which is to block a policy on a nationwide basis,” says Leah Litman, author of the new book, “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, newsroom counsel and correspondent Shawn Musgrave speaks with professor and attorney Litman and politics reporter Jessica Washington about how the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority is laying the legal foundation for unchecked executive lawlessness — and signaling to Trump that it won’t stand in his way.

The Supreme Court’s Most Worrisome Non-Decision

Matt Ford, July 15, 2025 [The New Republic]

The Roberts Court has asked for reargument in a key redistricting case, a move that strongly suggests the conservative majority is about to whack the Voting Rights Act again….

By not deciding the case at hand, however, the justices took a momentous step that will alter the nation’s political geography. The Supreme Court appears poised to use Callais as a vehicle to rule that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 cannot be used to remedy racial gerrymandering by state legislatures….

The Court’s Liberals Are Trying to Tell Americans Something

Aziz Huq, July 17, 2025 [The Atlantic]

Justices Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor aren’t merely disagreeing with the majority’s technical readings of the law….

But look closer at the dissents, and it is evident that, whatever their differences, the three liberals agree on an overarching theme: They no longer see the Court playing by the old game of constitutional law. Their dissents suggest anything but an assumption of business as usual. The three liberal justices are writing about a majority unbound by law and its tiresome technicalities—about a majority that is no longer doing law as that term has come to be understood.

In other words, the dissents are screaming that the old game of law is no more; we’re in a different world, they say. Their critiques of incoherence, internal contradiction, and factual obfuscation are all in service of this….

Civic republicanism

“Trump, Bibi, and Ayn Rand’s ghost.” Narcissists and their theorist

Patrick Lawrence [The Floutist, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2025]

…There is also the question of the cultural currents prevailing at a given time in history. And so, as we gaze via video upon that tableau in the Blue Room at the White House, we must rummage through America’s intellectual and political history until we come to the curious case of Ayn Rand, a writer of thuddingly didactic novels and a propagator of radically nonsensical ideas she and her acolytes dressed up as a philosophy they named Objectivism. It would be difficult to overstate Rand’s irrationality and the inhumanity at the core of her ideas, high among them what she called “the virtue of selfishness.” And it would be foolish to understate the influence she has had on the thinking, if this is my word, of generations of extremist American conservatives. We can include Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, who is well-practiced as a mimic of the political and cultural fashions abroad in America at any given moment, among these extremists….

…an argument that cannot be made in so many words, that narcissism is a defensible position….

…Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in 1905 into a prosperous Jewish family in what was then (and is once more) St. Petersburg. With the Bolshevik Revolution a dozen years later her father lost his prosperous chemicals business and the family plunged into extreme poverty. These proved the defining years of Rand’s life until she died in 1982. She was ever after not merely a committed anti–Communist: This formative experience made her obsessively opposed to all systems of thought or public policy that reflected any trace of concern for the community or the commonweal. Her philosophy—a critical point here—was thus the outcome in considerable measure of psychological and emotional complexes….

…As Rand explained its essential tenet herself, “Man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.” This amounts to a worship of self I consider borderline pathological. It follows more or less automatically that selfishness is virtuous—an early version of “greed is good,” the ethos we identify with the 1980s. Translated into practical terms, government should be limited to the provision of a military, a police force, a judiciary, and little more….

…Netanyahu is an active participant in the Rand cult as it has evolved over the decades from explicit to implicit. He has in the past cited Rand in precisely the same terms as American political figures customarily do. Ha`Aretz, the Israeli daily, traced this relationship in a piece published some years ago under the headline, “The Link Between Benjamin Netanyahu and Extreme Libertarian Ayn Rand.”….

Trump’s Darwinian America 

[Harper’s, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2025]

…This veneration of instinct has led many observers to describe Trump as a social Darwinist. This interpretation of Darwin’s work, celebrating the triumph of the strong and the extermination of the weak, is a common thread uniting the otherwise ideologically disparate set of historical leaders Trump has praised, from the American empire builders of the late nineteenth century to (according to his former chief of staff John Kelly) Adolf Hitler. Darwin saw in animal instincts “one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings,” to wit: “multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” Trump, like many among his social Darwinist predecessors, surely views the impulses he is determined to unleash in similar terms. Of all the various isms proposed to capture Trump’s ideology, social Darwinism has perhaps the most explanatory power….

Western Life Is Only One Way to Live — The “march of civilization” is the West’s founding myth. And yes, it’s a myth.

Thomas Neuburger, July 18, 2025 [God’s Spies]

…When Original Americans (those we call “Indians”) encountered Europeans, they were appalled at the way they lived. For example, here’s how whites treated whites along the Oregon Trail (transcribed by the author from an Oregon Trail museum display):

Many travelers expressed mixed feelings about the forts [that dotted the trail]. They were eager to see them, but complained about what they found. The prices were too high, the inhabitants too savage [the museum’s language], and their appearance disappointing.

“Chester Ingersoll wrote in 1847 that Fort Hall was “the worst place ever for emigrants that we have seen — they are almost destitute of honesty or human feelings.” “

In contrast, when the “emigrant” whites, those in the wagon trains, encountered Original Americans, they found help. This is another transcription from a museum display about life on the Oregon Trail:

“The First Ones

“Cayuse. Walla Walla. Nez Perce. People who have lived for centuries in a land you’ve never seen before. Superstition and fear [of Original Americans by the emigrants] gradually fade as the Indians offer guidance for the lost, horses for the hobbling, and food for the hungry.

“Tonight, after trading with a Cayuse fisherman, you’ll enjoy fresh salmon. The cost? Two fishhooks and a red flannel shirt.”

The difference between the two in treatment of others? Culture. Ways of living. Values. The culture of the West as displayed by those in the fort. The culture of non-Western Americans as displayed by their welcome. Life in the 1500s on two different continents.

America Needs a Bold Constitutional Reconstruction Agenda to Tame Presidential Powers

Andy Craig, July 17, 2025 [theunpopulist.net]

Fundamental flaws in our parliamentary rules, courts, and electoral system made our country vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover

[TW: Hmm, ok, yes, but what about the eight-decade long effort by rich reactionaries to create conservative and libertarian movements which reject “liberal” interpretations of the Constitution? (See link below, for one short history of this effort.) How can you expect to have a sensible national discourse when one third of the population has fallen for the conservative and libertarian idea that promoting the General Welfare is a BAD idea? ]

How Corporations became people, money became speech, usury was legalized, and the civil rights movement was used to advance neoliberalism 

[populistmessage and Sylvia Demarest, July 06, 2025]

On May 7^th this Substack published an essay titled: The Chicago School, law and economics, and the monopolization of the American economy. The essay discussed how the counter-revolution against the New Deal began at the University of Chicago with the organization of a Free-Market Study Group, how it progressed through the Mont Pelerin society, the Chicago School of Law and Economics, and various organizations, leading to the creation of neoliberalism and its takeover of our economy and legal system. This essay will further this discussion by reviewing the history that led to the judicial decisions creating corporate personhood, equating money with speech, dismantling the protections against usury, and allowing money to dominate our elections.