Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 03, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Trump’s Complaint About One Judge Is An Attack On The Entire Judiciary
Joyce Vance, July 31, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
…it should come as no surprise that judges are actively concerned. When the Judicial Conference of the United States met recently, the issue surfaced. That resulted in the Justice Department filing a complaint against District Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg. There is no way to soft-pedal this. The Trump administration wants to go to war with the federal judiciary. They’ve been moving that direction ever since the start of this administration.
A little background about the Judicial Conference….
On Monday, DOJ filed a complaint accusing Judge Boasberg of “making improper public comments about President Trump and his Administration.” CBS News was told by sources that Bondi directed her chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, to file the complaint with the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Sri Srinivasan. The Judge’s comments were supposedly made, according to DOJ, at the March 11 Judicial Conference meeting. Those meetings are private, but DOJ apparently obtained reports, which led them to claim Judge Boasberg tried to “improperly influence” the Chief Justice and other judges, which is ludicrous, just on its face. DOJ complains that the comments reflect bias against the Trump administration and that Judge Boasberg should be censured by the court….
Beyond the impropriety of making this kind of completely unprecedented complaint with no basis for it, there are some real issues with the argument the government tries to make. For one thing, the Judge’s comments weren’t made in public, which is the predicate for DOJ’s entire complaint. They were privately made, in the supposed confidence of colleagues (no word on who leaked them or how accurate that leak was). Then, there’s the fact that the comments reflect legitimate concerns that are widely circulating among judges, lawyers, and the general public. There are more technical flaws in the legal arguments DOJ makes, invoking the Judicial Canons of Ethics, that we’ll delve into if this goes anywhere. But what it adds up to is wholly inadequate to merit further consideration by the court and certainly not something that rises to the level of warranting judicial sanctions. The fault here lies with DOJ and its slippery practices….
[TW: If a Federal judge believes the regime may ignore court rulings, in what other forum is the judge supposed to discuss this? ]
‘Banana Republic’: Experts Horrified as Trump Demands BLS Director’s Firing Over Bad Jobs Report
Brad Reed, August 01, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trustworthy US Jobs Info Is the Latest Victim of Trump’s War on Facts
Robert Reich, Aug 02, 2025 [Inequality Media, via CommonDreams]
[TW: Ian and I have long been very critical of USA economic statistics / national income accounting. Basically, the statistics do not show the economic destruction which has occurred during the past half century of deindustrialization and financializaton. For example, statistics of raw steel production in USA show that the number of tons of steel produced has declined slightly. But adjust that number to a per capita basis, and the fact that steel production is about half what it was five decades ago becomes glaring. The same goes for housing units built, new vehicles produced, and new vehicles sold, and many other indicators of real economic activity.
[But in all the stories stirred up by Trump’s firing of the BLS director, none of this mentioned. Nor is there any mention of the many problems with national income accounting and GDP statistics that have been documented for decades now. Nor any mention of undertaking a rigorous process of evaluating and changing how USA creates its economic statistics. All this tells me is that the worst possible interpretation of Trump’s action is correct: he fired the BLS director for entirely political reasons because Trump demands that national income accounting and GDP statistics show that Trump’s policies are “Making America Great Again,” whether of not that is the actual reality.]
Campaign’s Interactive Tool Tracks How Much Trump and GOP Are Raising the Cost of Living
Julia Conley, July 31, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trump’s Domestic Use of Military Set to Get Worse, Leaked Memo Shows
Greg Sargent, August 2, 2025 [The New Republic]
A Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by TNR signals top-level discussions about a potential escalation of the Pentagon’s domestic anti-immigration role, and lays out new details.
National Guard Ordered to Do ICE Paperwork at Immigration Facilities in 20 States
Nick Turse, July 31 2025 [The Intercept]
Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to immigration facilities further blurs the line between military and law enforcement.
ICE, Georgia Sheriff’s Office Combine Forces To Keep A Salvadoran Journalist Locked Up Indefinitely
[Tech Dirt, via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2025]
A Clear Epstein Backgrounder and Where We Are Today
Thomas Neuburger, July 31, 2025 [God’s Spies]
“The elite classes have for a long time distinguished themselves from ordinary people by their adherence to a different code of morality.”
—Darryl Cooper, paraphrasing the New York Times….Let’s start with a recent interview of researcher Darryl Cooper by Tucker Carlson, as it’s the most complete and listenable backgrounder on Epstein’s history that I could find.
Yes, I know — both of these people can be highly politized commenters of a stripe some don’t like. If you’re among those people, feel free to skip this video.
But don’t. While Carlson gets a little “Christian” near the end — annoying to those who aren’t, or aren’t of his brand — Cooper is rigorous about sorting evidence from supposition, even likely supposition, and he stays away from dogma, even regarding “Pizzagate,” on which he has an interesting take. And Carlson, to his credit, keeps his intrusions to a minimum and his questions on point….
Bessent Admits Trump Tax Scam Offers ‘Backdoor for Privatizing Social Security’
Brett Wilkins, July 30, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Ryan Cooper. July 31, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Men DOGEbags at Work
Stephen Prager, July 31, 2025 [CommonDreams]
A new report found that in just six months, Elon Musk’s cost-cutting agency wasted more than $21 billion. Other estimates have found that the cuts will cost more than they save in the long run.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting to Shut Down After Trump-GOP Defunding
Brad Reed, Aug 01, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Strategic Political Economy
[Compact, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2025]
…I was once a Bitcoin true believer. Back in 2013, I sat in a New York University classroom when an eccentric libertarian took to the podium to evangelize the new currency. Drawn to the message, I soon interned at the Bitcoin Center on Wall Street, where I participated in the nascent community. I later hosted events promoting the merits of cryptocurrencies. In 2018, I joined the crypto-focused news site CoinDesk, where I reported on the industry. I also produced a documentary series on cryptocurrencies.
I was never a major player in the ecosystem, but as I met various influential figures and learned more about how crypto really worked, I began to realize that behind the rhetoric of freedom, decentralization, and empowerment was a reality in which a few elites were accumulating immense wealth under false pretenses. As the cryptocurrency economy expanded and evolved over the course of the 2010s, it became hard to ignore how radically the facts diverged from the vision I had been sold. So in 2019, I wrote a Medium post called “Leaving Crypto,” terminated all my crypto-related contracts and collaborations, and sold all my crypto assets.
In the years since, the speculative frenzy around cryptocurrencies has only continued to gather steam, to the benefit of private actors who have reaped massive profits from the industry’s growth and are exercising a growing influence over the state….
Adam Tooze [via Mike Norman Economics, July 30, 2025]
…In this installment I read the Annual Economic Report of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) produced by the wonderful research team at the BIS headed by Hyun Song Shin. Their research allows us to chart how the global financial system and financial flows have changed since the 2008 financial crisis and what implications this has for the functioning of the dollar system.
According to the BIS team, the key starting point is to recognize a series of major trends that have rearranged global finance since 2008:
The Great Financial Crisis (GFC) (of 2008) was a watershed event that set in motion two related structural changes in the global financial system which define the state of the system today. First, the focus of financial intermediation has shifted from lending to private sector borrowers to claims on the government, especially in the form of sovereign bonds. Second, non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) have assumed a greater role. While the GFC was primarily a banking crisis in which regulated banks were the main characters, portfolio managers investing in sovereign bonds have taken centre stage in the post-GFC financial system.
With the US in the lead, the private sector has “derisked” since 2008, whilst public debts have piled up as never before in peacetime.
SEC debuts ‘Project Crypto’ to bring U.S. financial markets ‘on chain’
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2025]
Who owns most of the farmland in Illinois? Not farmers
[Chicago Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2025]
The Second Gilded Age Is Resembling the First
David Dayen, July 31, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…But this week, Union Pacific, one of Harriman’s old lines, announced its intent to merge with Norfolk Southern for $85 billion. Jay Gould would be proud. Forty-three states are touched by this proposed national railroad, which accounted for 43 percent of total rail shipping last year. The combination upends the gentlemen’s agreement whereby two eastern and two western railroads split up the U.S. in their respective regions. (The other two of the Big Four, Warren Buffett’s BNSF and CSX, have been rumored to merge too.)….
We keep learning more about the Justice Department’s corrupt maneuvering on antitrust. Conservative journalist Sohrab Ahmari advanced the story on Wednesday, revealing “boozy backroom meetings” in “private city clubs” in Washington, where lobbyists close to the White House (in particular Mike Davis and Arthur Schwartz) persuaded Attorney General Pam Bondi and top DOJ officials to overrule the Antitrust Division and impose a weak settlement on a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Juniper Networks. The department fired dissenters in the Antitrust Division soon after….
And if all of this angers the voting public, and has them thinking of throwing the bums out, the bums will simply choose their voters to avoid a reckoning. On Wednesday, Texas released new maps designed to win as many as five seats in the House of Representatives. The maps would crack and pack Austin, Dallas, and Houston, and shuffle Latino-heavy South Texas to threaten two Democratic House members there….
It’s hard to be very optimistic amid this orgy of corruption and bending of our political system to the benefit of a few. But the very fact of calling it a Second Gilded Age reinforces that we’ve been here before. And though it was even harder to communicate then and the forces arrayed against ordinary people were even more powerful, movements began to demand changes to the status quo that succeeded in reining in monopolies, building equitable contributions for the common good, and expanding voting rights. The work is long and difficult, but it can be done, and a public that disapproves of the status quo is begging for it.
The First Gilded Age ended. The second one must as well.
You can’t fight enshittification
Cory Doctorow, 31 July 2025
I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life.
Oh sure, you can tinker in the margins, and you should! Get a repairable laptop, like the Framework, which is the greatest computer I’ve ever owned, and run Linux on it (I use Ubuntu, which is easy to install). You’ll spend two weeks looking around the UI for the thing you need to click on and then you’ll stop noticing it altogether, forever:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame
Access the internet via RSS, and avoid all the algorithmic twiddling and surveillance that subjects you and yours to the depredations of the worst people on earth and their feral algorithms:
https://www.citationneeded.news/curate-with-rss/
Give preference to high-security, private, open messaging tools like Signal. Open an account on a federated social media service, like Mastodon, and make it a first-class home for your online social life:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
Do all this! Do more! You’ll make your life somewhat better, and in some cases, much better. But you’re not going to fight enshittification this way. Enshittification is not the result of people making bad choices: it’s the result of bad policies that produce bad systems.
Enshittification makes for a neat descriptive account, talking about how platforms go bad:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
But the most important part of enshittification is its causal hypothesis: the answer it proposes to why this degradation is happening everywhere, right now:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#franklinite
Here’s why you’re getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don’t have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don’t compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they’ve amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about “fighting for the user.” Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings….
Global power shift
China’s Maglev train hits 623 km/h, breaking global speed record.
[India Today, 07-27-2025, via msn]
In a new test run, China’s magnetic levitation (maglev) train clocked an impressive speed of 623 km/h, making it the fastest land vehicle of its kind. The high-speed test took place in Tongji University’s dedicated low-vacuum tube testing line in Shanghai.
The breakthrough puts China even further ahead in the race for next-generation transport, while the US continues to struggle with getting its own projects off the ground.
The test was carried out using a scaled-down model that was just 2 metres long and weighed 165 kilograms. What makes this even more interesting is that the track was only 210 metres long and placed inside a tube with pressure 98 per cent lower than normal air. This design sharply reduces air resistance and allows maglev trains to go much faster.
This successful run is being seen as a step closer to future vacuum maglev systems that might someday reach speeds of up to 1,000 km/h, faster than commercial airplanes….
China’s Astonishing Maglev Train Is Faster Than Most Planes
[Newsweek, July 13, 2025]
China has successfully tested a magnetic levitation (Maglev) technology which could see trains travel faster than most planes.
The most recent test, demonstrated at Donghu Laboratory in Hubei Province, saw a 1.1-ton Maglev train accelerating to 404 mph in just under 7 seconds over 1,968 feet. The test follows a trial of the same technology last year, which achieved speeds of over 620 mph—faster than the flight of many commercial planes….
Aurelien [via Naked Capitalism 07-31-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
In Gaza, Hunger Has Overtaken Bombs as Israel’s Cruelest Weapon
[Drop Site News, July 30, 2025]
Sadism And Depravity in The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
Spencer Ackerman, 30 July 2025 [forever-wars.com]
I DON’T THINK I had many illusions about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The GHF is the weaponized “aid” operation created by the Israelis and a CIA veteran to wrest control of food distribution from the United Nations, staffed by mercenaries and backstopped by the Israel Defense Forces. In addition to the horrifying videos of starving people crammed into the four “aid” distribution points in Gaza, reports earlier this month revealed the mercenaries and soldiers firing on and throwing stun grenades into crowds of unarmed people just trying to get something to eat.
But now Anthony Aguilar, a former subcontractor and ex-Green Beret lieutenant colonel who worked at all four GHF sites in Gaza, has given a series of interviews attesting to “the indiscriminate use of force, lethal and nonlethal, against unarmed civilians.” However horrific I thought the GHF was, it’s worse.
Here is Aguilar’s interview from Tuesday with Amy Goodman for Democracy Now. I strongly advise reading the entire transcript. It’s hard to select just a few samples of what Aguilar discussed. Among them: Aguilar describes GHF routinely fencing off lanes, for the crush of desperate people, with razor wire—”not barbed wire… Razor wire is designed to maim and kill, and we’re using that to channelize and herd, if you will, thousands of unarmed, starving civilians. That’s a war crime.”
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-28-2025]
Kids by the thousands are starving to death. This is what that looks like. Air drops with spaghetti and canned beef won’t save them – allowing all foods in, allowing more doctors in with medical grade nutritional supplements will. All else=theatre. 10,000 trucks must enter now!
The Information Warfare Consortium Shaping GHF’s PR Offensive
Jasper Nathaniel, July 30, 2025 [Drop Site News]
…From the earliest days of the war, experts in offensive influence, public relations, and crisis communications have worked to delegitimize Gaza’s existing UN aid network, casting it as corrupt and ineffective. Earlier this year, they promoted replacing it with GHF’s militarized system that was aligned with Israeli political aims and asserted the GHF’s role as a “humanitarian” organization—and as the only safe and scalable solution for delivering aid across the enclave. Since its launch, a persistent information warfare apparatus has been operating behind the scenes to manage public perception and preserve the GHF’s function as an instrument of Israeli policy….
As Gaza starves, Trump tells Israel to ‘finish the job’
Aaron Maté, July 27, 2025 [defenddemocracy.press]
The Genocidal Partnership of Israel and the United States
Norman Solomon, 07/29/2025 [Juan Cole, via Naked Capitalism 07-30-2025]
…The policies of Israel’s government are aligned with the attitudes of most Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey, three-quarters of them (and 64 percent of all Israelis) said they largely agreed with the statement that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” – nearly half of whom are children.
“There is no more ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ with regard to Israel’s evilness toward the Palestinians,” dissident columnist Gideon Levy wrote three months ago in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “It is permitted to kill dozens of captive detainees and to starve to death an entire people.” The biggest Israeli media outlets echo and amplify sociopathic voices. “Genocide talk has spread into all TV studios as legitimate talk. Former colonels, past members of the defense establishment, sit on panels and call for genocide without batting an eye.”
Last week, Levy provided an update: “The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza ‘Humanitarian’ Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don’t manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies…. They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies.”
American Jews’ Support for Israel Is Near Its Breaking Point
Eric Alterman, August 1, 2025 [The New Republic]
Abolishing the First Amendment
Chris Hedges, July 28, 2025
I testified at the New Jersey state capital in Trenton last week against Bill A3558, which would adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
“This is a dangerous assault on free speech by seeking to criminalize legitimate criticism of Israeli policies,” I said. “The Trump administration’s campaign to ostensibly root out antisemitism on college campuses is clearly a trope to shut down free speech and deport non-citizens, even if they are here legally. This bill falsely conflates ethnicity with a political state. And let’s be clear, the brunt of repression on college campuses is directed against students and faculty who oppose the genocide in Gaza, 3,000 of whom were arrested and hundreds of whom were censored, suspended or expelled. Many of these students are Jewish. What about their rights? What about their constitutional protections?” ….
David Remnick, July 28, 2025 [The New Yorker]
Amid national euphoria over the bombing of Iran—and the largely ignored devastation in Gaza—a question lurks: What is the country becoming?
….In the seventeen years that Netanyahu has been Prime Minister, he has waged a culture war against those to his left and transformed Israel’s political climate. Backed by secular conservatives, Russian émigrés, settlers, religious nationalists, and the ultra-Orthodox, he has been the main force behind the creation of right-wing media outlets. He has pushed to diminish the Supreme Court’s power and has forged a ruling coalition with the help of far-right zealots. Above all, he has postponed any reckoning with an occupation that has lasted fifty-eight years. Netanyahu and his circle speak MAGA fluently—“deep state,” “wokeness,” and “fake news” have all made their way into political Hebrew—while his son Yair, an Israeli version of Donald Trump, Jr., rails against “post-national, globalist” leftists and lauds Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, and Jair Bolsonaro. Netanyahu’s outlandish obeisance to Trump, from posing with a “Trump Was Right About Everything!” cap to nominating him for a Nobel Prize, underscores the alignment.
Oligarchy
Behemoth or Leviathan? State and Unstate
John Ganz, July 30, 2025 [Unpopular Front]
In a recent post on his Substack, historian Adam Tooze has an interesting set of reflections on the deal foisted on Columbia University by the Trump administration. His colleague, David Pozen, thinks it raises the specter of “regulation by deal,” a regime of ad hoc rulemaking dictated by whoever is in power. “….[T]he agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme,” he writes.
“The spread of regulation by deal would be worrisome in any period, but it is especially worrisome at this time and in this domain. Authoritarianism feeds on manufactured emergencies and hardball tactics that give the executive leverage to attack political opponents and compel obedience. Basic research, on the other hand, thrives under stable institutional frameworks, reliable funding commitments, and a climate of free inquiry. Deals like Columbia’s enhance the power of presidents and their allies within targeted universities; sideline Congress, the courts, and most faculty; and sow fear and uncertainty throughout civil society. They are fundamentally inconsistent with the logic of academic freedom.”
….I think one key to understanding this continuity or dialectical development of fascism from within liberal society is that liberal society is divided into two conflicting notions of the subject. Following Hegel’s analysis in the Philosophy of Right, we’ll call one “bourgeois” and one “citizen.” The bourgeois is totally self-seeking, looking for personal and familial advantage, while the citizen follows and upholds the universal laws and regulations that make an orderly life possible. The life of the bourgeois is intrinsically competitive; the life of the citizen is intrinsically cooperative. Institutions must form the citizen out of the bourgeois, participating in what Hegel calls “the corporation,” and they become self-consciously aware of the need for solidarity and mutual support.
But the competitive nature of bürgerliche Gesellschaft, civil or bourgeois society, is always a threat to the lawlike world of right and citizenship. And in its intrinsic inequality, it creates a “mob” or “rabble” that does not recognize itself as a citizen but just a wretch denied the fruits of bourgeois society. The rules appear to it as just so many hypocritical lies designed to protect the system’s benefactors—just another racket. And so it is, if the process of social integration is breaking down. But there is also a “rich rabble” that does not respect the law, but only headlessly pursues its self-interest. To them, corruption is the rule, not the exception; society is a jungle, and law is a tool, a weapon. Sorry to quote myself, but:
“These are people who accumulate wealth and power, but see that accumulation as absolute and do not recognize any ethical norms of the surrounding society. The rich rabble is also detached from the mediating institutions of “the corporation.” It mistakes public envy of its “external demonstration of success, “ its conspicuous consumption, and luxury to be a form of recognition. As Frank Ruda describes in his book Hegel’s Rabble, “The rich rabble is marked by the ‘corruptness’ which manifests in the fact that the rabble ‘takes everything for granted for itself’ because he denies the right to any of the ethical, legal, or statist institutions…[it assumes] an economically determined state of nature, in which it can also assume the economic right of the fittest.” Now, who does that sound like?”
Howie Klein, July 28, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Bob Lord is an old friend dating back to Blue America endorsing his congressional campaign in 2008 when he challenged Republican extremist John Shadegg in Arizona’s 3rd congressional district… Last week Rolling Stone published an article he wrote, Yes, America Is An Oligarchy. He agreed with Bernie— rather than conservative Democrat Elissa Slorkin— that the term “oligarchy” has plenty of resonance across America because Americans aren’t idiots and they sense, as Lord explains, that “about half of the wealth-share increase of the top 0.01 percent since 2012 has been concentrated in the top 0.00001 percent— the top one-thousandth of the top one-hundredth of the top one percent. Nineteen households total.”….
…In a recent New Yorker essay, Evan Osnos fills in the gory details about how the ultra-rich are also using their influence to benefit themselves personally… “The bottom line: Since 2012, the concentration in our country’s wealth has almost entirely been limited to just our richest 0.01 percent. Our country’s wealth is not just continuing to concentrate. The beneficiaries of that concentration have become an ever smaller group.
”How small? The economist Gabriel Zucman has recently shared with the Wall Street Journal estimates on the share of U.S. wealth held by our richest 0.00001 percent, an elite just 19 households strong. The wealth share of this tiny group has hit 1.8 percent of total U.S. wealth, a share that represents over a ten-fold increase from the top 0.00001 percent’s share in 1982.
”We can determine, using a combination of the Forbes 400 list from 2012 and Zucman’s data for total American wealth at that time, some even more striking numbers. About half of the wealth-share increase of the top 0.01 percent since 2012 has been concentrated in the top 0.00001 percent— the top one-thousandth of the top one-hundredth of the top one percent. Nineteen households total.”
…The problem is structural, urgent and, literally, existential for our democracy—and it demands a political party willing to fight like it. The Democratic Party helmed in Congress by Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer is not that party…
We need a Democratic Party that treats oligarchy as the emergency it is— not just a talking point for progressive backbenchers. That means backing wealth taxes with teeth. That means rewriting corporate tax codes to end the massive stock buybacks and executive pay schemes that further fuel billionaire accumulation. That means ending the carried interest loophole and closing off every avenue that allows dynastic fortunes to escape taxation. And it means confronting the political power that extreme wealth buys— head on. The post-FDR Democratic Party ruined by Bill Clinton doesn’t have what it takes to do that even if individual Democrats in Congress and Democrats running for Congress do.
Why tech billionaires want a ‘corporate dictatorship’
[The Verge, via Naked Capitalism 07-31-2025]
Monetary Policy and the Problem of Oligarchy
During negotiations over the federal government’s debt limit this past week, President Obama appears to have achieved a major tactical victory over the Republican ideologues. I use the term “tactical” because in my view, the fundamental economic problem confronting the country remains not only unsolved, but entirely unheeded: after a half century of “neo-liberal” economic reforms, a.k.a., conservative economic deregulation, the economy is now structurally skewed to benefit a new financial and corporatist oligarchy, at the expense of everyone else. What I have striven to do, in posts such as Wealth and Income Inequalities are Markers of Oligarchy, is to force the concept of oligarchy back into the national discourse. I cannot claim this as my idea: Simon Johnson’s May 2009 article The Quiet Coup was a notable effort at forcing us to face up to the unpleasant fact of a new American oligarchy, and Michael Hudson has been ferocious in a number of recent posts: How Financial Oligarchy Replaces Democracy.
Trumpillnomics
How Big Tech Powered A Justice Department Coup
Luke Goldstein, July 31, 2025 [The Lever]
After a secret lobbying effort, Trump’s Justice Department ousted staff and reversed course on Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s proposed megamerger.
Trump’s New Merger Scandal Is Swampier Than Watergate
David Sirota, July 31, 2025 [The Lever]
America on life support as ‘ally’ launches huge sabotage operation… and the results are terrifying
[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2025]
…Canada is aggressively poaching doctors, nurses and health professionals, offering simpler systems, universal care and a political climate many in the liberal-leaning field may prefer to life under President Donald Trump.
The exodus is accelerating at a stunning pace. Between November 2024 and April 2025, the Medical Council of Canada (MCC) saw a staggering 718 percent surge in US medical graduates registering to get licensed across the border….3CanAm Physician Recruiting, a firm specializing in cross-border placements, reported a 65 percent jump in US doctors exploring jobs in Canada just this year.The Nova Scotia-based company now receives up to 15 serious inquiries each day from medical professionals keen to leave America.
Monopoly Round-Up: The War Among Democrats Over Market Power, Housing and Capital
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 07-28-2025]
Barry Ritholtz [via Naked Capitalism 07-30-2025]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Wealth series 9: What happens if the wealthy go? (video)
Richard Murphy, August 2, 2025 [taxresearch.org.uk]
People say higher taxes will drive the rich away. But here’s the truth: most wealthy people stay put — and even if some do leave, the UK keeps their houses, pensions and financial assets. This video exposes the hollow threat of ‘rich flight’ and makes the case for bold action on tax justice. Let’s stop being held hostage by a myth.
Rethinking the Politics of Money
Katharina Pistor, July 23, 2025 [project-syndicate.org]
If independent, technocratic central banks are not conducive to democracy, how else should monetary policy be conducted? Until recently, asking such questions would have been considered heresy, but times have changed.
[TW: Not really an important article, but interesting as an indication that certain elites in USA are FINALLY beginning to contemplate the correct questions.
[About half a century too late….
[Here is an excerpt from William Greider’s 1987 extremely important book, Secrets of the Temple, How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, which concisely captures the central issue of political economy in our time.
The question of who owned financial wealth–or who did not–was the buried fault line of American politics. Wealth holders whose money circulated through Wall Street markets were an untypical minority of Americans, with distinctly different economic interests than the majority. The distribution of wealth was the subtext beneath nearly every important economic question that faced the government, yet it was seldom discussed in politics. Political leaders, instead, treated wealth like a taboo subject, cloaked in euphemisms, as if the hard facts of who owned capital might excite class jealousies they could not satisfy or raise questions about the system for which they had no answers.
Nevertheless, the concentration of wealth was the fulcrum on which the most basic political questions pivoted, a dividing line deeper than region or religion, race or sex. In the nature of things, government might choose to enhance the economic prospects of the many or to safeguard the accumulated wealth held by the few, but frequently the two purposes were in irreconcilable conflict. The continuing political struggle across this line, though unseen and rarely mentioned, was the central narrative of American political history, especially in the politics of money. (pp. 37-38)
[At the end of 1989, Greider joined with Lawrence Goodwyn — the unsurpassed historian of the 19th century populists [the good, progressive populists who wanted the republic to extend its political ideals into the economy, contra today’s Trump “populists”), and 20th century revolutions in Central Europe, who was also a tireless progressive activist — to give a presentation in St. Louis commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Populist Sub-Treasury Plan for financial reform. Here are some of Greider’s remarks from that presentation, Democratic Money: A Populist Perspective. Note its title.
It is perfectly plausible for the financial system of this country to put money into people’s hands, to make credit available for ordinary Americans at rates they can afford. The economy could be managed prosperously and equitably, serving all groups — not perfectly, but with some sense of justice that we would all recognize.
There is no physical reason in economics why that can’t happen. There are huge, intimidating political reasons why it did not happen in our history. In fact, at the very center of our politics is this subject, called “money and the regulation of credit, that we have been told we can’t talk about. ]
Health care crisis
Other nations had a pandemic reckoning. Why hasn’t the US?
[Christian Science Monitor, via Naked Capitalism 07-27-2025]
…the pandemic became increasingly politicized in the United States – the most politicized, in fact, of 14 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Foundation in the summer of 2020. By the second anniversary of the pandemic, the percentage of Democrats following masking and social distance practices was two to three times greater than Republicans….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Zionist Spies Innovate AI Sexual Blackmail Tech
Kit Klarenberg, July 29, 2025
On July 19th, Ynet announced Israeli artificial intelligence startup Decart “has unveiled a groundbreaking real-time video transformation technology, setting a new benchmark in the fast-evolving field of generative media,” following “months of anticipation and extensive fundraising.” Dubbed Mirage, it “allows continuous transformation of live or pre-recorded video content without interruption, maintaining high quality and impressive stability throughout.” Obvious suspicions arise the tech’s true purpose is to concoct convincing, fabricated kompromat on targets, with no risk of Zionist intelligence being publicly exposed.
Such an interpretation isn’t immediately obvious from the description of Mirage offered by Ynet. The outlet states the tech “transforms the very definition of video – from a static, pre-recorded format to a living, flexible, and interactive medium.” This reportedly opens up “new business models for content creators, brands, and platforms.” For example, “broadcasters and advertisers” could “generate multiple versions of a single piece of content during a live transmission…[tailoring] content in real-time to different audience segments.”
Yet, buried in the Ynet report is reference to how Decart was forged in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, while they were serving in the Zionist Occupation Forces’ fearsome Unit 8200. The shadowy spying cell conducts clandestine operations, signals intelligence collection, code decryption, counterintelligence, cyberwarfare, and surveillance. Many of its veterans have established major tech companies, frequently operating in Silicon Valley. Decart generated enormous early interest among investors, raising $53 million just two months after official launch, and securing a $500 million valuation….
Collapse of independent news media
Hulk Hogan and the Lawsuit That Changed Journalism and America
Josh Marshall, July 28, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
…I’ve argued at various points that TPM was ahead of the curve roughly during the Obama years because we paid a lot of attention to what was then sometimes called The Crazy — the subterranean world of GOP and far-right politics; the colorful, weird and almost-always super racist congressmen (and sometimes women) from obscure rural districts. That was portrayed as a sort of moving circus, cheap laughs, click-bait — not real politics. We were often criticized for giving it so much attention. I never thought that was right. And unfortunately the Trump presidency itself vindicated our read of that era. The Crazy was the reality of Republican politics….
I note all this by way of getting to the death of Hulk Hogan….
Back around this time I was at TPM’s New York office one day when we had a then-Gawker staffer visiting. This was in the build-up to the Gawker trial by which time it was clear that this wasn’t an ordinary lawsuit. The company’s existence might be in jeopardy. Our guest told me that the First Amendment itself was at stake. He explained that Gawker’s lawyers were almost certain they’d lose the case at trial. It was a Florida judge and a Florida jury in a particularly bad county to get sued in. But they were confident they’d win on appeal. The problem was that they’d have to come up with what ended up being a $140 million judgement to get to the appeal process. But Nick Denton, Gawker’s owner, had made a deal with some Russian oligarch to float that money while they were appealing the verdict.
That’s what our friend told us.
I said some nice and encouraging things to our guest but in my head it was hard to take seriously that this was a righteous fight for the First Amendment. I was certainly on Gawker’s side. I was hoping for the best. But publishing someone’s sex tape struck me as reckless, difficult to justify in journalistic terms and frankly hard to defend.
As you probably know, Gawker lost the case. Hogan got a $140 million judgement. Somehow the thing with the Russian guy (if I’m remembering what our friend told us) didn’t pan out. Without $140 million, Gawker couldn’t appeal. The company and its owner, Denton, were forced into bankruptcy. And that was the end of Gawker and its stable of sites. Some of those — Jezebel, Gizmodo, Deadspin, even the Gawker site proper (Gawker Inc. was the company that owned all these sites) have had post-bankruptcy zombie existences. But basically that was it.
As it turns out, I was completely wrong.
That lawsuit was a critical event of our time, and Gawker’s destruction was a body blow to the First Amendment. Hogan’s lawyer, Charles Harder, wasn’t just any libel lawyer. He had whole new ways of going about it. After Harder’s victory for Hogan, his new approaches to attacking media companies were quickly folded into the Trump political movement, not just the strategies but Harder’s firm itself. You see them again and again in numerous Trump and MAGA world lawsuits.
It turned out that Hogan himself was the cat’s paw of Peter Thiel who funded the entire litigation. Hogan himself must have been a wealthy man but the bills of a major libel suit is a very iffy investment. Denton had suspected that someone was footing the bill behind the scenes — perhaps even Thiel. Money seemed like no object in how the lawsuit proceeded. Thiel took all those worries and risks away. Thiel held a grudge over Gawker’s past negative coverage of him and had been plotting its destruction behind the scenes. Thiel’s use of Hogan presaged the current world of billionaire lawsuits in which limitless money can overcome the weakness of meritless litigation. (See the recent Times story on how Elon Musk and MAGA attorneys general have brought Media Matters to its knees.) The rich have always put their wealth on the scales of justice. But Thiel’s actions opened new terrain, as did the explosion of billionaire wealth taking shape at the same time.
But as much as anything it was the example it set. Gawker wasn’t damaged. It was destroyed. It ceased to exist. For what was essentially pocket change, Thiel got his revenge. In that one suit, you can see the evil vapors of Trumpism and its oligarchic billionaire milieu congealing into solid matter for everything that was to come. In so doing, Harder and Thiel radically raised the stakes for all journalism in the United States. The combination of billionaire money, novel legal theories, venue shopping and quirks of civil litigation at the state level (the fact that Gawker was prevented from appealing a judgement that never would have survived appeal) changed everything that goes through a publisher’s mind when they click the publish button.
Climate and environmental crises
Cheap Tricks for Hard Problems: Picking up nickels in front of the climate steamroller.
Hamilton Nolan, July 29, 2025 [How Things Work]
…. I have written a number of times about the way that the climate change crisis in America will manifest itself as an insurance crisis, which will then cause an economic crisis and a political crisis. Increasing climate risks will cause home insurance prices to rapidly rise towards unaffordability; homeowners in risky areas unable to afford the (actual) price of home insurance will clamor for relief; policymakers unwilling to confront the underlying problem (climate change) will react with a series of increasingly desperate maneuvers to delay and paper over the issue; increasingly pricey disasters will cause state and local politicians to run to the federal government for bailouts; in time, this will lead to a political confrontation between those who are receiving aid, and those in safer areas who are paying for it. The end of this process will be a retreat from areas that have become untenable to live in due to climate change. Instead of carrying out this necessity in a managed and rational way, our political system and economic system, absent some deep changes, will cause it to unfold in a cutthroat, childish, maximally destructive way, with millions of Americans frantically trying to step on the heads of everyone underneath them to jump into the metaphorical lifeboats, which will be controlled by capitalists looking to extract maximum profits from the spreading crisis….
Interior order targets ‘preferential treatment’ for wind and solar
Ian M. Stevenson, 07/30/2025 [Clean Power Roundup]
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum ordered his department Tuesday to weed out policies that favor nascent renewable power industries.
His secretarial order decries “preferential treatment” for wind and solar, while other directives Tuesday ask agencies to consider withdrawing public land with “high potential for wind energy” and review projects’ impacts on wildlife.
“Leveling the playing field in permitting supports energy development that’s reliable, affordable, and built to last,” Burgum said in a statement.
[TW: “Leveling the playing field” is a canard of neo-liberal / conservative / libertarian economic philosophy that has become almost unquestionable. But the fact is, that in the political economy of civic republicanism, TILTING the playing field in favor of developing new science and technology is exactly what government should be doing. As first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wrote his Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures (December 1791):
Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the [most] ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance and by slow gradations … To produce the desirable changes, as early as may be expedient, may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government…
[The apprehension of failing in new attempts is perhaps a more serious impediment… it is of importance that the confidence of cautious sagacious capitalists…should be excited… it is essential, that they should be made to see in any project, which is new, and for that reason alone, if, for no other, precarious, the prospect of such a degree of countenance and support from government, as may be capable of overcoming the obstacles, inseparable from first experiments.
[So, preferential treatment for companies and industries striving to introduce new technologies is exactly what government should be doing.]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Micro Molding In Micro-Optic Manufacturing
Brett Saddoris (Technical Marketing Manager, Accumold), July 8, 2025 [photonicsonline.com]
Micro-optics — tiny lenses, beam-splitters, prisms, light pipes, and similar optical components — play a critical role in the miniaturization of optical applications across various industries. Ranging in size from as small as 20 microns to 1 mm, or incorporating micron-scale features in larger optical components, these elements are integral to applications in sensors, medical diagnostics, DataCom, augmented reality (AR) devices, and wearable technology.
Traditional optical manufacturing methods such as precision glass molding, diamond turning, and lithographic processes have long served the industry, yet each presents challenges in scalability, cost, and complexity when it comes to mass production of micro-optics. Micro injection molding (often referred to simply as micro molding) has emerged as a transformative alternative, allowing for the high-volume production of complex, precision micro-optic components with remarkable consistency, speed, and cost efficiency….
Reading Hits Differently to Listening For Your Brain, Science Says
[ScienceAlert, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2025]
…Your brain uses some of the same language and cognitive systems for both reading and listening, but it also performs different functions depending on how you’re taking in the information.
When you read, your brain is working hard behind the scenes. It recognizes the shapes of letters, matches them to speech sounds, connects those sounds to meaning, then links those meanings across words, sentences and even whole books. The text uses visual structure such as punctuation marks, paragraph breaks or bolded words to guide understanding. You can go at your own speed.
Listening, on the other hand, requires your brain to work at the pace of the speaker. Because spoken language is fleeting, listeners must rely on cognitive processes, including memory to hold onto what they just heard.
Speech is also a continuous stream, not neatly separated words. When someone speaks, the sounds blend together in a process called coarticulation. This requires the listener’s brain to quickly identify word boundaries and connect sounds to meanings….
Democrats’ political malpractice
John Kenneth Galbraith [Harper’s. July 1970 [via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2025]
[Yes, from 55 years ago….]
The Democratic Party has, within a relatively short span, lost its purpose; it has become a defender of the status quo, a role in which it cannot hope to compete with the Republicans. It was President Truman who said that, faced with a choice between two conservative parties, voters will opt for the real thing….
Apart from a few, the Democrats’ leaders are geriatric or even repellent. Many are archaically hard-line on Communism, in favor of the Vietnam War, untroubled by military power: in a word, indifferent or hostile to what most concerns their younger partisans. This old guard finds political solutions unpleasantly radical. So it has become policy to be nice to the rich; public ownership has become all but unmentionable; a thousand speeches a year proclaim the party’s affection for progressive private enterprise and its distaste for regulation. Similarly on foreign policy: the military is sacrosanct. Thus the Democrats have been at pains to forswear all of the lines of action that the present situation requires….
The Real Reason for Zohran’s Success Should Rattle National Democrats
Greg Sargent, July 28, 2025 [The New Republic]
Exclusive internal campaign data on the reach of Mamdani’s viral videos illustrates that he gets modern messaging in ways other Democrats just don’t.
No Doubt Left: Russiagate Was a Cover-Up
Matt Taibbi, Aug 01, 2025
[TW: I’m not inclined to agree that Taibbi is no longer trustworthy. And the story he tells of Hillary Clinton’s corruption certainly aligns with what I believe about the Clintons’ role in destroying the Democratic Party from within. For me, the most damning allegation about this story — and it is one that Taibbi shies away from making explicit — is that Clinton and her fellow travelers were willing to absolutely wreck USA-Russia relations, and perhaps even risk a nuclear war, in order to cling to power rather than let Trump take over. I have previously written that it was probably the duty of intelligence services in a republic to do something to prevent Trump’s rise to power. There are plenty of other ways to do so — such as focusing public opinion on Trump’s mentor, mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, and on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. What I have not previously acknowledged is that the present intelligence agencies had too much to lose through a public airing of the Cohn and Epstein angles.
[Not that Trump is much better, judging from:
Scott Ritter: Trump deploys Nuclear Subs to Russia over Social Media Rift
Judge Napolitano [YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2025]
Trump Escalates Nuclear Threat to Russia… Taking the World to the Brink of Nuclear War
Larry Johnson [via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2025]
12 Points on Zionist Occupied Territory and Epstein
Sam Husseini [via Naked Capitalism 08-02-2025]
…. 10. Whitney Webb, author of One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein recently posted: “Now that Trump is trying to deflect talk of the Epstein-Trump relationship by talking about the Epstein-Clinton relationship, the shift to the Epstein-Clinton relationship will almost certainly focus on Clinton’s ties to Epstein after Clinton left office (i.e. after the year 2000) and will not touch the 17 visits Epstein made to the Clinton White House. To do so would lead to too many troublesome questions for the uniparty such as — Who was Mark Middleton? What were Epstein and Wexner actually using the CIA-linked airline Southern Air Transport for? Why was Robert Rubin the first person to invite Epstein to the White House? What was Commerce Secretary Ron Brown due to testify about before he died in a suspect plane crash?”
Resistance
The Trump Era and The Psychology of Moral Courage
Alina Tugend, July 27, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
…Research has shown that not only are few of us Nelson Mandela or Tiananmen Square tank man, but most of us even have a hard time mildly protesting when a dinner party guest tells an offensive joke.
“Everyone thinks, ‘I would resist—I’m a strong person, I’m moral and have values, and nothing comes between me and my values,’” said Philip Mazzocco, an associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University at Mansfield. “Nope, we’ve run studies for a hundred years. Everything comes between you and your values.”….
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and William J. Barber, II, July 31, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
…The moral witness of direct actions like the Freedom Rides interrupted everyone in a system that was more fragile than it seemed. It didn’t change the minds of Southern governors or Mississippi jailers, but it did force the masses who’d gone along with the quiet violence of the system to decide whether they really believed it was justified.
This is what direct action does. It exposes the moral bankruptcy of authoritarian regimes. It compels everyday citizens to choose a side in a moral struggle….
That’s why Moral Mondays are coming back to Congressional offices across the South on August 18th. The people we elect to represent us in the US Congress have district offices in every state. During the month of August, they do not work in Washington, DC. They are back home in their state offices for an in-district work period. This is when they are supposed to listen to the people who elected them and understand how they can represent us when they go back to Washington….
We’ve checked in with our partners and set a date for August 18. If you’d like to get information about how to join a delegation in your state, please register here.
The Premature Guide to Post-Trump Reform
Paul Starr, July 31, 2025 [The American Prospect]
American history offers three general strategies of repair and renewal….
…History offers three models for institutional repair: changing the laws, changing the Supreme Court, or amending the Constitution. The first is the post-Watergate model, which primarily involves codifying unwritten norms in legislation and executive branch rules. The second is the politically treacherous path of judicial reform. The third, amending the Constitution, is only a dim possibility but still useful to consider, because some of the problems highlighted by Trump lie in the Constitution itself….
[TW: Like almost all other writers on the subject of Trump’s drive to authoritarianism, Starr does not address what I consider the most important underlying factor: the rejection of the founding philosophy of civic republicanism by the conservative and libertarian movements artificially created and lavishly funded by rich reactionaries.
This ideology is entrenched in the judiciary, with every conservative appointed to the bench. What to do about these anti-Federalist ideologues who openly espouse anti-Constitutional ideas such as hostility to the General Welfare clause, or the need for eliminating any and all secular basis for national government? ]
Level 3: Amending the Constitution
The likely need of constitutional change to set term limits for Supreme Court justices brings us to the third and most difficult level of reform—amending the Constitution itself.
Executive coups have become the principal form of democratic breakdown around the world. Elected leaders use their positions to deny the opposition an equal chance to win the next election. The outcome, while not a traditional dictatorship, may still be an autocracy because the incumbent regime uses the leverage of the state to disable its opponents and stay in power. The U.S. government is now at risk of exactly this authoritarian transformation.
The central problem is that the Constitution provides no real deterrent to presidential aggrandizement and malfeasance. In a country that has relied on norms of executive restraint, it has taken one disinhibited president to show the need for more explicit deterrents and constitutional limits. At the heart of the failure is that presidential impeachment is almost always an empty threat. The requirement of a two-thirds vote for a conviction is high enough that loyalists in a president’s party ordinarily have enough votes for an acquittal.
[TW: the obeisance of the Republican Party to Trump’s violation of constitutional and political norms begs the question: Why did the founders so loath and fear political parties? Again, like almost all other writers on the subject, Starr does not even begin to consider this fact. There is probably a rich source of wisdom and information to be tapped by investigation of the issue. What exactly did the founder folks say and write about the ill effects of political parties? What safeguards and restrictions did they consider and attempt to implement to constrain the ill effects of political parties? How and why were these safeguards and restrictions rejected, ignored, or broken? I strongly suspect that some digging in this area will yield some gems of political philosophy that will be crucial in the tasks ahead, such as declaring political gerrymandering a stark violation of political rights and civil liberties in a republic. ]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, July 30, 2025
On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.
“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues….
When Kevin Roberts announced a year ago that the radical right was launching a second American revolution, he was telling the truth. But the new world they want to bring to life seems no more popular now than it was then.
And now the growing scandal around President Donald J. Trump’s connections to late convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein shows that the MAGA movement is apparently willing to accept the sexual abuse of children in order to cement their worldview….
Five Years: What I’ve done and what I’ve learned
Jim Stewartson, Aug 02, 2025 [MindWar]
Five years ago, August 2nd, 2020, I was working on a virtual reality system using AI to create simulations of everyday stressful events like job interviews, to help people be more successful. It was fine, but after 3 1/2 years of Donald Trump—and with the nation seemingly on the brink of widespread violence following the murder of George Floyd—I had, for a few months, been increasingly monitoring the protests, the police crackdowns, and the bizarre behavior of Trump’s followers on Twitter, out of sheer anxiety.
One of the things that kept coming up was QAnon. I’d see them with their signs and shirts and weird slogans and bizarre Twitter accounts, but I hadn’t really looked into it. A friend suggested I read an article from an old colleague that described QAnon as an alternate reality game (ARG)—which struck a nerve.
As one of the people who helped develop ARGs into a genre of sorts, after I read the article I became very concerned. From the very first ARG I helped create, I Love Bees for the massive video game Halo 2 in 2004, I knew how powerful the concept was, and how easily it could be abused….
One of the strange things we noticed throughout our creations was that once players had bought into an alternate reality, it was really like they were in it. They would go to incredible, even dangerous lengths, including one person who drove into a hurricane to answer a payphone, in order to perform the activities and solve the puzzles that we created for them. Another time they figured out who one of our voice actors was and stalked him in the real world thinking it must be a clue. So we built in very clear limits….
16 years later, five years ago, after reading the article about QAnon and ARGs, I became extremely concerned that QAnon was abusing the ideas that we created for fun, which tens of millions of people participated in, to alter people’s behavior involuntarily. Since I knew that was possible, even 16 years before, I decided to see for myself….
So, to investigate QAnon, I created a brand new Twitter account, a LARP—called “Trumpfan1776”—I put some of the QAnon phrases I’d seen around in my profile, and I dove headfirst into the Qniverse on Twitter.
Within 15 minutes, I knew. They were using our ARG techniques—gamified storytelling, using the internet to deliver a cycle of clues, puzzle-solving and larping, to “drive people crazy.” As I wrote two weeks later: “QAnon Is an Enormous Alternate Reality Game With Malevolent Puppetmasters.”….
How It Happened: Why America Mirrors Donald Trump
Jim Stewartson, July 30, 2025 [MindWar]
Taking back the ballot initiative
Jordan Zakarin, Aug 02, 2025
It was good while it lasted: between 2016 and 2022, progressives racked up big policy wins in red states with wildly popular ballot initiatives. Medicaid expansion, minimum wage increases, paid leave, abortion rights — it was all popping off, much to the chagrin of Republican majority legislators.
Progressive initiatives have continued to succeed over the past few years, but Republican legislators have gone from simply angry to actively sabotaging. Initiatives have been repealed, gutted, and tossed out by courts, while the process itself has been made increasingly difficult to even access.
This spring was particularly brutal: Republicans in Missouri and Nebraska each gutted increases to the minimum wage, while Michigan did so on a bipartisan basis; Florida, Arkansas, and Utah made it almost impossible to qualify an initiative at all.
Now activists in those states are fighting back, launching new initiatives that they hope can harness popular anger and overcome the hurdles put up by Republicans….
Similarly, activists in Montana just submitted the text of a ballot measure that would ostensibly prevent corporations from spending money in elections by redefining them as “artificial persons.” The proposal is designed to counter the Citizens United decision, which ruled that corporations are people and thus entitled to unlimited political spending….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
David Cole [[The New York Review, August 21, 2025 issue]
In several major cases in its 2024–2025 term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority reached its desired results not by overturning precedent but by ignoring it.
The Senate Confirms Trump’s Criminal Defense Lawyer to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals
Joyce Vance, Aug 1, 2025 [Civil Discouse]
Civic republicanism
Must we choose between saving democracy and saving the Earth? No!
Robert Reich, Aug 01, 2025 [via Richard Murphy]
We cannot deal with the climate crisis unless our democracy is strengthened to reflect the will of the people rather than the profits of giant corporations.
Democracy and the environment are not two separate issues, of which we must choose one. They are in many respects the same. But democracy is the foundation for all else. If we lose it — as we are in the process of doing — we can’t do anything, because there’s no “we.”
Hamilton Nolan, July 31, 2025 [How Things Work]
…Which brings us to the most important thing to be said about what is happening here: These schools do not believe in anything. A fuller way to say this is that, like many institutions that come to thrive under capitalism, these schools do not have any ideological values other than their own flourishing. In the case of private corporations, this quality is taken for granted—they exist to serve their own interests. But in the case of universities, this conclusion is obscured by a thicket of declarations about the timeless nature of education and learning and knowledge and serving the values of mankind. Still, the actions of the schools tell the full story. They define their own survival as the highest inherent good. Therefore they will pay whatever price is necessary to punch their own ticket to the future. They will throw as many people overboard as necessary in order to ensure that the ship itself continues sailing. If you are trying to figure out the ideological beliefs of America’s most respected institutes of higher education, you will come closest to the truth by concluding that they do not have any ideology at all….
The schools are non-ideological contestants in an ideological battle. They are hollow shells facing iron wrecking balls. Their opponents may be bigoted, deranged, power-mad, and dishonest, but they believe in something. The schools believe only in self-perpetuation. It is easy to understand how this dynamic inevitably causes the schools to acquiesce to increasingly outrageous demands. They have no ideological firewall blocking their own retreat. They have no philosophical reason to say to themselves, “Stop giving in at this point.” They will always give in, sell out, accede to whatever they think is necessary to preserve what they can of what they have. You can see in university presidents the same quality that you see in many business CEOs: They envision their own task not as vision and leadership towards a higher goal, but as one of balancing the competing demands of various stakeholders in the least damaging way possible. When there is a stakeholder—in this case, the US government—that is ideologically driven to go beyond reasonableness, institutions that do not have any equal and opposite ideological drive of their own find themselves pushed backwards. That is what we see in higher education, right now….
Into the Abyss: Trump’s Bizarro New Deal
Matt Stoller, via Naked Capitalism 07-30-2025]
…The coup at the Antitrust Division is a useful window through which to understand the kind of politics we’re experiencing. We are in a historic period, with Trump and the GOP reengineering the American social order. It’s hard to grasp its full contours, because we are just not used to the way that MAGA works. But it’s important to discuss, because this kind of politics, is happening everywhere….
The stakes here are immense. I guess I’d call what Trump has done the Bizarro New Deal, because it’s a re-ordering of our Constitutional system. Here are five big changes that are worth observing to illustrate the moment we’re in.
First, Trump is seeking a genuinely big economic transformation. He has mostly abandoned the manufacturing-focused strategy of his first term. This time, he’s ginning up the “animal spirits” of Wall Street, crypto, and oil, while putting his chips on data centers for generative artificial intelligence….
Second, Trump has reordered key underpinnings of our financial and legal order. He has ended the independence of the Federal Reserve, and restructured the judiciary to be a partisan pro-corporate Republican constituency group, both fundamental shifts in American statecraft. These changes prompt questions about first principles….
Third, there’s now a wave of fear in America among corrupt liberal elites. Harvard is considering paying off the administration with a $500 million settlement over fake allegations of antisemitism. That follows payoffs by Columbia University, Paramount, Disney, X, Meta, and various big law firms. Trump is systematically terrifying American institutions of power into silence. Foreign countries are similarly afraid, as are journalists. Fear in America is not new, most people in business are afraid of monopolists. Now it’s crossed over into the political realm, explicitly, targeting the traditionally unaccountable liberal elite world.
Fourth, Trump is presiding over American global decline, which is a trend that predated him….
Fifth, the physical plant of America will decay under the weight of high finance and consolidation, which is another trend that predated Trump but is being accelerated under him. Take rail. We’ve had railroads in America for 200 years, but we’ve never allowed a nation-wide railroad corporation, because of the immense power such a combination would foster. That is going to change under Trump, with Union Pacific buying Norfolk Southern for $85 billion, a merger no one considered possible just a few months ago. We talk a lot about high-speed rail, but it’s regular old freight rail that makes America work. We can expect the financiers behind this deal to grind U.S. transportation infrastructure into dust, and further erode our ability to make and ship things….
Vitamin supplement scamming is the culture of the Republican Party, and has been since Reagan’s alliance with this odd scuzzy world in the 1980s, particularly the DeVos family of Amway wealth. Donald Trump himself has done multi-level marketing, which is the way the “industry” rebranded itself after “pyramid scheme” got a bad name in the 1960s. (This story is told wonderfully by Bridget Read in Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America. I taped an Organized Money episode this week with her, which is fantastic, so you can listen to it here.)
Pyramid scheming is also the culture of MAGA, MAHA, Wellness, and evangelical Christianity, as well as large chunks of Wall Street and big business….
Taking a step back, it’s important to see that populism on the right just doesn’t fit, because at heart today’s GOP is still the party of Reagan scammers, or George W. Bush confidence men. What we have, instead, is some populist discourse, with the goal of establishing a hierarchical system based on the whims of Trump and the billionaires he bosses around. Our old models, our old language, our old ways of thinking, our old political leaders, just cannot grapple with the oligarchy in which we increasingly find ourselves, and the Amway-style rhetoric and money-drenched politics we are seeing.
We have at least three and a half more years of this kind of behavior to come, and a deeply feeble opposition party. It’s not fun to keep looking out the window at the cliff towards which we are headed. That said, there’s a lot of opportunity to rethink our institutions and the first principles on which they are based, and we definitely need to do that.
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