Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 10, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
UNLOCKED: The Epstein/Trump/Israel Connection Unpacked (w/ Whitney Webb) (YouTube Video)
Briahna Joy Gray interviews Whitney Webb, July 30, 2025 [Bad Faith podcast]
[TW: Webb does an extraordinary job detailing the organized crime backgrounds of Trump and Epstein. Gray was left flabbergasted and visibly shaken by the information. I was also flabbergasted, but because here was someone finally discussing a few key facets of USA and British history that very, very few historians are willing to consider: the World War Two merger between organized crime and intelligence agencies begun during Operation Underworld, when the Office of Naval Intelligence recruited Joseph Lanza, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano to watch for and report any possible Axis espionage and saboteur operations in U.S. northeastern ports. Webb next outlines how organized crime “went legit” by taking over Wall Street and the “mergers and acquisitions” racket in the 1970s and 1980s. This last point is something many “influencers” have denied, some with near hysteria.
[Trump’s mentor was mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, and Webb discusses Cohn’s ties to organized crime that were also shared by Epstein’s mentor, Les Wexner. Webb also mentions the CIA / Iran-Contra involvement in the illegal narcotics trade uncovered by San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb in 1996, and some of the British “corporate raiders,” such as Sir James Michael Goldsmith, who spearheaded the criminal infiltration of Wall Street. (It is not mentioned if and how Gary Webb and Whitney Webb are related.) This may be the most explosive 90 minute show you will ever listen to in your life. It paints a clear picture of the malevolent criminally-inclined elites who have seized political and economic control of USA and the west.]
[At 59:59 BJG asks why? “why are these people who have everything still getting involved in illegal and immoral activities.”
[My answer: to understand why, you have to ignore the nostrums and ideas of liberalism, and turn to the founding philosophy of civic republicanism, which has been under attack by USA’s would be oligarchs since before the Constitution was signed and ratified. The quick answer to BJG’s question is found in the1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, by English republican John Milton: when Satan explains why he rebelled against God by saying “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
[Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. That is the mindset of an oligarch.
[The great weakness of liberalism is its moral ambivalence about the accumulation of wealth. Liberal thinkers such as John Locke defend the accumulation of great wealth under the principles of individual liberty. But as should be abundantly clear by the events of the past few decades, great wealth corrupts a society. While liberalism prefers to ignore this problem, the general socio-economic dynamic of this corruption is a central theme of civic republicanism.
In The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston, Northwestern University , 1945), Zera S. Fink, quotes from English republican political theorist Algernon Sidney, who was executed for “treason” against the crown in 1683: “Man” he wrote, “is of an aspiring nature, and apt to put too high a value on himself. They who are raised above their brethren, though but a little, desire to go farther; and if they gain the name of king, they think themselves wronged and degraded, when they are not suffered to do what they please. In these things they never want masters; and the nearer they come to a power that is not easily restrained by law, the more passionately they desire to abolish all that opposes it.” Even when a prince was virtuous and began by desiring nothing more than the power allowed him by law, he was subject to greater temptations to invade the liberty of his subjects than human nature could be expected to withstand. “The strength of his own affections,” Sydney declared, “will ever be against him. Wives, children, and servants will always join with those enemies that arise in his own breast to pervert him; if he has any weak side, any lust unsubdued, they will gain the victory. He has not searched into the nature of man, who thinks that anyone can resist when he is thus on all sides assaulted.” Monarchy, in short, by the very constitution of human nature, tended always to degenerate into tyranny. It was a defective form of government because in the most important place of all it was lacking in those adequate restraints on the defects of human nature which all the classical republicans saw as an essential of any well-contrived government.
[In The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America (New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2007), Michael J. Thompson writes, “Any political community that suffers from severe imbalances between rich and poor is in danger of losing its democratic character…” And he explicitly states that “the contemporary tolerance of economic inequality is actually the result of liberalism and liberal thought itself.” Thompson explains that the political philosophy of civic republicanism recognizes the great danger posed by concentrations of wealth and economic power.
In “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765-1900,” James L. Huston argued that the founders developed a political economy of aristocracy which identified the avaricious rich as a primary threat to the republic.
The revolutionaries’ concern over the distribution of wealth was prompted by a tenet in the broad and vague political philosophy of republicanism. In contrast to nations in which monarchs and aristocrats dominate the state, republics embodied the ideal of equality among citizens in political affairs, the equality taking the form of citizen participation in the election of officials who formulated the laws. Drawing largely on the work of seventeenth-century republican theorist James Harrington, Americans believed that if property were concentrated in the hands of a few in a republic, those few would use their wealth to control other citizens, seize political power, and warp the republic into an oligarchy. Thus to avoid descent into despotism or oligarchy, republics had to possess an equitable distribution of wealth….
[In The Laws, his last and longest dialogue, Plato wrote that “there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.” We should not be surprised The Laws is the least studied, least known, and least quoted of Plato’s books.
[The Roman historian Plutarch traced the degeneration of the Roman republic into an oligarchic empire to the growing imbalance between rich and poor. Another Roman, the lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator, and writer, Cicero, discussed the dangers of economic inequality, but also included a warning of the peculiar psychological condition of the rich:
“When one person or a few stand out from the crowd as richer and more prosperous, then, as a result of their haughty and arrogant behavior, there arises [a government of one or a few], the cowardly and weak giving way and bowing down to the pride of wealth.”
[The work of another historian of ancient Rome, Livy, was the basis of Machiavelli’s description of how the rich of Rome corrupted the Senate. In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli described how the Romans tried to restore political balance by creating tribunes to represent the plebians to counterbalance the control of the Senate by the rich, but the unceasing resistance and plotting against the tribunes by the rich of Rome eventually brought about the end of the Roman republic.
[The lesson for Machiavelli was “Let, then, a republic be constituted where there exists, or can be brought into being, notable equality.”
[In The Spirit of Laws, Book 5. Chapter 5, ”In what Manner the Laws establish Equality in a Democracy,” Montesquieu wrote,
“Though real equality be the very soul of a democracy, it is so difficult to establish, that an extreme exactness in this respect would not be always convenient. Sufficient is it to establish a census, which shall reduce or fix the differences to a certain point: it is afterwards the business of particular laws to level, as it were, the inequalities, by the duties laid upon the rich, and by the ease afforded to the poor. It is moderate riches alone that can give or suffer this sort of compensation; for as to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury.…”
[Montesquieu thus echoed Cicero by identifying the peculiar psycho-pathology of the rich by noting “to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury.” Does this not precisely define Trump and his vindictiveness?
[In the Christian Bible we find Matthew 6:24:
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”
[And, more pointedly, James 5:1-6:
Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence.
[And there is the famous warning in that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” This famous biblical quotation is repeated three times in the New Testament, in Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25.
[The problem of the rich dominating society and destroying it by their aggressive greed and ambition is not confined to the West. The view that the rich posed a danger to good government was also enunciated by the Chinese philosopher Confucius:
“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”
[According to Confucius, in a well governed society there should be a rough level of economic equality — there should be no poverty. But when a society is no longer well governed, economic inequality arises and there are the impoverished many and the rich few, who abuse and ignore the law and social norms, resulting in misrule. The existence of the wealthy therefore are a marker of a badly governed society.
[And in his Analects, Confucius wrote
If there were an honorable way to get rich, I’d do it, even if it meant being a stooge standing around with a whip. But there isn’t an honorable way, so I just do what I like.
[Oligarchy is the mortal enemy of a republic. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is a well-known saying, but it is just as important to understand that wealth corrupts and concentrated wealth corrupts absolutely. What Gray and Webb discuss is the general corruption that has arisen by our society’s toleration of great wealth, and the social damage it has caused, including the escalating problem of elite impunity.
[The Transcendentalists — among whom were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman — were particularly hostile to liberal philosopher John Locke. The Transcendentalist view of Locke was summarized by Orestes Brownson, in The Boston Quarterly Review, in January 1839:
…Locke reduces man to the capacity of receiving sensations, and the faculty of reflecting on what passes within us. According to him we have no ideas which do not enter through the senses, or which are not formed by the operations of the mind on ideas received by means of sensation.
[Locke’s] system of philosophy… is no less fatal to political liberty than to religion and morality… This philosophy necessarily disinherits the mass. It denies to man all inherent power of attaining to truth. In religion, if religion it admits, it refers us not to what we feel and know in ourselves [such a sense of fairness and justice], but was said and done in some remote age, by some special messenger from God; it refers us to some authorized teacher, and commands us to receive our faith on his word, and to adhere to it on peril of damnation. It therefore destroys all free action of the mind, all independent thought, all progress, and all living faith. In politics it must do the same. It cannot found the state on the inherent rights of man; the most it can do, is to organize the state for the preservation of such conditions, privileges, and prescriptions, as it can historically verify….
The doctrine, that truth comes to us from abroad, cannot coexist with true liberty… The democrat is not he who believes in the people’s capacity of being taught, and therefore graciously condescends to be their instructor; but he who believes that Reason, the light which shines out from God’s throne, shines into the heart of every man, and that truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man’s souk, whether patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar. It is only on the reality of that inner light, and on the fact that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to survive that storms of human passions.
[Zohran Mamdani has been repeatedly attacked for saying we shouldn’t have billionaires. But he badly flubs his explanation of this view. The simple fact is that a republic cannot survive the rise of oligarchy. A republic must have very high taxes on wealth and income, to disrupt the concentration of wealth and prevent the inherent despotism of the rich from ever emerging in the first place.
[Our problem now is that a plutocratic oligarchy has already parasitically fastened itself on our society and polity, and we need to dislodge it, and restore the governing principles of civic republicanism.]
Tesla withheld data, lied, and misdirected police and plaintiffs to avoid blame in Autopilot crash
Electrek, via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2025]
[Yves Smith: “No wonder the damages were so large. Judges and juries do not like this sort of thing.”]
Scandal-Plagued Prison Company Celebrates “Pivotal Opportunity” Under Trump
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 08-08-2025]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Donald Trump Is Mostly a Crypto Billionaire Now, Group Says
Matt Sledge, August 9 2025 [The Intercept]
… according to a new analysis from the left-leaning watchdog group Accountable.US. Nearly 73 percent of Trump’s wealth — $11.6 billion of an estimated $15.9 billion — comes from crypto holdings that he built at record pace by misusing his office, the group claims in an analysis made public Thursday.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American August 2, 2025
Republicans in the Texas legislature are working to redistrict the state before the 2026 midterm elections. Although state legislatures normally redraw district lines every ten years after the census required by the Constitution, President Donald J. Trump has asked Texas Republicans to redistrict now, mid-decade, in order to cut up five districts that tend to vote Democratic and create districts Republicans will almost certainly win. Five additional seats will help the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives despite their growing unpopularity.
A person close to the president told Goldmacher and Corasaniti that the White House strategy is “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”….
The extreme gerrymander Texas Republicans are attempting is coming on top of partisan gerrymanders already in place. As journalist David Daley explained in his book Ratf**cked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, after Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Republican operatives worked to make sure he had a hostile Congress that would keep him from passing legislation.
To push a plan they dubbed Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, they raised $30 million, mostly from corporations, to buy ads and circulate literature that would convince voters to elect Republican state legislators in 2010. The legislatures elected in 2010 would get to redistrict their states with maps that would last for a decade.
Texas Pushes Redistricting Into an Era of ‘Maximum Warfare’
Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti, August 2, 2025 [New York Times]
…Mr. Trump and his allies are already pressing other states to follow suit and remake their maps with more Republican seats. States under complete G.O.P. control that could be targeted for redistricting include Missouri, Florida, Indiana, New Hampshire and Ohio.“We’re going to get another three or four or five, in addition,” Mr. Trump told reporters recently of new Republican House seats. “Texas would be the biggest one, and that’ll be five.”The gerrymandering is deeply consequential at a time when a single House race can cost tens of millions of dollars. Republicans won control of the House in 2024 by only three seats, a margin the remapping in Texas alone would more than double.One person close to the president, who insisted on anonymity to describe the White House’s political strategy candidly, summed it up succinctly: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”
New executive order puts all grants under political control
[ars technica, via Naked Capitalism 08-09-2025]
On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. The order requires that any announcement of funding opportunities be reviewed by the head of the agency or someone they designate, which means a political appointee will have the ultimate say over what areas of science the US funds. Individual grants will also require clearance from a political appointee and “must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.”
The order also instructs agencies to formalize the ability to cancel previously awarded grants at any time if they’re considered to “no longer advance agency priorities.” Until a system is in place to enforce the new rules, agencies are forbidden from starting new funding programs….
Pushing and pushing
ZACK STANTON, 08/10/2025 [politico.com/playbook]
The Trump administration’s newest front in its monthslong war on Harvard University is “an investigation into Harvard’s patents derived from federally funded research, threatening intellectual property potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” per the Crimson’s Dhruv Patel and Grace Yoon.
In a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber on Friday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick “accused Harvard of failing to fulfill its obligations to disclose federally funded inventions in a timely manner, ensure substantial U.S. manufacturing for licensed technologies, and maximize public benefit.” He did not “identify any specific patents that could have violated federal law in the request.” It comes as the administration is seeking a settlement with Harvard in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
On the other end of the country, the administration has suspended $584 million in grant funding to UCLA, demanding the school — which is a public university, not a private institution like an Ivy — pay a $1 billion fine.
On the front page of this morning’s L.A. Times, Daniel Miller and Jaweed Kaleem detail some of the research at stake, which includes “lifesaving breakthroughs in cancer treatment, and developing tools to more easily diagnose debilitating diseases.” University of California President James Milliken calls the funding freeze a “death knell” to the school’s research; California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who says the state will sue, calls it “extortion.”
Trump’s War on Big Law Means It’s Harder to Challenge the Administration
Molly Redden, Aug. 6, 2025 [ProPublica]
Some of America’s largest law firms are refusing to take pro bono and paid legal work from groups that seek to hold the government to account on issues like environmental protection, LGBTQ+ rights and police accountability.
“There are cases that aren’t being brought at a time when civil rights abuses are maybe at the highest they’ve been in modern times,” said Lauren Bonds, the executive director of the National Police Accountability Project….
Meet the 30-Year-Old Far-Right Provocateur Nominated by Trump to Investigate Jack Smith
[Zeteo, via Naked Capitalism 08-06-2025]
To grasp how Donald Trump is degrading the caliber of the US government, consider his deployment of a young man named Paul Ingrassia.
Ingrassia is 30 years old. He graduated from law school three years ago.
He was admitted to the New York bar last year, but “lawyer” is not the way to think about what he does. Ingrassia is a far-right provocateur, best known for his former podcast, which published a post calling for martial law in 2020; his support for antisemitic Holocaust-denying extremists such as Nick Fuentes; his participation on the legal team of “manosphere” influencer and alleged rapist Andrew Tate, who denies any wrongdoing; his tweet calling former Vice President Mike Pence a “traitor” who belongs in the “ninth circuit of hell”; and his false but Trump-pleasing assertion that former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley was ineligible to run for president in 2024….
Strategic Political Economy
China mapped its industrial rise onto a single risk, seaborne oil under U.S.-policed chokepoints.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2025]
China mapped its industrial rise onto a single risk, seaborne oil under U.S.-policed chokepoints. At peak, 80% of crude arrived by tanker; the Malacca Strait is the throat. In a crisis, a blockade would aim to strangle the economy.
Beijing treated the problem as engineering. It locked down critical minerals and rare-earth refining so the magnet layer for wind turbines, motors, and batteries sits inside its control, quiet hardware for a sovereign grid, with refining share approaching 90%.
The state scaled domestic renewables and then electrified transport on top of that grid. Policy muscle, tax breaks, subsidies, R&D, license-plate priority, drove an EV stack that now produces 70% of global EVs and runs on 14M onshore chargers, bending oil demand before car ownership saturates….
The objective is operational immunity, oil-unblockable. Rewired flows, a grid decoupled from diesel, buffers in steel tanks, and demand shifting to electrons make energy policy double as wartime logistics; fleets lose leverage when the route, the stock, and the load all move inland.
An Abundance of Sleaze: How a Beltway Brain Trust Sells Oligarchy to Liberals
Matt Stoller [via Naked Capitalism 08-08-2025]
How did a debate over housing become a call to end the anti-monopoly movement? Abundance co-author Derek Thompson used slimy tactics to protect wealth and power in America. It’s worth examining how….
How popular are post-capitalist/socialist ideas and policies?
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-07-2025]
How popular are post-capitalist/socialist ideas and policies? Here’s a list of studies and surveys with some striking results…
Global power shift
Russia ‘no longer considers itself bound’ by nuclear treaty with US
[RT, via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2025]
[Observing Japan, via Naked Capitalism 08-07-2025]
…the questions about the US-Japan trade deal are not just a threat to Ishiba’s survival. They increasingly show that the damage that the Trump administration’s approach to Japan has done to confidence in Tokyo among Japanese elites, echoing the loss of trust in the United States recorded by public opinion polls.
One phrase in particular captures the degree to which the mood in Tokyo has shifted since the beginning of the year: unequal treaty….
This phrase, of course, carries tremendous weight in East Asian history, referring to the treaties imposed by the western powers on China, Japan, and Korea from the First Opium War onward – either following the use of force or, in the case of Japan, under the threat of force – that gave the western powers extraterritorial privileges, territorial concessions and the opening of treaty ports, and control over tariffs and customs enforcement. Meiji Japan, having inherited “unequal treaties” signed by the Tokugawa shogunate, was determined to abolish these privileges and succeeded not only in effectively doing so by the mid-1890s but also imposed its own unequal treaties on both Korea and China as it joined the ranks of the imperial powers. China, meanwhile, continued to be subject to its unequal treaties until 1941 (or later, if Hong Kong’s status is considered as part of the unequal treaties), serving as an important part of the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative about a “century of humiliation.”1 The phrase remained part of Japan’s political rhetoric after 1945, often on the left when discussing postwar treaties with the United States.2
The ease with which the phrase has reappeared voiced by conservative politicians and economists – shortly after Ishiba took an aggressive stance on the campaign trail, warning that Japan “would not be taken advantage of” in talks with the United States – points to the anger that is roiling barely below the surface of Japanese politics….
The real reason the West is warmongering against China
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 08-07-2025]
…The US relationship with China needs to be understood in the context of the capitalist world system. Capital accumulation in the core states, often glossed as the “Global North”, depends on cheap labour and cheap resources from the periphery and semi-periphery, the so-called “Global South”.
This arrangement is crucial to ensuring high profits for the multinational firms that dominate global supply chains. The systematic price disparity between the core and periphery also enables the core to achieve a large net-appropriation of value from the periphery through unequal exchange in international trade….
[TW: In reality, it’s been China that has been accumulating. This is typical leftist / Marxist thinking that simply does not understand the crucial role the development of new science and technology in economic development and the creation of wealth.
…much of Apple’s production relies on Chinese labour. According to research by the economist Donald A Clelland, if Apple had to pay Chinese and East Asian workers at the same rate as a US worker, this would have cost them an additional $572 per iPad in 2011.
[TW: and if USA household income had continued to rise at the level it had before Reagan, USA households would have around triple the income they do now, and could easily absorb that $572. ]
In the years since, China’s hourly labour costs have increased to more than $8 per hour, while India’s are now only about $2 per hour.
[TW: It’s amazing that economists and commentators do not stop and wonder how China could increase its labor costs eight-fold, and not collapse into economic ruin. As the Doctrine of High Wages — one of the four principle tenets of American System political economy — explains, the more labor is enhanced by new productive capabilities resulting from advancing science and technology, the more material wealth a society can produce. First USA Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wrote in Section II, “As to an extension of the use of Machinery…” in his December 1791 Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures:
The employment of Machinery forms an item of great importance in the general mass of national industry. ’Tis an artificial force brought in aid of the natural force of man; and, to all the purposes of labour, is an increase of hands; an accession of strength, unincumbered too by the expence of maintaining the laborer….
To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted. Even things in themselves not positively advantageous, sometimes become so, by their tendency to provoke exertion. Every new scene, which is opened to the busy nature of man to rouse and exert itself, is the addition of a new energy to the general stock of effort.
The spirit of enterprise, useful and prolific as it is, must necessarily be contracted or expanded in proportion to the simplicity or variety of the occupations and productions, which are to be found in a Society.
Alfred McCoy: Controlling the ‘World Island’
Thomas Neuburger, Aug 08, 2025 [God’s Spies]
Today we’ll examine a single persistent notion, an idea that has driven the West since the global project began — the domination of Asia, which Western strategists came to call the “world island.”
Aurelien, via Naked Capitalism 08-07-2025]
Why my liberal friends disowned me
[Unherd, via Naked Capitalism 08-06-2025]
Adam Tooze · Is this the end of the American century? America Pivots
[London Review of Books, via Naked Capitalism 08-09-2025]
…As of today, two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominates much of American political life. What we are facing is a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation….
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
What Can Be Done to Stop the Genocide of the Palestinians?
Larry Johnson [via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2025]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-09-2025]
Israel’s ambassador to Australia makes a chilling statement: “I’m going to play golf in Gaza whether you like it or not” — then adds, “Execute children.”
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2025]
An Israeli soldier from the Golani brigade has testified under oath at the Knesset that 10/7 was a false flag, and that he was ordered to stand down from 5:20am to 9am the day of the attack.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2025]
Senior Mossad agent claims that American politicians are trapped by Israel through Epstein blackmail! Ari Ben-Menashe also states that Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton almost reached a 2 state solution but….!
The ADL’s Descent And The Trajectory of Zionism
Spencer Ackerman, 4 Aug 2025 [FOREVER WARS]
MY FRIEND AND COLLABORATOR Noah Shachtman…. has a very good piece in New York magazine looking at, broadly, the transformation of the Anti-Defamation League from a civil-rights organization protecting the American democratic fabric into a Zionist organization ripping that fabric apart. Now: That dichotomy is too neat to describe the ADL’s actual history. As Noah notes, Zionist tendencies within the ADL compelled the organization to surveil critics of Israel, and even to sell information on U.S. anti-apartheid activists to the government of South Africa in the 1980s. But in the years before and especially after October 7, the ADL has gotten out of what you might call the solidarity business. When I reported for The Nation in October 2023 about the ADL baselessly accusing campus groups of material support for terrorism, I quoted Arab-American Institute Executive Director Maya Berry: “The bottom line has been that the ADL has decided to prioritize its pro-Israel work at the expense of any contribution it’s made in the civil rights space for some time now.”
On Creating a Cover for Genocide — Preventing criticism of Israel by defining it as antisemitic.
Aviva Chomsky, Aug 4, 2025 [LA Progressive]
Oligarchy
The Faux Intellectuals of Silicon Valley: Oligarchs, Courtiers, and the Corruption of Thought
Mike Brock, Aug 06, 2025 [Notes from the Circus]
There exists in Silicon Valley a particular species of intellectual fraud so brazen, so systematic, and so dangerous that it demands the kind of moral clarity that cuts through pretense like a blade through silk. We are witnessing the corruption of human thought itself—not by crude propagandists or obvious charlatans, but by a sophisticated ecosystem of oligarchs and their courtiers who have weaponized the very concept of expertise against the democratic discourse they claim to serve.
At the apex stands Peter Thiel, whose genuine brilliance serves a moral emptiness so complete it takes your breath away. When asked by Ross Douthat whether the human race should survive, this man—this creature of extraordinary wealth and influence—paused to compute the variables. Not because he lacks intelligence, but because he possesses it without the slightest trace of love for the species that created the conditions making his intelligence possible.
Thiel doesn’t merely theorize about replacing human judgment with superior systems—he builds them. His Palantir Technologies is working with the Trump Administration to compile digital dossiers on every American citizen, creating surveillance infrastructure that makes the Stasi look like amateur hour. Under Trump, Palantir gained unprecedented access to federal databases, combining immigration records, financial transactions, social media activity, and behavioral patterns into algorithmic profiles designed to predict and control human behavior.
This is what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil” in its most refined form: not the dramatic villainy of lesser monsters, but the systematic evacuation of moral weight from decisions affecting millions of lives. Thiel treats democracy like a venture capital portfolio, authoritarianism like a hedge fund position, human extinction like a fascinating thought experiment….
…What we are witnessing is not a collection of independent intellectuals reaching similar conclusions, but a coordinated ecosystem where oligarchic power gets legitimized through manufactured intellectual authority. The division of labor is precise and devastating….
…What makes this ecosystem particularly dangerous is how it corrupts the very concept of intellectual authority….
…Steve Jobs, whom these figures often claim as inspiration, understood something they cannot grasp. In a 2010 email to himself, he wrote: “I grow little of the food I eat… I speak a language I did not invent… I did not discover the mathematics I use… I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.” ….
…The time for polite disagreement with these figures has passed. They are not participants in democratic discourse but threats to the conditions that make democratic discourse possible. They deserve not engagement but exposure, not respectful disagreement but moral condemnation proportionate to the damage they inflict….
Trump’s Authoritarianism Is A Symptom— Totalitarianism And Oligarchy Are The Disease
Howie Klein, August 09, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…This is more economic coercion than it is economic policy— the kind of behavior we associate with authoritarian regimes, like Putin’s or Orban’s, where political loyalty dictates corporate survival. And Trump doesn’t hide it. He boasts about punishing his enemies and rewarding sycophants. He attacks CEOs, journalists, lawyers, university administrators, researchers and entire industries if they refuse to fall in line. To put it mildly, that sure ain’t the behavior of a president committed to the Constitution. That’s a man using the power of the state to build a patronage machine with himself at the center. This is totalitarianism, defined by an insistence on total authority over all aspects of society— economy, culture, speech, education, information flow and even personal belief.
The danger lies in the chilling message this sends: that CEOs and corporations must please not just shareholders and customers, but a volatile, politically motivated president. As Cutter and Ramkumar point out, some companies have tried to avoid Trump’s wrath through public flattery or hiring lobbyists with Trumpworld ties, behavior reminiscent of how elites navigate the whims of strongmen in the other totalitarian countries Trump admires. This isn’t just about Trump being “unconventional.” It’s about a president leveraging the power of the state to enforce personal political preferences, to punish enemies and reward allies, and to shape the economy through fear and coercion rather than law and policy. When private companies start adjusting their leadership, investments or even sweetening formulas to avoid public rebuke from the White House, it’s no longer a free-market democracy— it’s a command economy governed by a single man’s political imperatives….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
What’s Driving the Surge in U.S. Corporate Profits?
[Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, via The Big Picture August 4, 2025]
U.S. corporate profits have risen markedly to near all-time highs since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, both in nominal terms and as a share of national income. We examine the factors and industries that have driven this surge.
How AI, Healthcare, and Labubu Became the American Economy
Kyla Scanlon [via Naked Capitalism 08-08-2025]
Dewalt Price Changes are Not a Good Sign
[ToolGuyd, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2025]
Trumpillnomics
The U.S. Economy Is Stumbling Badly
Robert J. Shapiro, August 4, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
US manufacturing extends slump; factory employment lowest in 5 years
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2025]
‘A Black Hole’: America’s New Graduates Discover a Dismal Job Market
[NBC, via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2025]
So What Happens With the Jobs Numbers Now?
Josh Marshall, August 4, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
…BLS is staffed by career government economists and statisticians, very apolitical people in their work, who are just not the kind of people who are going to go along with anything like that. To the extent they were ordered to do so or Trump found a compliant statistician willing to cook for him that fact would almost certainly leak out in short order, either through leaks to the press or people resigning.
But there’s a related and deeper reason why this would be difficult to pull off. And it goes to the deeper cultural and methodological conflict that in many ways typifies our age – the conflict between data, expertise, method on the one hand and power, bullshit and personalist rule on the other. The numbers out of BLS (and other federal government data custodians) aren’t like calls from a ref which are in-the-moment judgment calls. A bad call from a ref might look fishy. But it’s difficult to say conclusively that it’s dishonest. They’re not even like Fed decisions which, while dependent on data, still rely on subjective judgements which could go either way. Those are decisions which could be “cooked” or, more relevant now, be swayed or pressured by the threat of more firings. At least as I understand the BLS and Commerce Department economic data it’s just not like that. These are very complex models into which large amounts of data are poured and then those are the numbers. There are probably some edge case roles for professional judgment. But in general, unlike our sports refs and Fed decision-makers, it’s a show your work enterprise. The models are the models and the data are the data. In the short term they are what they are. In the medium term changes to the models or collection methods are also a show your work thing.
Even to the extent some government economist at BLS might want or feel pressured to give Trump better numbers, I’m not sure they’d know how to do it. And here I’m referring to what I think is a basic culture class. Career government economists or statisticians are a certain kind of person. They’re not deal makers. I wouldn’t imagine they’re big risk-takers or – perhaps ‘risk takers’ isn’t quite the right word – not people with a lot of life experience drawing wildly outside the lines. Systematically goosing the data would involve both having the technical expertise to work the models and data together and then also figure out the best ways to distort them in the most plausible ways….
Bloomberg Odd Lots Podcast Transcript: An Interview with Former BLS Commissioner Bill Beach
[via Notes on the Crises, 4 Aug 2025]
…Tracy Alloway (41:23): So I want to ask you about qualitative adjustments….
Bill Beach (42:20): Well you’re absolutely right. It is very difficult to do that. But we do a lot of training. A lot of people don’t know that at the national headquarters there is a training suite, I think it’s on the second floor at least before we moved out of that building. And so people from the regions who are the CPI and PPI field teams that go out and do the surveying, they come to the BLS for training. And in these training rooms are kitchens, there are grocery store aisles. We’ve recreated kind of the inventory you might find in a grocery store or a warehouse. And we will train people from time to time on the changes in the items in the CPI, the 200+ items in the CPI or the items that we’re surveying at the producer price level. So if there is a change all the way from the number of potato chips in a bag, which is a very important thing when we will look at fast foods and potato chips and so forth, all the way to the technology involved in diamond cutting, we will be training people to observe the change and work that into their evaluation of the product when they’re in the store, when they’re in the warehouse….
Veronica Riccobene, August 08, 2025 [The Lever]
The Securities and Exchange Commission, overseen by crypto millionaire Paul Atkins, just agreed to drop its lawsuit against the cryptocurrency exchange Ripple after Biden-era regulators sued the firm for alleged securities fraud. Ripple, which will still have to pay a $125 million fine, gave $4.9 million to Trump’s inauguration in January and paid nearly $800,000 to lobby the federal government in the first half of fiscal 2025. That included $260,000 spent lobbying on issues related to crypto regulation paid to D.C.’s newly crowned lobbying king, Ballard Partners.
Ballard Partners was founded in 1998 by wealthy conservative donor Brian Ballard — a major MAGA fundraiser since Trump’s first campaign. Ballard Partners also previously employed Trump’s White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, until 2020, and his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, until her confirmation in January.
The firm’s clout within Trumpworld has made Ballard the highest-earning lobbying shop in the U.S., raking in more than $20 million just last quarter from clients clamoring to get the ear of the White House. (It’s overtaken powerhouse Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which has long used D.C.’s revolving door to help its corporate and oligarch clients.)
Predatory finance
How Big Insurance Companies Fleece Disaster Victims
Cathy Cowan Becker, July 30, 2025 [LA Progressive]
…All told, insurers have dropped over 1.9 million home insurance policies nationwide since 2018, a congressional investigation found.
Elsewhere, big insurance is raising rates dramatically. Home insurance premiums have risen by over 40 percent across the United States over the past six years, according to Lending Tree. This year alone, State Farm raised rates 17 percent in California and 27 percent in Illinois.
Even as they raise rates, the same companies are facing mounting complaints for not paying claims months after a major disaster — when they’re needed the most….
Large insurance companies are also large institutional investors, investing their profits in stocks and bonds — including in the fossil fuel industry. Last year, the property insurance industry made $25.4 billion from underwriting, but $164.3 billion — over six times as much — from investments and capital gains, an analysis from Revolving Door Project found.
Even as the climate crisis renders much of the country uninsurable, the property insurance industry had $582 billion invested in fossil fuel companies driving the climate crisis in 2019, the most recent year for which aggregate data is available.
Restoring balance to the economy
Meet the States Fighting Private Equity’s Health Care Destruction
[Boondoggle, via Naked Capitalism 08-08-2025]
Health care crisis
As Americans Struggled, Health Insurers Made a Record-Breaking $71.3 Billion in Profits
[HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 08-07-2025]
UnitedHealth Merger Approval Again Shows Lobbyist Power
David Dayen, August 08, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Another merger settlement allows consolidation in health care; UnitedHealth’s lobbyist was MAGA’s biggest firm.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
We’re Losing The Internet. But It’s Not Too Late
[¡Do Not Panic!, via Naked Capitalism 08-07-2025]
James Baratta August 5, 2025 [The American Prospect]
It’s only a matter of time before the drones, spy blimps, license plate readers, and motion-activated cameras come to the rest of America.
Meta illegally collected data from Flo period and pregnancy app, jury finds
Jon Brodkin, Aug 5, 2025 [arstechnica.com]
A federal jury found on Friday that Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act, the state’s wiretap law, by collecting data from a period-tracker app without user consent.
Plaintiffs in a class-action case proved by a preponderance of evidence that Meta intentionally eavesdropped on and/or recorded conversations using an electronic device, said a verdict form released yesterday in US District Court for the Northern District of California. Plaintiffs also proved that they had a reasonable expectation of privacy and that Meta did not have consent from all parties to eavesdrop on and/or record the conversations, the jury found.
The lawsuit was filed in 2021 against Flo Health, maker of an app for tracking periods, ovulation, and pregnancy. Facebook owner Meta, Google, and app analytics company Flurry were added as defendants later. The plaintiffs settled with Flo Health, Google, and Flurry before the trial, leaving Meta as the only remaining defendant….
“Each of the Defendants had their own purpose for collecting and using Flo user data,” the brief said. “Flo used this information to acquire new app users through advertising and marketing, including advertisements based on Flo App users’ reproductive goals (e.g., getting pregnant). Flo also sold access to the CAEs sent through SDKs to other third parties for profit. Google and Meta separately used the data they intercepted for their own commercial purposes, including to feed their machine learning algorithms that power each of their respective advertising networks.”….
Data Centers Could Make or Break Electricity Affordability
[Power & Policy, via The Big Picture August 9, 2025]
How AI factories are inflating grid costs, yet hold the key to lower rates.
The AI democracy debate is weirdly narrow
Henry Farrell, Aug 5, 2025 [Programmable Mutter]
…Crudely put, we suggest that many AI people would prefer a version of democracy that gets rid of the politics. That not only misses the point of what democracy is, but risks ignoring a multitude of urgently important problems and questions. How does actually existing AI affect people’s understanding of politics? How might it reshape the ways in which groups and parties operate? What are the likely consequences of the efforts to turn LLMs into political-cultural chokepoints (see e.g. the Trump administration’s “anti woke AI” executive order)?
So what, exactly, are we disagreeing with? Existing debates about AI and democracy regularly suggest using AI to make democracy more deliberative and representative, if not necessarily more powerful, or alternatively want democratic tools to provide legitimacy to AI without any real accountability….
LEAKED: A New List Reveals Top Websites Meta Is Scraping of Copyrighted Content to Train Its AI
Murtaza Hussain, Ryan Grim, and Waqas Ahmed, Aug 6, 2025 [Drop Site]
The tech giant is sidestepping guardrails that websites use to prevent being scraped, data show, in a move whistleblowers say is unethical and potentially illegal.
The AI bubble is so big it’s propping up the US economy (for now)
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2025]
Privacy group details extensive city-run surveillance in new report
[amNY, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2025]
Texas AI centers guzzle 463 million gallons, now residents are asked to cut back on showers
[The Economic Times, via Naked Capitalism 08-03-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment
Bill McKibben, July 9, 2025 [The New Yorker, via The Big Picture August 9, 2025]
In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system….
- It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.
- That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.
- Last year, ninety-six per cent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables, and in the United States ninety-three per cent of new generating capacity came from solar, wind, and an ever-increasing variety of batteries to store that power.
- In March, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the U.S. In California, at one point on May 25th, renewables were producing a record hundred and fifty-eight per cent of the state’s power demand. Over the course of the entire day, they produced eighty-two per cent of the power in California, which, this spring, surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy….
- All this is dwarfed by what’s happening in China, which currently installs more than half the world’s renewable energy and storage within its own borders, and exports most of the solar panels and batteries used by the rest of the world. In May, according to government records, China had installed a record ninety-three gigawatts of solar power—amounting to a gigawatt every eight hours. The pace was apparently paying off—analysts reported that, in the first quarter of the year, total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased; emissions linked to producing electricity fell nearly six per cent, as solar and wind have replaced coal….
…there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word “power,” offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you’re interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don’t come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways…..
Energy chief suggests Trump administration is altering previously published climate reports
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 08-08-2025]
Energy Sec. Chris Wright said Tuesday night the Trump administration is updating the National Climate Assessments that have been previously published, which the administration recently removed from government websites.
“We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports,” Wright told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in an interview on “The Source.”
Wright dismissed the past reports, saying “they weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.”
Democrats’ political malpractice
New TIME piece as paperback of WHITE POVERTY hits shelves
William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Aug 5, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
…Over the past four decades, as inequality has grown exponentially for all Americans, the number of poor and low-income white people—66 million in 2018—has swelled higher than any other demographic. This is one reason low-income, majority white communities became susceptible to the “populist” appeal of the MAGA movement. If white people are hurting, the divide-and-conquer myths suggest, it must be because Black people or immigrants are taking from them. By leaning into an aggressive investment in extreme ICE raids, Trump’s regime has bet the farm on this myth.
But the reality of American politics is that, despite these appeals, most poor people don’t vote against their own interests. While Trump improved in 2024 among low-income voters who cast a ballot in the election, new data from Lake Research Associates makes clear that the real change was in the number of poor and low-income people who decided not to vote in the race between Trump and Harris. More than 19 million “Biden Skippers” who helped elect President Joe Biden in 2020 didn’t show up in 2024. When asked why, nearly a third said their number one reason for not voting was that they didn’t feel like the Democrats’ message spoke to their economic situation.
When asked, these “Biden skippers” were not disinterested in politics. Far from it, nearly half say they check the news more than once a day and the majority favor Democrats in a generic match-up. What they want is a candidate who speaks to them, commits to fight for them, and presents an economic agenda that they know would make a difference in their lives.
Poor people are not driving the extremism in American politics, nor are they the true base for Trump, whose major policy achievement has been to cut government programs that serve everyday people so he can give tax breaks to corporations and wealthy Americans. Poor and low-income Americans are, in fact, the largest swing vote in the country. We need a movement to engage poor people who haven’t voted because they’ve never imagined the system could work for them. As they begin to feel the impact of the cuts from Trump’s big ugly budget bill, poor and low-income people must organize to demand candidates who will represent them….
Where are all the Democratic donations?
[Angry Bear, via Naked Capitalism 08-06-2025]
…“The illusion of a sprawling grassroots movement, with its dozens of different PAC names, quickly gave way to a much simpler and more alarming reality. It only required pulling on a single thread—tracing who a few of the most aggressive PACs were paying—to watch their entire manufactured world unravel. What emerged was not a diverse network of activists, but a concentrated ecosystem built to serve the firm at its center: Mothership Strategies.
“To understand Mothership’s central role, one must understand its origins. The firm was founded in 2014 by senior alumni of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC): its former digital director, Greg Berlin, and deputy digital director, Charles Starnes. During their tenure at the DCCC, they helped pioneer the fundraising model that now dominates Democratic inboxes—a high-volume strategy that relies on emotionally charged, often hyperbolic appeals to compel immediate donations. This model, sometimes called “churn and burn,” prioritizes short-term revenue over long-term donor relationships.” ….
“After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network’s FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees….
“This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.
“Here’s what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns.”
The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine
Adam Bonica, Aug 03, 2025 [data4democracy, via Angry Bear story, above]
How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.
Resistance
How to Mount a Cognitive Insurgency: Know. Name. Disrupt. — Part I
Jim Stewartson, Aug 4, 2025 [MindWar]
In a regime of epistemological totalitarianism, just KNOWING is resistance.
How to Mount a Cognitive Insurgency: Know. Name. DISRUPT. — Part III
Jim Stewartson, Aug 6, 2025 [MindWar]
With the knowledge gained in Part I and Part II, this article includes:
- Why the complexity of the system both protects it and makes it vulnerable to disruption
- How each step of the process of brainwashing can be combatted and interrupted
- Strategies for disrupting the system in the field—individual to national
- Applied cognitive dissonance as a tactic
- Being a better mousetrap for people than the leaders and prophets of the system—hijack the operant loop
- Using all three parts together to build national cognitive immune system
This is about legally and morally sabotaging a parasitic system of mind control….
Trump’s Canceling Democracy; The Left Needs A Different, Smarter Playbook
Howie Klein, August 08, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…Will Bunch laid it out in stark terms yesterday: Trump and his MAGA allies are using aggressive mid-decade redistricting to rig the game before the first ballot is cast. Starting in Texas, where Democrats are being threatened with FBI roundups and legal expulsion for resisting gerrymandering schemes, the White House is working with Republican governors in Indiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Florida… to redraw congressional maps in real time— long before the next census, and long before most Americans realize what’s happening. Don’t call it voter suppression; it’s voter nullification….
…Waleed Shahid’s strategic intervention is essential. Progressives, he argued, need to back off, at least for now, playing defense in unwinnable swing districts and start consolidating real ideological power where they already have it: in safer blue territory. It’s a counterintuitive idea in an era obsessed with flipping purple seats. But Shahid makes the case that the left’s biggest wins— from AOC’s upset over Joe Crowley to the rise of leaders like Greg Casar and Summer Lee— haven’t come from battlegrounds. They’ve come from deep blue districts where progressives can govern boldly, organize freely, and shift the Democratic Party’s center of gravity from the inside out. (Let’s not wander into the Zohar Mamdani race today and just stick to federal races for now.)
That’s how the Tea Party did it. They didn’t start by winning swing voters in Pennsylvania. They took over safe red districts and used them as ideological fortresses, gradually dragging the GOP toward full-blown Trumpism. Progressives, he proposes, must now adopt the same long game— building a disciplined bloc of unapologetic advocates for progressive values in solid Democratic districts and using that bloc to push the party, and the country, toward multiracial social democracy.
Volume 69, 2013, Pages 479-495]
Obama’s shift away from a policy approach aimed at helping 90 percent of Americans, to one that helps only the richest ten percent, shows that a very small economic elite has a chokehold on economic policy making in the United States. Which means it’s about time we face facts: the United States is no longer a government of, for, and by the people. The American polity is no longer a republic; it is a combination of oligarchy and plutocracy, with political power based on the ability to finance political campaigns. In simpler words: political power is based on wealth. The institutional and cultural arrangements of political and economic power in the United States are such that it is foolish to think that the President of the United States represents all the people in any real sense other than figuratively.
But this is, of course, an overly simple summary. The reality is that the federal structure of government designed by the Founders – political power diffused to the local, state, and national levels, overlaid with an institutional superstructure of three branches of government intended to check and balance each other – offers fissures and pressure points in the political system at which dominance by the rich is not complete and total. This reality is what progressives need to understand thoroughly, and use ruthlessly, to leverage political power where it can do the most good. This is a truth that is reflected repeatedly in American political history: focusing on the White House race is a huge waste of time, money and effort for progressives….
If wealth is concentrated through political acts – such as taxing the income of hedge fund managers as capital gains at only 15 percent, lowering the top marginal income tax rates, lowering corporate tax rates, eliminating the estate tax – then, breaking up concentrations of wealth obviously require political acts as their remedy. Deregulation of banking and financial derivatives, the repeal of usury laws, restrictions on organized labor – all these are political actions, that can be, and need to be, reversed by new political acts aiming to eradicate the new oligarchs, and so restore the vitality of the American economy, and the promise of republican self-government. We need regulations and taxes that encourage economic activity that society needs, and discourage economic activity that harms society.
In an Election Sermon delivered to the Connecticut governor and legislature, on May 10th, 1792, Rev. Timothy Stone warned that the idea that “liberty consists in freedom from restraint, leaving each one to act as seemeth right to himself, is a most unwise mistaken apprehension.” Rev. Stone noted that besides personal liberty, in a republic, all citizens also enjoyed, and needed to protect, civil liberty.
“Civil liberty, consists in the being and administration of such a system of laws, as doth bind all classes of men, rulers and subjects, to unite their exertions for the promotion of virtue and public happiness [i.e., general welfare]…. A state of society necessarily implies reciprocal dependence in all its members; and rational government, is designed to realize and strengthen this dependence, and to render it, in such sense equal in all ranks, from the supreme magistrate, to the meanest peasant, that each one may feel himself bound to seek the good of the whole…”
In the remarkable essay below, originally published last week in the Washington Spectator, Danny revisits one of the darkest, most repressive eras in modern American history, the 1950s, and finds in it not just disturbing parallels to our present, but also a glimmer of hope. He reminds us that even amid McCarthyism, segregation, and violent political backlash, there were people— editors, writers, artists, musicians— who pushed back with empathy, courage, and truth.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Trump’s Redistricting Coup Is Already Underway And Texas Is The Test Site For The Death Of Democracy
Howie Klein, August 08, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
David Weigel, August 8, 2025 [Semafor]
…the goal is the same as it was six years ago, when Trump attempted to add a citizenship question ahead of the last census. Stop counting non-citizens, and maps (as well as government funding formulas) could only be drawn around citizens, which would eliminate at least a single-digit number of seats that Democrats usually win.
And the larger goal is historic, as old as the arguments between Hamilton and Jefferson, about whether the city or the country would get to run America. Each of these actions would reduce the political power of cities; once de-powered, the cities would lose some of their self-governance.
Austin, Houston, and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, which are all losing seats on the new Texas map, have watched local reforms struck down by Republicans in the capitol — in the GOP’s mind, for the cities’ own good. Nashville, which reliably elected Democrats to Congress, lost that ability when Republicans split the city into three red districts. It still elects a Democratic mayor, who, according to Kristi Noem, “doesn’t deserve to be in office.”
Last month, at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s conference in Indianapolis, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts explained how that could happen: “When we have cities like Austin, or Nashville, or other capital cities whose local government is not representative of the will of the people, de-charter them and establish them as state municipal districts in the name of common sense.”
What do you do with cities that elect progressive Democrats, give sanctuary to illegal immigrants, and do not put enough criminals in jail? You don’t let them run themselves. You certainly don’t let them run the country. Their elections can’t be trusted, their immigration policies are probably a scam to import quasi-legal voters, and their ideas — from re-zoning to grow their populations, to bike lanes, to the whole book of criminal justice reform — are poison. That’s the mindset, as easy to see as its goal.
Christian Nationalism’s Plot on Civil Society: The Seven Mountains Mandate
Matthew Boedy [via Naked Capitalism 08-06-2025]
How Axios rebranded conservative ideology as objectivity
[Popular Information, via The Big Picture August 3, 2025]
Our news is carefully curated by conservative billionaires: Sinclair Broadcast pushes right-wing propaganda into 40% of local news markets. Fox News is in 70M homes. The WaPo and Politico owners are Trump donors. CBS has a political bias monitor.
Big Broadcasters Plan For A Trump TV Takeover
Freddy Brewster, Aug 6, 2025 [The Lever]
News broadcast giants that have curried favor with President Donald Trump and disseminated right-wing talking points are now urging the administration to eliminate rules holding back their monopolization of local and national TV stations, under the guise of competition with Big Tech companies, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.
Amid a multimillion-dollar lobbying and media blitz on the matter, the companies could find an ally in the country’s top communications regulator, Brendan Carr, who championed abolishing regulations limiting corporate ownership of local news stations in a Project 2025 chapter he authored that advocated for gutting the agency he now leads….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Partisan Gerrymandering After Rucho
Steve Vladeck [One First, via Naked Capitalism 08-05-2025]
…the larger issue is with the Supreme Court—and, specifically, its 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, in which a 5-4 majority held that federal courts can’t entertain challenges to partisan gerrymandering on federal constitutional grounds—not because those grounds don’t exist, but because such suits lack “judicially manageable standards.” The Rucho majority’s unwillingness to articulate such standards given the other constitutional claims for which the Court has shown no comparable reticence to craft its own standards was deeply exasperating at the time—and looks that much worse each time a state (of any color) tries to pull a stunt like what Texas is currently attempting.
To be sure, partisan gerrymandering didn’t begin with Rucho. But for those states that (1) leave the line-drawing to their legislatures; and (2) don’t recognize meaningful state constitutional limits on partisan gerrymanders, Rucho got rid of the last legal obstacle. And although folks will debate in perpetuity whether partisan gerrymandering is better in the nationwide aggregate for Democrats or Republicans (or neither), two points seem undeniable: Partisan gerrymandering tends to make primary elections far more important than the general election (the result of which is to exacerbate political polarization); and mid-decennial gerrymandering, like what Texas is attempting now, is especially pernicious. Against that backdrop, it’s fascinating to wonder how things might look today if Rucho had come out differently….
Trump-Appointed Judges Quash Contempt of Court Case Against White House
Brad Reed, Aug 08, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Two judges appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday at least temporarily shut down a bid by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg to potentially hold members of the Trump administration in contempt of court.
Politico reported that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit voted in a 2-1 ruling to quash contempt proceedings that Boasberg initiated against the Trump administration after he found there was probable cause to believe officials had defied his orders by sending 130 Venezuelan immigrants to be detained at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center.
A Tough Week For The Rule of Law
Joyce Vance, Aug 10, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
A 2-1 decision in the D.C. Circuit has deprived Judge Boasberg of jurisdiction to proceed with his inquiry into whether Trump administration officials should be held in criminal contempt for violating his orders and sending 130 Venezuelan men to CECOT prison in El Salvador in March. The two judges in the majority, Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, are both Trump appointees to a court that has long been a feeder court to the U.S. Supreme Court. That decision could be reheard by the entire circuit sitting en banc, or an appeal to SCOTUS could be attempted. But for now, the contempt proceeding—this is the case where the government’s best has been that they didn’t have to comply with the Judge’s order because their planes were out of U.S. airspace before he entered it in writing—will end without additional action against government lawyers. The dissenting judge, Obama appointee Cornelia Pillard, wrote that the majority’s decision was legally unjustified and “a grave disservice” to Judge Boasberg, who the Trump administration has gone after with an ethics complaint. Federal judges should not whitewash the government’s disgraceful behavior in the case involving the deportees, unless they intend to cede all the power of the Article III branch of government, the judiciary, to the Article II branch, the presidency.
What to Do — And Not to Do — About a Judge Like Emil Bove
Natasha Lennard, July 31 2025 [The Intercept]
Chris Mooney, November 27, 2001 [The American Prospect]
…The Anti-Federalists of the late 1780s spoke in a cacophony of voices; they were unified in nothing so much as their opposition to the Constitution. But by and large they tended to fear government centralization, which they suspected would result in tyranny. Thus, despite the obvious failure of the pitifully weak Articles of Confederation, the Anti-Federalists believed the new Constitution vested dangerous powers in the federal government….
Nevertheless, in the past 20 years, legal scholars and courts have rehabilitated the Anti-Federalists. Today, their anti-Big Government writings appeal not only to fringe militia gunslingers of the Timothy McVeigh variety, but to a wide range of academic constitutionalists. As the Ohio State historian Saul Cornell writes in his recent book The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788 1828, Anti-Federalists like George Mason, Patrick Henry, and Elbridge Gerry (not to mention pseudonymous writers like “Brutus” and “A Federal Farmer”) were cited almost as frequently from 1982 to 1995 in law reviews as the historical Federalists. In other words, scholars have begun to interpret the Constitution based on the views of its opponents….
Indeed, the trend of treating the Anti-Federalists as founders of the union they hoped to block began under the intellectual aegis of the Reagan Administration, where the Anti-Federalist distrust of centralized government had an obvious appeal. The Anti-Federalist revival was partly fostered by the right-wing political scientist Gary McDowell, whose work includes articles with titles like “Were the Anti-Federalists Right? Judicial Activism and the Problem of Consolidated Government” (1982), and “Federalism and Civic Virtue: The Antifederalists and the Constitution” (1987). McDowell was a head speechwriter for Reagan’s second Attorney General Edwin B. Meese, the original proponent of “original intent” jurisprudence, and currently a member of the Federalist Society’s “Board of Visitors” (apparently an honorary group including such conservative luminaries as Senator Orrin Hatch and Judge Robert Bork). McDowell was also a student of Herbert J. Storing, a Chicago School Straussian scholar whose seven volume collection The Complete Anti-Federalist (1981) became a dorm shelf staple for conservative law students. “That I think was the beginning of a modern efflorescence of interest in them,” observes the Duke Law School professor Jeff Powell, who as early as 1982 characterized William Rehnquist’s jurisprudence as more or less Anti-Federalist in an article in the Yale Law Journal….
bruce wilder
Michael Tracey took Whitney Webb to task for factual errors in the Briahna Joy Gray interview, errors that intensified implications supporting the narrative script she was following. Webb acknowledged some errors, but minimized their importance.
We can see here both the scarcity of verified fact and the surplus of moral panic and outrage at work. I do not see how representative democracy can possibly work in these circumstances. Who has the bandwidth to sort such nonsense out?
I follow the Russiagate saga, because way back when I thought the narrative of Russian “interference” and “Trump collusion” was ill-founded in manipulative tropes. Now, Gabbard and others are exposing some of the machinations behind its distribution. Will the historical memories that underlay the political discourse get rewritten, flushed down the memory-hole or just left to ferment into some further poison?
Jan Wiklund
Concerning “They’re not capitalists….”: It seems to me that the article follows all the disgusting conspirationist patterns. That is, that there is one overarching hierarchy that is responsible for everything that is harmful. But the world doesn’t work that way.
The “elites” look more like a Venn diagram than a hierarchy. That is, they consist of separate groups that sometimes ally with others, sometimes fight against others. It’s the routine work of the world that allow them to make a mess of it, usually that the people who take the blows don’t defend themselves enough forefully.
The elites are extremely competitive people who can’t accept that anyone get the better of them. If somebody tries he will get the same back. Sometimes, of course, one group of elites die, and sometimes another come instead. But they will continue to act in the same way, as a combination of pragmatic alliances and pragmatic wars. Nobody can “take over” Wall street, there are always competitors lurching in the shadows.
And besides. Why I engage in this kind of argumentation is of course because I loathe the conspirationist worldview. If there is One Big Bad Boy everything is so simple – just kill him and the world will be Good again. Which is moonshine. But if it is about bad routines we will need someting of a revolution to create new and better ones. Which will require mass organizing!
different clue
I remember once learning in an ecology class about a concept called a “multidimensional hypervolume”. It was a 3-D improvement upon the Venn Diagram.
Imagine interpenetrating-interlapping spheres instead of just overlapping circles.