Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 24, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Neoliberalism is not a viable option
Richard Murphy, August 22 2025 [Funding the Future]
… a fascinating blog post by someone called Blair Fix.
He analysed fascism in what seems like an entirely original way, showing that its roots are, in effect, in mediaeval theocracy, because the language used by those of fascist persuasion is remarkably similar to that found in some 17th, and maybe 18th, century political mediaeval theocratic thought, after which periods the language of the enlightenment displaced that of the theocrats, although the latter is now on the rise again….
In his analysis of fascist writing, Blair Fix identified three common threats. One was the significant overuse of violent symbolism. Words like annihilation, bloodshed, conquer, extermination and fighting were substantially overused when compared to the body of normal writing of the periods when fascist or similar ideas were written.
The second was a significant quantity of emotion-laden judgment, typified by the use of words like betrayed, cowardice, enemies, hatred, humiliation, slander and treason.
Third, he found there was a significant use of what appear to be quasi-religious, e.g. references to the Almighty, blessings, providence and the eternal….
The Deep Roots of Fascist Thought
[Economics from the top down, via Funding the Future 08-22-2025]
…In this essay, I’ll use word frequency to track the spread of fascist ideology. The journey starts with a trip to 1930s Europe, where we’ll encounter the works of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler (translated into English). The rantings of these two villains will serve as our corpus of fascist text. From this text, we’ll extract the ‘jargon’ of fascism — the words that Mussolini and Hitler use frequently and overuse relative to mainstream English. With this jargon, we’ll then track the popularity of fascist thinking in written language….
…In hindsight, the delusions of 2010 seem rather quaint. So was it then that neo-fascism first took root? Turning to our linguistic data, the answer is no. The seeds of today’s neo-fascism were planted decades earlier, in the 1980s. Figure 3 shows the trend….
…the fall of the Soviet Union left capitalism alone — free to be plagued by its own excesses. What would follow was a period of free-market cravenness which made the rich richer and left the poor to fend for themselves. Unsurprisingly, amidst the humiliation of this class war, dark ideas brewed. But for years, folks in the mainstream didn’t listen. Even when Trump won the presidency, elites dismissed it as an accident — a brief departure from the norm. It was not. Trump, it seems, is riding a wide wave of fascist discontent. We ignore it at our own peril….
…reflect on the common roots of injustice, which I think are fairly simple. They stem from the belief in innate inequality. Pick any horrific act, and you will find it easier to perform if you declare the victim a lesser human. Likewise, if you view the victim as your equal, the same act feels appalling. So it is the belief in human inequality which motivates injustice. And it is this shared belief in inequality which unifies the various forms of far-right politics. (This is Corey Robin’s thesis, explored in his book The Reactionary Mind.)2….
Figure 4: The deep roots of fascist thought in English writing. When we trace Mussolini and Hitler’s fascist jargon back in time, we find that ‘fascism’ seems to be overwhelmingly an ideology of the past. The frequency of fascist jargon was highest in 18th-century English writing and then declined continuously until the early 20th century. [Sources and methods]….
…Then I’ve tracked the frequency of these words over four centuries of German publishing. The results are unambiguous. In German books, the high point of fascist thought came in the 1600s, three centuries before Hitler seized power….
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]3
Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest
Alex Horton and David Ovalle, August 12, 2025 [Washington Post]
Trump’s FBI Raid of John Bolton’s Home Looks Like a “Five-Alarm Fire”
Greg Sargent, August 22, 2025 [The New Republic]
- Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon explicitly declared the other day that ICE officers will indeed be employed during the 2026 midterm elections in large numbers to monitor voting booths, again floating undocumented voters as the bullshit pretext to justify it. Bannon is not in a position to compel this, of course, but it’s clear the MAGA movement now sees Trump’s militarization of cities as a precursor to the use of law enforcement and/or the military to intimidate voters in large numbers, or foment a crisis atmosphere designed to help the GOP, or both.
- Last but not least, as we reported, a recent internal Department of Homeland Security memo outlines the hopes of senior DHS officials for substantially escalated military involvement in domestic law enforcement going forward. It even declares that military operations like the one in L.A. may be needed “for years to come.”
Trump Says Chicago ‘Probably Next’ for National Guard Invasion
Brett Wilkins, August 23, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Military lawyers to handle civilian crimes in DC
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]
Trump administration to begin continuous police-state surveillance of 55 million US visa holders
[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]
Joyce Vance, Aug 18 2025 [Civil Discourse]
…Trump elaborated on the post Monday afternoon, saying the quiet part out loud: “If you [end] mail in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected,” he said in the Oval Office. Trump mumbles a bit as he’s making the comment, but the context is plain….
- Trump claims that “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” That’s not true. Countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland use mail in ballots, and there is no more suggestion of fraud there than there is here….
- Trump claims he will sign an executive order to this effect (he hasn’t yet) because “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY.” That’s another wild and false claim. Congress sets the date and the time for national elections, but all other matters are reserved to the states, and each state runs its own elections with its own rules. If that wasn’t clear to Trump previously, it should be now. In June, a judge blocked the part of Trump’s March executive order that sought to stop states from counting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but arrived afterward. The judge emphasized that presidents can’t impose their views about how to conduct elections on the states….
Trump Demands: Ditch Vote-By-Mail. Republicans Shouldn’t
Bill Scher, August 19, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
…Donald Trump declared on his social media network that he is “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and that he will do it unilaterally. He continued:
“WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
‘Psychological warfare’: Internal data shows true nature of Alligator Alcatraz
[Miami Herald, via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2025]
Why are you so massively “obsessed” with Slavery?
Frank Vyan Walton, August 19, 2025 [DailyKos]
Trump: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future…”
“Slavery was very, very, very bad, and I hope that view continues to be reflected in our national museums,” said deputy opinion editor James Hohmann at the Washington Post….
Legal analyst and Substacker Aaron Parnas questioned Trump’s demand that museums talk about “the Future.”
“Also, why would museums talk about the future?” Parnas questioned….
Professor of human rights law Steve Peers mocked, “MAKE SLAVERY GREAT AGAIN!”
Power at any cost: It’s Trump Capitulation Disorder.
Thomas Mills, Aug 22, 2025 [PoliticsNC]
The FBI is raiding John Bolton’s house this morning. Bolton served as Trump’s National Security Advisor during his first term and as Ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush. Since the end of Trump’s term, Bolton has been a steady and harsh critic of Trump, calling him unfit to be president.
Alarm bells should be ringing, but, if they are, Republicans won’t hear them or won’t heed them. The people who once decried government agents as “jack-booted thugs,” now shrug when federal troops are deployed to US cities or the president uses the FBI to go after his political enemies, of whom John Bolton is one.
Republicans call Democrats’ fear of Trump’s authoritarian actions and impulses “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” In reality, their acceptance of behavior they once derided is Trump Capitulation Disorder….
Strategic Political Economy
How Trump Is Undoing 80 Years of American Greatness
Garrett M. Graff [New York Times, via The Big Picture August 17, 2025]
What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together….
Organizations like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war. They were joined by the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (founded in 1958); and the National Institutes of Health, which became a major grant-maker after the war — not to mention a host of other agencies like NASA and the Department of Energy….
[TW: Graff is strictly correct in focusing on the Manhattan Project, but he misses the larger picture, which was the creation of a communal “team” of government, universities, and private institutions, organized by the national government to create and perfect the technologies needed to win World War Two. These included much more than the atomic bomb, such as radar, proximity fuses, the aerodynamics of laminar flow, penicillin, packaged foods, and more.
[Especially glaring is Graff’s omission of Vannevar Bush, the dean of Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who Roosevelt put in charge of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). At the end of the war, Bush wrote a report that firmly established the principle that science was a public good which required adequate sustained funding by the federal government:
(United States Government Printing Office, Washington: 1945
[Writing in response to a request from President Roosevelt for an outline of what to do after the war, Bush argued that basic scientific research was essential for long-term technological progress and economic growth, and had to be supported even in the absence of any identifiable immediate commercial application or profitability. He called for the creation of an independent, federally funded agency to support basic research and talent development in universities and industry. Bush’s report directly influenced Congress’ creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. Bush’s model of the NSF is credited with promoting and steering the development of the computer, microchips and electronic miniaturization, the Internet, medical devices and procedures, and much more.
[In July 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published an essay by Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,”
Of what lasting benefit has been man’s use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health.
Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.
There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial….
Erin Malone, June 16, 2002, Foreseeing the Future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush
In 1945 a seminal article appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Titled, “As We May Think,” the article’s author, Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), proposed a new mechanical machine to help scholars and decision makers make sense of the growing mountains of information being published in to the world. This article presaged the idea of the Internet and the World Wide Web and was directly influential on the fathers of the hypertext and the Internet as we know it today. Ted Nelson, who coined the term “hypertext” in 1967, describes Bush’s article as describing the principles of it….
George P. Landow, author of Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology says of Bush, “Bush’s idea of the memex, to which he occasionally turned his attention for three decades, directly influenced Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart Andreis Van Dam and other pioneers in computer hypertext. […] In “As We May Think” and “Memex Revisited” Bush proposed the notion of blocks of text joined by links and he also introduced the terms links, linkages, trails and web to describe his conception of textuality. Bush’s description of the memex contains several other seminal, even radical, conceptions of textuality.”
Nobody’s Buying Homes, Nobody’s Switching Jobs—and America’s Mobility Is Stalling
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture August 17, 2025]
The paralysis has left many people in houses that are too small, in jobs they don’t love or shackled with ‘golden handcuffs.’ For everyone, there are economic consequences.
Global power shift
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 08-17-2025]
How Germany and Japan Tried to Derail China’s High-Speed Rail Rise
Felix Abt [via Naked Capitalism 08-19-2025]
Pete Hegseth Just Fired a Top General Who Pissed Off Trump
Robert McCoy, August 22, 2025 [The New Republic]
The president didn’t like the intel Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse’s agency reported on Iran.
Russia / Ukraine
[Aurelien, via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
The world authority on food crisis officially declares famine for over 500,000 in Gaza
[Drop Site News, Aug 22, 2025]
The world’s leading authority on food crises—the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—has officially declared a full-blown, phase 5 “catastrophic” famine in the Gaza governorate, including Gaza City, and the famine is projected to spread and engulf Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis by September. Nearly one-third of Gaza’s population—641,000 people—already face “starvation, destitution and death,” while another 1.14 million are in the “emergency” phase 4. Food supplies have collapsed: 87% of UN aid trucks were intercepted in July, bakeries are shut, wheat flour prices have soared 3,400% since February, and families are scavenging through rubble and rubbish for food. The Famine Review Committee calls the crisis “entirely man-made” and warns that “if a ceasefire is not implemented… avoidable deaths will increase exponentially.” ….
A newly published joint report by Forensic Architecture and the World Peace Foundation titled “The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation” in Gaza concludes in part that “the Israeli military has dismantled the ‘civilian model’ of aid distribution in Gaza and sought to replace it with a ‘military model’ which uses aid to further Israel’s military and political objectives, and starve the population of Gaza.”
Confirmed Gaza death toll tops 62,000, Hamas accepts ceasefire proposal
Drop Site Daily, August 19, 2025
Over the past three days, only 266 aid trucks entered Gaza out of the 1,800 required, with many looted amid what officials describe as deliberate chaos created by Israel to worsen humanitarian conditions. In the last 22 days, just 1,937 trucks entered—less than 15% of the 13,200 needed—leaving Gaza’s 2.4 million people without sufficient food, medicine, and other essentials.
Israel’s War on the U.N. (w/ Mara Kronenfeld)
Chris Hedges, Aug 21, 2025
The Executive Director UNRWA USA describes how important UNWRA has been in Gaza for decades, and how Israel’s targeted destruction of UNWRA infrastructure is an attack on all civilian life in Gaza.
Israeli army database suggests at least 83% of Gaza dead were civilians
[+972 Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]
Oligarchy
‘Self-termination is most likely’: the history and future of societal collapse
[The Guardian, via Avedon’s Sideshow 08-23-2025]
‘We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,’ says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. ‘I’m pessimistic about the future,’ he says. ‘But I’m optimistic about people.’ Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.”
Pluralistic, 20 Aug 2025
Forget surveillance capitalism – let’s talk about surveillance infantilism: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler’s goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.
After the Snowden revelations, I started to wonder about something fundamental: why spy at all?
The answer I came up with at the time is that the ultra-rich (and the states they have suborned) have a fundamental understanding that the more unfair a society is, the less stable it is. The more unstable a state is, the more its ruling class have to expend on private security. No captain of industry wants to arise from his sarcophagus of a morning, only to discover a mob of hoi polloi building a guillotine on his lawn.
As Thomas Piketty argues, there comes a point where it’s cheaper to make society more fair – say, by building hospitals and schools – than it is to pay for all the gaiter-wearing gun-thugs you’ll need to weed out the guillotine-building projects that spontaneously erupt under conditions of gross unfairness:
https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/
Mass surveillance shifts the guillotine equilibrium in favor of being greedier, by making it cheaper to identify and neutralize incipient guillotine-builders, which means that you can raise the greediness floor without seeing a concomitant rise in your guard labor bill.
And there’s lots of money to be made by raising the greediness floor, the corollary of which is that any time you fail to act with sufficiently shameless greed, you leave a ton of money on the table. That’s the substance of the shareholder lawsuit against Unitedhealthcare, alleging that after Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United CEO Brian Thompson‡, United failed to screw enough patients hard enough:
Israel’s Biggest US Donor Now Owns CBS
Alan Macleod, August 7, 2025 [MintPress]
After reaching an agreement with President Trump, David Ellison—the son of the second-richest man in the world, Larry Ellison—has acquired Paramount Global, the media giant that owns CBS News.
Larry Ellison, the largest private funder of the Israel Defense Forces, is deeply tied to the Israeli national security state and counts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among his closest friends.
David has already announced significant changes at CBS, promising “unbiased” news coverage and “varied ideological perspectives,” which are widely understood to signal a shift toward right-wing, pro-Trump coverage….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Why Has Consumer Spending Remained So Resilient? Evidence from Credit Card Data
Rees Hagler and Dhiren Patki, August 13, 2025 [Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, via The Big Picture August 21, 2025]
…since 2022, real aggregate spending—overall spending adjusted for inflation—has been propelled by the highest-income consumers. We also find that while inflation-adjusted credit card debt held by high-income consumers has yet to catch up to the level that prevailed before the pandemic, low-income consumers now have substantially higher levels of credit card debt than they did in 2019….
Data Centers Aren’t the Main Villain Behind Higher Electric Bills
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2025]
The Global Car Reckoning Is Here. Far Too Many Auto Companies Don’t Have a Plan
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2025]
The Number of Housing Units Under Construction Continues to Crash
Michael Shedlock [via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2025]
Trumpillnomics
What Declining Cardboard Box Sales Tell Us About the US Economy
[BusinessWeek, via The Big Picture August 17, 2025]
- Sales of corrugated cardboard used to make boxes are slumping, signaling that retail demand across industries may be due for a correction.
- US box shipments fell to the lowest second-quarter reading since 2015, with companies like International Paper Co. and Smurfit Westrock Plc reporting drops in box shipments.
- The drop in packaging demand appears to be tied to President Donald Trump’s mixed messaging on tariffs, with companies not stocking up on packaging while they wait to find out how the levies will affect costs and demand.
Monopoly Round-Up: Will Trump Deal Away a Google Break-Up?
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 08-18-2025]
Trump admin strips ocean and air pollution monitoring from next-gen weather satellites
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]
Stephen Prager, Aug 22, 2025 [CommonDreams]
How Deeply Trump Has Cut Federal Health Agencies
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]
No, Native-Born Employment Has Not Soared
Jed Kolko, Aug 13, 2025
The Vice President, the Secretary of Labor, and the new nominee for Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner have all recently trumpeted that there are two million more employed native-born Americans than a year ago….
But these charts and commentaries are a multiple-count data felony. The statistical agencies explicitly warn that these data are not suitable for sizing and trending the foreign-born and native-born populations. In fact, the apparent boom in native-born employment is just a statistical artifact, arising from arcane rules about how the data are constructed and population levels are determined….
Don’t Use the CPS for Levels or Shares of Foreign- vs. Native Born, Period
There are three reasons why the CPS should not be used to estimate the level or change in population or employment for the native-born or foreign-born. Very close readers of Census and BLS technical documentation know this already, but I’m going to spell it out in exhaustive detail….
Trump’s USDA Eliminates Support for Renewable Energy, a Lifeline for Farmers
The Trump administration is kneecapping wind and solar generation under the false narrative that they jeopardize reliability—nothing could be further from the truth.
Predatory finance
Private Equity Ripped the Heart Out of Skateboarding
David Dayen, August 21, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Multiple buyouts and bankruptcies have ruined iconic brands and hollowed out skateboarding culture. It’s our financialized economy in miniature.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Dougald Lamont, Aug 21, 2025
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) found a company Epstein ran registered in the Paradise Papers – leaked databases of offshore banking. That company, Liquid Funding Ltd, was partially owned by Bear Stearns, whose collapse started the Global Financial Crisis.
I am just stunned that Epstein is literally at the centre of a financial disaster that knocked the globe off its economic trajectory. The failure to adequately address the terrible imbalances in the economy has led us to this miserable and chaotic point in world history.
And here in the Paradise Papers is Jeffrey Epstein, kicking it all off.
What’s more, it’s linked to tax havens. It’s being made possible by the existence of offshore banking networks where wealthy “aggressive tax planners” and tax cheats – many of them U.S. corporations – are able to stash hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars offshore, rather than either going to pay taxes in their home country, and sometimes just hiding the proceeds of corruption and organized crime….
As you can see from this diagram from ICIC, the connections from Epstein’s company, looks like a diagram of an exploding octopus: GRAPH
Under-Examined Aspects of the Epstein Story
Thomas Neuburger, August 22, 2025 [God’s Spies]
Why was he working with arms dealers? Was he involved in money laundering? What were his ties, if any, to organized crime?
The CIA, Mossad, and Epstein: Unraveling the Intelligence Ties of The Maxwell Family
Alan Macleod, August 22, 2025 [MintPress]
DOJ Insider Blows the Whistle on Pay-to-Play Antitrust Corruption
David Dayen, August 19, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Roger Alford, former number two at the Justice Department Antitrust Division, speaks out. Here’s what was important in what he said.
I met Roger Alford once, a few months ago at a conference. He’s a no-doubt conservative who served in both Trump administrations, yet he is cursed with having a sense of right and wrong. He was fired a few weeks ago for resisting pay-to-play corruption at the Justice Department, which offended his belief system. Unlike virtually everyone in the Republican Party since Inauguration Day, he’s willing to talk about it.
Alford, now a law professor at Notre Dame, delivered a speech at the Tech Policy Institute Aspen Forum on Monday, and simultaneously released an opinion piece in UnHerd, a well-known forum for populist conservatives. In both, he decried the subordination of the rule of law to a “rule of lobbyists,” confirming a degradation of antitrust under Trump that has been widely reported. In doing so, he made it more likely that the lobbyist cabal and their enablers in the Justice Department, both of whom he singled out by name, would face a judicial tribunal that can expose this broken process.
Restoring balance to the economy
What It Will Really Take to Electrify All of Africa
[IEEE Spectrum, via Naked Capitalism 08-17-2025]
Disrupting mainstream politics
Jeremy Corbyn on building a new party to transform British politics
[defenddemocracy.press 08-23+2025]
MEE sat down with the former Labour leader to talk about his vision for the new left-wing party
Health care crisis
Here’s a Map of What Trump-GOP Destruction of US Hospitals Looks Like
Brad Reed, Aug 21, 2025 [commondreams]
New Senate Report Details How Private Equity ‘Devastates’ Hospital Systems
Brad Reed, August 21, 2025 [CommonDreams]
“Private equity comes in, squeezes the life out of hospitals and doctor’s offices, and then leaves patients and communities in the lurch,” says a report from Sen. Chris Murphy.
Nonprofit hospital CEO, employee pay gap widens: Study
[Beckers Hospital Review, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]
“The researchers also found a trend toward the “financialization” of nonprofit health systems, in which they adopt business practices and governance philosophies resembling those of publicly traded corporations and financial firms.”
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Let’s Turn the Tide on Surveillance – starting with radio biometrics
Jem Bendell [via Naked Capitalism 08-18-2025]
Google Search Is Fading. The Whole Internet Is at Risk
[Barron’s, via The Big Picture August 17, 2025]
Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi
[Ars Technica, via The Big Picture August 17, 2025]
A I pocolypse
The Plot To Outlaw AI Lawsuits
Helen Santoro, Aug 19, 2025 [The Lever]
Generative AI isn’t just a matter of life and death. It’s far more important than that
[The Register, via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2025]
…The big topic right now in grieftech, as we must learn to call this new frontier, is how to safeguard against generative grave-robbing. It’s hard enough for the living to keep their digital existence safe. What happens after death is a whole new ball game. We’ve recently seen calls for legal clarification and reform on who decides what happens to the digital afterlife of the analog deceased. The rules are fragmentary, complicated and largely unformed.
What’s needed is a sober, thoughtful debate considering what mix of personal rights and public abilities will be best for individuals, commerce and society. We aren’t going to get this, at least not in the US and at least not in the next few years, where a merry free-for-all for the powerful and the preferred is the order of the day.
If this was the only complicated consequence of grieftech, it’d be enough. It is not. It’s not even the most consequential. While there are worries about generative AI being used for the virtual resurrection and exploitation of the dead without permission, there are more profound implications of AI being used for the same purposes with permission or indeed active intent….
Collapse of independent news media
The Surprising Link Between Craigslist, Classified Ads, and Political Polarization
[Stanford Business, via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2025] Important.
Democrats’ political malpractice
Silicon Valley Is Panicking About Zohran Mamdani. NYC’s Tech Scene Is Not
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2025]
How Democrats Can Ditch The “Distraction” Crutch
Brian Beutler, Aug 21, 2025 [Off Message]
Gary Hale: I am a lawyer and former Democratic State Senator here in CT. Only disclosing that as my preface to my firm belief that lawyers – specifically Holder under President Obama and Garland & Monaco under President Biden are culprits in a fair amount of the distrust among rank & file D’s and voters in general have with our party. Holder’s failure to prosecute a single major Wall Street exec following the economic collapse in ’08 and Garland’s lethargy in prosecuting Trump & others after taking over the DOJ for Russian collusion, emoluments & Jan 6 broke a trust with everyday citizens. The powerful won’t prosecute the powerful, and justice is never equal. Thoughts?
My view is that the Democratic leadership’s decision to largely sidestep Trump accountability (and to “look forward” past earlier elite crimes) has had three terrible consequences:
- Demoralizing Democratic voters who rightly want to see Trump’s crimes fully exposed, and for their party to be unafraid of him.
- Allowing Republicans to win the battle of public perception over which party is more corrupt. It’s not just that liberals became frustrated with Democrats. It’s also that, as Democrats retreated and Republicans hyperventilated over false specters of Democratic cheating and Biden corruption, the median voter came away believing Democrats are dirtier than Republicans.
- Reinforcing Republican impunity. The failure to prosecute any of the architects or functionaries of the torture regime or the financial crisis didn’t help in this regard, but I don’t think it contributed nearly as much to the GOP’s transformation into a criminal enterprise as seeing their leader violate his oath of office, commit grave crimes of state, and get away with it. and Trump came back more crooked than ever, and it’s ruining the country.
How Moderate Senate Democrats Enabled Trump’s D.C. Takeover
by Ryan Cooper August 22, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Many have warned that allowing D.C. to remain a disenfranchised colony would lead to disaster. They were right….
…If Democrats had axed the filibuster—which could be accomplished with a majority vote in the Senate at any time—and passed the For the People Act in 2021, Trump would now find it considerably more difficult to impose a military occupation on the nation’s capital, and Republican states would face an obstacle to cheating elections by rigging district boundaries. Democrats also would have had 52 votes in 2021-2022 rather than 50, and President Biden’s Build Back Better Act likely would have passed instead of dying in the Senate. Had Biden’s massive expansion of the Child Tax Credit passed, Trump might not have won in 2024.
All that is water under the bridge. But it is an important lesson about the stakes for any future Democratic Congress and president. If they do manage to stop Trump’s attempt to consolidate a dictatorship, America’s political institutions will need a major overhaul. Manchin and Sinema are both gone, but their brand of “moderation”—some mixture of triangulating cynicism, corruption, and cowardice—is not. Supporting D.C. statehood is the bare minimum for any Democrat seeking a Senate seat.
Amid DSCC Pressure, Democratic Populist J.D. Scholten Exits Iowa Senate Race
Austin Ahlman, August 18 2025 [The Intercept]
Party elites batten down the hatches. The same day a progressive, working-class outsider announced he’s challenging Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), institutional Democrats announced a major monetary push to protect Collins’ seat. Considered a moderating voice in the GOP — particularly on the issue of abortion — Collins is getting an assist from liberals at a Hollywood fundraiser.
- An oyster farmer and military veteran named Graham Platner has launched a Democratic campaign to unseat Collins with a platform including universal health care and ending U.S.-backed regime-change wars. Establishment Democrats are pushing Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a moderate Democrat, to join the race, but she has yet to decide.
A new kind of Democratic candidate is on the rise — Party leaders vs populists
Jordan Zakarin, Aug 21, 2025 [Progress Report]
…The DSCC’s preferred candidate in Maine, outgoing Gov. Janet Mills, would seem to fit the same mold as Cooper and Brown, but there are key differences, including the fact that at 79 years old, Mills would be the oldest first-term senator in history. She also isn’t particularly popular in Maine, having just bobbed up over 50% approval rating thanks to her spats with the Trump administration. Mills has also drawn the ire of organized labor in the state after vetoing several priority bills, including legislation that would have guaranteed farmworkers’ right to simply talk about poor working conditions.
Nothing about Mills suggests that she’d be a populist or appeal to the mass number of voters craving that sort of politics, and if she does get in the race, she’ll now have to reckon with a candidate who has made a working class background the underpinning of his entire campaign. Graham Platner, a 40-year-old oyster farmer and Marine veteran who served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, threw his hat into the ring on Tuesday, with a viral campaign video and social media blitz that announced him as a new-ish kind of Democrat.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Republican autocracy is all part of the plan — The conservative campaign to crack down on freedom
Jordan Zakarin, Aug 18, 2025 [Progress Report]
…The American Legislative Exchange Counsel recently boasted of the work done by its members to lower state income taxes, part of a larger coordinated push to fully eliminate one of the only progressive taxes in these states. Ohio this year created a 2.75% flat tax, which is as regressive as it gets, while Kansas enacted a 4% flat tax. Mississippi took another step toward eliminating the income tax, while Missouri is in the process of ending its capital gains tax.
According to the Local Solutions Support Center, legislators have put forward more than 800 preemption bills intended to limit the power of local officials, negate citizens initiatives, and steal rights from residents.
There have been more than 100 immigration-related preemption bills filed alone, a 900% increase from last year’s crop of anti-immigrant bills, evidencing a coordination with federal officials….
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has played a decisive role in preventing the Keystone State’s democratic slide, overturning gerrymanders and denying organized campaigns to disqualify voters. Democrats hold a 5-2 lead on the court, but this year’s justice retention votes give Republicans an opportunity to eventually flip three of those seats. Retention elections have been historically difficult to lose, but justices don’t generally face expensive “vote no” campaigns paid for by billionaire donors.
The Pennsylvania GOP really hit the jackpot: a collaboration between Jeffrey Yass and Federalist Society co-founder Leonard Leo. They’re pouring money into the Republican State Leadership Committee, a dark money group that’s already running ads against the Democratic justices justices….
Judge Rules Ohio’s Voucher System Unconstitutional
Ella Tummel, Aug 22, 2025 [The American Prospect]
The ruling could end the siphoning of funds to private and parochial schools.
Heather Cox Richardson, August 18, 2025 [Letters from an America]
Trump also reposted material from two QAnon-related accounts and pushed the QAnon belief that the Democratic Party is “the party of hate, evil, and Satan.”
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Elon Musk Just Won His War on Labor Unions
Matt Ford, August 21, 2025 [The New Republic]
The Fifth Circuit has done the mogul’s bidding and neutered the National Labor Relations Board, in a move that will likely substantially damage workers’ rights.
Appeals court says NLRB structure unconstitutional, in a win for SpaceX
[TechCrunch, via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2025]
Corruption, over piña coladas.
The Lever, Aug 18, 2025
Nearly 60 federal judges attended antitrust seminars held in tropical vacation destinations and hosted by a Big Tech-backed conservative law organization, according to The Capitol Forum. Dozens of U.S. judges — including some now overseeing Big Tech litigation — traveled to places like Italy, Hawaii, and Portugal to attend educational sessions hosted by the Global Antitrust Institute. The group is affiliated with the Antonin Scalia Law School, a Leonard Leo-connected conservative institution and cog in the judicial corruption machine.
The south rises again
Heather Cox Richardson, August 20, 2025 [Letters from an America]
President Donald J. Trump created a firestorm yesterday when he said that the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, located mostly in Washington, D.C., focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.” But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not simply white supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation’s voting system to create a one-party state.
That ideology took shape in the years immediately after the Civil War, when Black men and poor white men in the South voted for leaders who promised to rebuild their shattered region, provide schools and hospitals (as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to work hard and rise.
Former Confederates, committed to the idea of both their racial superiority and their right to control the government, loathed the idea of Black men voting. But their opposition to Black voting on racial grounds ran headlong into the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, after it was ratified in 1870, gave the U.S. government the power to make sure that no state denied any man the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” When white former Confederates nonetheless tried to force their Black neighbors from the polls, Congress in 1870 created the Department of Justice, which began to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had been terrorizing the South.
With racial discrimination now a federal offense, elite white southerners changed their approach. They insisted that they objected to Black voting not on racial grounds, but because Black men were voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to Black people, since hospitals and roads would cost tax dollars and white people were the only ones with taxable property in the Reconstruction South. Poor Black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina.”
In contrast to what they insisted was the federal government’s turn toward socialism, former Confederates celebrated the American cowboys who were moving cattle from Texas to railheads first in Missouri and then northward across the plains, mythologizing them as true Americans. Although the American West depended on the federal government more than any other region of the country, southern Democrats claimed the cowboy wanted nothing but for the government to leave him alone so he could earn prosperity through his own hard work with other men in a land where they dominated Indigenous Americans, Mexicans, and women….
…In forty years, Republicans went from opposing Democrats’ policies, to insisting that Democrats were socialists who had no right to govern, to the idea that Republicans have a right to rig the system to keep voters from being able to elect Democrats to office. Now they appear to have gone to the next logical step: that democracy itself must be destroyed to create permanent Republican rule in order to make sure the government cannot be used for the government programs Americans want.
Trump is working to erase women and minorities from the public sphere while openly calling for a system that makes it impossible for voters to elect his opponents. The new Texas maps show how these two plans work together: people of color make up 60% of the population of Texas, but the new maps would put white voters in charge of at least 26 of the state’s 38 districts. According to Texas state representative Vince Perez, it will take about 445,000 white residents to secure a member of Congress, but about 1.4 million Latino residents or 2 million Black residents to elect one….
Civic republicanism
Failed Republics: Haiti— Revolution, Retaliation And The Struggle To Survive
Howie Klein, August 19, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Haiti’s experience shows how democracies can be strangled not just from within, but by sustained external sabotage and economic exploitation. It’s a cautionary tale about the need for solidarity, sovereignty and resilience in defending democratic values.
Failed Republics: Venice— The Long Fade Of A Merchant Republic
Howie Klein, August 18, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Venice shows that even the longest-lived republics can decay from within when political power is monopolized, reforms are resisted and the world changes faster than leadership adapts.
Failed Republics: Florence— The Republic That Became A Family Business
Howie Klein, August 17, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Florence shows how democratic structures can be hollowed out from within. You don’t need to formally abolish a republic to kill it— you just need to turn elections into theater and concentrate real power in the hands of a few…
Failed Republics: The French Third Republic— Democracy Slowly Rotting From Within
Howie Klein, August 16, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
The slow decay of the French Third Republic warns us that democracy can die not just in dramatic coups, but through years of neglect, division and erosion of trust. Without renewal and responsiveness, even long-standing democracies become brittle.
Failed Republics: The Roman Republic— When Power Corrupts and Democracy Crumbles
Howie Klein, August 15, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
The Roman Republic’s demise warns how inequality, corruption and the breakdown of democratic norms open the door for authoritarianism. It underscores the importance of strong institutions and vigilance in protecting democracy.
Failed Republics: Weimar Germany— Democracy Undone By Crisis And Extremism
Howie Klein, August 14, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
The Weimar Republic shows how economic crisis, political paralysis, and extremist propaganda can hollow out democracy from the inside. Once norms are broken and authoritarian shortcuts become routine, reclaiming a healthy democracy becomes far harder— sometimes impossible. Many here in the U.S. are extremely worried that we’ve already entered into this cycle.
Failed Republics: Athens— How The World’s “First” Democracy Fell
Howie Klein, August 13, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Democracy isn’t just about voting; it’s about protecting the norms, institutions, and inclusivity that give those votes meaning. Athens shows that exclusion, demagoguery, perpetual war, and erosion of civic trust can destroy even the most ground-breaking democratic experiment.
Failed Republics— Vaishali: The World’s First Republic You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
Howie Klein, August 12, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Vaishali’s story reminds us that the roots of participatory governance are more diverse than we often think. While Athens gets the credit in most history books, places like Vaishali were experimenting with similar ideas, tailored to their own cultural contexts. In an era when democracy is both celebrated and challenged, Vaishali’s example invites us to explore the global tapestry of political innovation.
Want to learn more? Check out works like Jagdish Prasad Sharma’s Vaishali, The World’s First Republic. Vaishali may be lesser-known, especially here in the West, than the other democracies we’ll be looking at this week but its story is a powerful testament to humanity’s enduring quest for collective rule.
Preamble to the Fourth American Constitution
Thomas Neuburger, Aug 20, 2025 [God’s Spies]
We’ve argued in these pages that the U.S. has entered a new constitutional order, the nation’s fourth….
…The third crisis grew from the corruption and dominant power of the rich that rose in the post-Civil War period and produced the Great Depression of the 1930s. The people’s reaction to their sudden and greater impoverishment put Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal ideas in power. The phrase “New Deal” specifically meant restructuring the economy and restructuring the relationship between the government and its people, both in a radical way. This is from a Roosevelt campaign speech delivered in July 1932:
“Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth… I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.” [emphasis added]
These changes were deeply transformative. But unlike the Second Constitution, the New Deal Constitution consisted, not of amendments, but of laws, declarations, agreements and judicial rulings….
…With that, let’s start by noting deviations from our so-called written Constitution — provisions that are no longer in force or whose meanings have changed — starting with the Preamble….
The phrase “promote the general Welfare” must be revised to reflect the government’s real goals. As we’ve seen, the modern rule is to promote the welfare of the few at the expense of the many.
GRAPH — What if most incomes grew at the same rate as top incomes? [$92k instead of $30k]
The counter-revolutionary response to the New Deal Constitution started immediately, with the failed 1933 Plot to depose Franklin Roosevelt and establish a dictatorship by the titans of wealth. This counter-revolt picked up real steam in the 1980s with the so-called Reagan Revolution (actually a counter-rebellion) that put the wealthy again back in control.
Thus the welfare today’s government promotes isn’t general; it’s that of the already rich, our current elites, our moneyed aristocrats. Is this hyperbole? Decide for yourself, but do decide based on facts. Consider the Epstein case, for example, or the case of elite-protected Israeli pedophiles. Consider the right of corporations to kill, or the protected immunity of people like Jon Corzine….
With this in mind, the Preamble to our Fourth Constitution reads roughly as follows:
We the People of the United States, in order to form a government with preemptive control, establish a justice regime that protects our elites, provide enough defense so elites may profit, promote the welfare of the already rich, and secure the blessings of liberty on wealth and its friends, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Three Crises of Labor: “Organize or Die” gets uncomfortably relevant
Hamilton Nolan, Aug 20, 2025 [How Things Work]
America did not get to the bad place it is in today by accident. We are here as a result of the combination of a political system that serves money, and a half-century long explosion of economic inequality that has produced an oligarchy. Donald Trump is the product of these factors, but he is not the underlying problem. The underlying problem is that too much power has flown into the hands of too few people, and they have used that power to arrange the entire economic and political system in their favor. Democracy, such as it was, is an inevitable casualty of this process.
Climbing out of the hole that we are in will require more than one or two favorable election cycles. It will require shifting that underlying balance of power away from the oligarchs and their allies, and back towards the rest of us. Power that has accumulated among the rich and ultra-rich will have to be wrested back into the hands of the working class majority. This pro-democratic shift in economic and political power can only be accomplished if the organized power of the working class gets stronger—strong enough to compete with the power of the rich. In other words, organized labor must get stronger if we are to turn around America’s descent into fascism. This is why you should care about what is happening with America’s labor unions even if you have been operating under the illusion that unions don’t mean much to you personally….
You don’t get paid enough because your boss takes all the money. Then he donates some of the money to Republicans, who take away your health care in order to give your boss tax cuts. When your union wins you a contract, Trump tears it up. He doesn’t give a damn about you. He even fired the head of the agency that measures union membership! He puts soldiers in the streets, sends out masked thugs to snatch hardworking people off the streets, and sits in a golden office lying his ass off while his billionaire supporters shove more of the wealth you produce into their own pockets.
Fuck that guy, fuck his judges, fuck his soldiers, fuck his cops, fuck his billionaires, fuck anybody talking about how “the Republican Party is the party of the working class now.” Fuck the Democratic Party leadership, too. You are failing. We have eyes. Everything is getting worse and nobody is coming to save us. We are the workers and the workers are the unions and the unions are for everybody. That’s how the labor movement needs to think now, from the bottom to the top. “Organize or die” has always been true. It’s just that now, the “die” part is getting closer than you would like.
Liberals: Alas, the Time Has Come to Throw John Rawls Under the Bus
Toby Buckle, August 21, 2025 [The New Republic]
…liberalism began to think it was, or should be, “neutral.” Philosophically, this is the belief that the state should not favor any particular conception of what constitutes a good life for its citizens, but should create a neutral framework for people to pursue the good as they see it. In recent American history, the most powerful liberals, when asked to justify neutrality—to explain how and why they use it—will often say they are applying “the rules” fairly and impartially. And this, to them, is what liberalism is for. Its role is as the referee of the great ideological game, not a player in it.
In public discussions, this idea of liberal neutrality has often been in the background, manifesting as a set of genteel conversational norms. Elite liberalism over the last generation has concerned itself with matters of decorum, civility, and process—making sure that everyone played nicely together….
…In this new era—what Samantha Hancox-Li calls “the long ’90s,” defined by seeming stability and consensus—there was a feeling in elite spaces that the fundamental questions of governance had now been solved; the “end of history” and all that. Representative democracy, a classically liberal set of rights and freedoms, and free trade and markets had won. Communism, planned economies, protectionism, legally enforced race or gender hierarchies, and overt bigotry were being left in the past….
[CovertAction, via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2025]
…Unfortunately, under the more recent leadership of Margaret Huang—a U.S. State Department adviser with a career rooted in regime-change operations abroad—the SPLC morphed into something entirely different from what the original organization was intended: a domestic proxy for federal power, advancing intelligence narratives and targeting dissent under the guise of social justice….
Not surprisingly, given this background, Huang increasingly directed SPLC’s considerable resources toward discrediting domestic political opposition—not limited to the far right, but encompassing environmental activists, medical freedom advocates, parental rights organizations, and anti-war voices.
Under Huang, critics of federal policy are no longer treated as citizens with grievances, but as potential threats to the state.
The SPLC’s flagship products—its Extremist Files, Hatewatch blog, and annual Year in Hate reports—no longer simply document hate groups.
Mixed with legitimate warnings about hard-right white supremacists, they now construct a narrative framework where opposition to war, vaccine mandates, centralized education, or corporate environmental policy is equated with hate or extremism.
bruce wilder
I really worry about the sanity or integrity of people who purport to see no potential problems with mail-in ballots. This is not rocket science and a very few minutes of thought should lead any minimally intelligent person to be skeptical. I rarely see any arguments in favor of mail-in ballots that feature the identification of effective controls, rather than baseless denial.
Why are you even arguing? Democrats have secured control of electoral results in my jurisdiction regardless of whether I personally vote or make any use of the mail.
DMC
Well, we’ve had mail in voting in Oregon for decades and theres never been any problems. Especially in the sparsly populated East of the state, if people had to drive in to the county seat, fewer people would vote. If the Republicans want fewer people to vote, this is definitely a way to do it.