Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 05, 2026

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 05, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

UNhappy birthday, America

Reconsidering the Constitution’s Preamble: The Words that Made Us U.S. — University of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper Series Paper No. 1718

David S. Schwartz, September 25, 2021 [37 Constitutional Commentary 2022]

[TW: I now refer to the GOP and its members as (anti)Republicans and the (anti)Republican Party, because they believe in a philosophy of governance that is repugnant to the original principles of civic republicanism on which USA was founded. The two major principles of civic republicanism are promoting the general welfare, and justice, as explained by Senator Charles Sumner in a speech on February 5 and 6, 1866, The Equal Rights of All: The Great Guaranty and Present Necessity, for the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government; Speech in the Senate, on the proposed Amendment of the Constitution Fixing the Basis of Representation. (Here are excerpts.)

[(Anti)Republicans have openly and explicitly rejected the founding principle of promoting the general welfare. This rejection is centralt to their attacks on the “welfare state.”  See Randall G. Holcombe’s 1992 article arguing that the major improvement of the Confederate Civil War constitution was the elimination of the General Welfare mandate. Holcombe served on Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors in Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign. Also see Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s May, 2011 misinterpretation of James Madison, enumerated powers, and the General Welfare mandate.

[Recovering the meaning of the General Welfare Clause  necessarily includes a rebuttal of conservative / neoconfederate / (anti)Federalist attempt rewrite the Constitution with their pet theories of constitutional originalism and enumerated powers.

[Until they were shocked by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, liberals and leaders of the Democratic Party have been blind to this reactionary project. Democrats and “the left” have committed a grievous error of omission by ignoring the historical record of the fight within USA between republicanism and oligarchy, and rejecting out of hand USA Constitutional law and political history as mere instruments of an oppressive and exploitative capitalist system tainted irremediably by slavery, racism and bigotry. This omission has crippled the ability of “the left” – not to mention the leadership of the Democratic Party – to comprehensively understand how thorough, insidious, and deadly the reactionary project is. They mistakenly believed liberalism was a derivative of civic republicanism instead of seeing how much of liberalism — with its emphasis on “private property” and “individual liberty” — was shaped as an oligarchical response to civic republicanism and the rise of the American republic. Thus they were disastrously outflanked by the Rehnquist / Scalia / Thomas assault on the law and persistent undermining of the principles of civic republicanism.

[Nevertheless, some constitutional scholars and historians — such as those listed in the excerpts below — were quite aware of the reactionary assault on the USA justice system, and working to correct a historical record that had been hijacked by the conservative / neoconfederate / (anti)Federalist project. The liberal / Democratic / “left” response to “the right” is bound to fail until it incorporates the work of these constitutional scholars and historians.

[Conservatives and originalists dismiss the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution as a “stylistic flourish with no operative legal significance,” but “the drafting history of the Preamble, observable by comparing the preambles in the Articles of Confederation, the Committee of Detail draft of the Constitution, and the Committee of Style’s final version, demonstrate that the Framers considered the Preamble to be substantively meaningful.” There is room to debate the exact meaning of the Preamble — “it might be viewed as a rejection of compact theory, as an interpretive guide to the powers granted in the body of the Constitution, or as a source of implied powers.” But concluding that the Preamble is “a legally inoperative flourish has no basis as a matter of text or history.”

[In his 1833 three-volume Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States — long considered the most through and faithful exposition of Constitutional interpretation — Justice Joseph Story wrote that while the Preamble does not confer any “substantive power” on the national government, it does “expound the nature, and extent, and application of the powers actually conferred by the
constitution,” and should be used as a guide to interpreting the Constitution when “the terms of a given power admit of two constructions, the one more restrictive, the other more liberal.” Further, interpretation should be “governed by the intent of the power;” that is, Constitutional interpretation of federal powers should “promote” and not restrict — Story uses the word “defeat”” — that power. Schwartz writes,

“For Story, then, the preamble is an argument against strict construction of federal powers: a statement that the Constitution’s grants of powers are to be liberally construed, to promote such things as “the general welfare.”

[This is, of course, the exact opposite of the doctrines of conservatives and originalists such as William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas,  and Samuel Alito, not to mention the entire (anti)Federalist Society.  Schwartz makes the important point that

The argument that the preamble meant nothing more than a stylistic flourish … was highly congenial to compact theorists, nullifiers, and secessionists.

[We have seen this throughout American history: the “domestic enemies” of the Constitution have tried repeatedly to have the Constitution reinterpreted in ways that limit and even abrogate the powers of the national government. Today, the “domestic enemies” of the Constitution want to dismantle “the administrative state” and allow “free enterprise” and “private property” free reign to foul our environment, alter our climate, exploit our labor, limit our economic prospects, mute our political participation, and surveil our lives.

[Schwartz ends by noting that at the time of ratification, the Anti-Federalists fully understood that the grand objectives proclaimed in the Preamble meant that the federal government was not at all strictly limited in its powers, but pointed to an expansive realm of implied powers, as Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton would argue in his February 1791 report to President Washington on the constitutionality of establishing a national bank.

[Schwartz writes,

The Framers felt they had to clarify that the new government was a truly national government, and moreover, one based on republican principles—that is, authorized by the sovereign people, not by a grand interstate compact.

Significantly, nothing in the Preamble makes “limited enumerated powers” an object, or—pace Madison—an essential characteristic of the national government. The preamble does not list “federalism,” or “state sovereignty” or “balancing national powers with the rights of the states” among its great objects. [p. 10] ….

Federalists and Anti-Federalists during the ratification debates and early republic both understood the Preamble “as reinforcing a theory of sovereignty and national union that expanded the scope of national power, beyond either those powers that were enumerated or those powers that might be aggregated from that enumeration.”  This nationalist reading, channeling the constitutional vision most acutely expressed by James Wilson, was thus a prominent reading—although so read with horror by Anti-Federalists—as Federalists in the early post-ratification years argued that the Preamble was indeed a legitimate source of implied powers. [pp. 11-12]

[There is plenty of history that clearly demonstrates the wild inaccuracy of “originalist” interpretation: Hamilton’s reports, Justice James Wilson’s law lectures in the first years of the republic [and it was actually Wilson who wrote most of the Constitution; Madison is better known because he took notes on the proceedings and later became President], Justice Story’s Commentaries, and more. Never forget that yhe Southern slaveholders insisted the slave states were the true republics in their time. Failure to understand what a republic really is at that time, and repudiate the slaveholders accordingly, led to civil war. ]

The Original Meaning of Enumerated Powers (pdf)

Andrew Coan and David S. Schwartz [Legal Theory Blog]

From the abstract:

The powers of Congress are limited to those enumerated in the Constitution and must not be construed as the equivalent of a general police power. This doctrine of “enumerationism” is the linchpin of a multi-decade conservative assault on the broad conception of federal powers recognized by the Supreme Court since 1937. The loudest champions of enumerationism are originalists. But even critics of originalism generally accept that enumerationism is rooted in the original public meaning of the Constitution. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a stronger—or broader—consensus on an important question of original meaning.

This Article challenges that consensus. Despite its wide acceptance, the originalist case for enumerationism is remarkably weak and undertheorized. At the same time, enumerationists have largely ignored strong arguments that the original public meaning of enumeration was indeterminate. The constitutional text nowhere says that the federal government is limited to its enumerated powers. To the contrary, several provisions—the General Welfare Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the Preamble—could plausibly be read to support a congressional power to address all national problems.

Recovering the Lost General Welfare Clause

David S. Schwartz [63 William & Mary Law Review 857 (2022)]

Abstract:

The General Welfare Clause of Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Constitution enumerates a power to “provide for the common defense and general welfare.” A literal interpretation of this clause (“the general welfare interpretation”) would authorize Congress to legislate for any national purpose, and therefore to address all national problems— for example, the COVID-19 pandemic—in ways that would be precluded under the prevailing understanding of limited enumerated powers. But conventional doctrine rejects the general welfare interpretation and construes the General Welfare Clause to confer the so-called “Spending Power,” a power only to spend, but not to regulate, for national purposes.

This Article argues that both the text and the drafting history of the General Welfare Clause support reading it as a power to regulate on all national problems, such as environmental degradation, violence against women, and pandemic disease. It is only our superficial ideological commitment to enumerationism—the doctrine of limited enumerated powers—that causes us to depart from the most evident textual interpretation of the General Welfare Clause. Recovering the lost General Welfare Clause is particularly important at this moment in constitutional history, when a conservative and supposedly originalist Supreme Court is poised to greatly constrict federal power to respond to pressing national problems in service of a tendentious and badly one-sided account of Founding Era views on federalism….

[p. 867] …Only after the repeated electoral triumphs of Jeffersonian Republicanism beginning in 1800-1801 did enumerationism become entrenched as constitutional dogma.  Since the New Deal revolution in 1937, our constitutional order has continued to pay lip service to enumerationism, while making every effort to work around it. Most often, we try to shoehorn regulatory problems into the Commerce Clause….

[p. 870 …Moreover, limited enumerated powers is not even a second-best mode of enforcing federalism limits. It is at best a third- or fourth-best mode.  The Framers themselves apparently believed that process limits on legislation—such as a two-house legislature and a presidential veto—were more effective than “parchment
barriers” in the form of specified limits.  But if paper barriers were desirable, then a better way to protect reserved state powers would be to enumerate limitations, rather than powers—a point that the Framers apparently understood, for example, in enumerating limits on Congress’s powers in Article I, Section 9.42

[p. 880] …The drafters of the 1861 Confederate Constitution reworked Clause 1 to obviate a general welfare interpretation: “To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts,
and excises, for revenue necessary to pay the debts, provide for the common defence, and carry on the government of the Confederate States.”….

[pp. 887-888] The enumeration in Article I, Section 8, originated with the Committee
of Detail draft, reported to the full Constitutional Convention on August 6, 1787.  The Committee’s charge was to write up the numerous resolutions approved by the Convention in the form of a draft constitution… The resolution conforms to one of the primary purposes of calling the Constitutional Convention in the first place: to add legislative powers to what the Confederation Congress possessed.130 The Articles of Confederation had conferred several nontrivial powers on the Union, including powers to declare war, conduct certain foreign affairs functions, “appoint  maritime and prize courts, coin money, fix the standards of weights and measures, regulate commerce and relations with Indian tribes, “establish[ ]” or “regulat[e ]” post offices, and incur debt. Passing these on to the new national government
was uncontroversial, and was approved unanimously.  The “legislate in all cases” language following the semicolon was somewhat more controversial, but was nevertheless approved on July 17 by a solid 8-2 vote of the state delegations present…. The conventional view that the enumeration is exhaustive requires explaining away the Resolution 6 instruction to authorize Congress to legislate “in all

How US Slave Interests Stifled US Monetary and Banking Policy Until 1913

Michael Hudson, July 4, 2026 [Naked Capitalism]

The main aim of the slave states was to block federal power – via the rule of the democratic majority – to take measures to limit or end slavery, and to prevent its westward expansion. From the very beginning, the southern slave states insisted on the national government relinquishing as much power to the states as possible – and to give them the power to block federal actions binding on the entire United States.

This anti-federal policy set the Southern states at odds with the North and West. The fear that the northern population would increase and become more urban, electing candidates for Congress, the Senate and the Presidency whose policies would be adverse to that of the slave states.

The result was an opposition to tariff protection, internal improvements, and a national bank and related commercial banking to provide credit for industrial investment and employment. That was the program of Henry Clay and the Whigs. To the South, it threatened to increase the population of northern states, which threatened to back abolitionist policies.

The Southern slave states advocated limiting money and credit to gold and silver coinage precisely to impose financial austerity. The aim was to starve the economy of credit by blocking federal tax and tariff collection from being circulated back into the economy to provide a basis for bank credit.

The South viewed bank credit as financing industrial investment and urban employment. That threatened to raise the price of grain that plantation owners had to pay to feed their slaves. The aim was to make their cotton and other plantation exports less expensive and hence more competitive in foreign markets.

The first fight over monetary policy erupted in 1791 when the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton (1789-1795) proposed to establish a government mint and created the First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia. The First Bank was not a central bank and did not hold the Treasury’s reserves, but was merely a national bank permitted to establish branches across state lines. But the anti-Federalist president Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) and his fellow Virginian slave-owning successor James Madison (fourth U.S. president, 1809-1817) urged that monetary functions should be left to the states….

When a president says the quiet part out loud

Richard Murphy, July 05, 2026 [Funding the Future]

Donald Trump said things at an event to mark the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence that deserve attention.

Amongst his many partisan claims at an event that should have been anything but that, he argued that the US Congress should abolish the filibuster so that they could pass what he calls the SAVE America Act, which has the deliberate intention of making it harder to vote in the USA. If they did so, he claimed, Republicans would “not lose an election for a hundred years.”

At the same time, he portrayed the Democratic Party as little more than a vehicle for communists, criminals, illegal immigrants and people who do not want to work.

The remarkable thing was not the language about communists. American, and most especially Republican, politics has a long history of that sort of accusation, most notably during the 1950s McCarthyite era. I think most people in the US – the MAGA apart – realise this and can appreciate just how absurd these claims are.

What was most egregious was Trump’s claim that changing the rules of the electoral system could ensure that one party remained in office for a century at a time when the US is supposedly celebrating 250 years as a multi-party democracy, during which period it has stood up for its version of democracy as the core feature of the American way of life.

To contextualise that, most people would agree that the purpose of democracy is not to guarantee that the right of any one group of people to win elections. It is to ensure that governments always know they can lose them.

That uncertainty is not a flaw in democracy. It is a defining characteristic that governments know that they survive only with the continuing consent of the people who put them in power. If they fail that continuing support, democracy ensures that the public has the right to dismiss them. Every democratic election is, then, a reminder that power is held on trust, and never owned.

In that case, the moment a government begins designing a system of power intended to prevent itself from losing office, as Trump says he is doing,  something fundamental changes. Government no longer exists to serve the people. Instead, the people begin to exist to sustain the government, at least in that government’s view. And this, of course, is what fascism is all about, and that is why Trump’s remarks matter.

Whether or not his proposed legislation could actually achieve what Trump claims is almost beside the point in that case. He has explained what success looks like from his perspective. His definition of success is not in persuading voters to support Republicans for the next hundred years. He thinks success comes from changing the system so that Republicans do not, and maybe cannot, lose for the next hundred years. Those are very different ambitions….

My Front-Row Seat to the Slow Death of the Freedom of Information Act – I file FOIA requests for a living, and the landmark law—which turns 60 this week—is near a breaking point.

Ian Head, July 3, 2026 [The New Republic]

Trump not violating any law

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

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

Letters from an American, June 30, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, Jul 01, 2026

[Useful summary of Trump’s attempts to end Constitutional birthright citizenship, beginning with the executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” his first day back in office.]

Why Republicans Keep Calling for the End of Birthright Citizenship

Martha S. Jones, July 2, 2023 [The Atlantic]

Calls to undo birthright, though couched in terms of immigration reform, ultimately aim to undo a key precept of our democracy: equitable access to citizenship. Birthright sets an even bar when it comes to being a citizen—all those born here are subject to the same threshold test, no matter whom they descended from. It ensures that, for those born in the United States, citizenship will not be conferred depending on their politics, race, faith, culture, gender, or sexuality. Birthright safeguards those born here from political leaders who would mete out citizenship as a reward or withhold it as a punishment.

The wielding of citizenship as a weapon is precisely what the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to prevent. In 1868, birthright undid the Dred Scott decision. It ensured that the right of Black Americans to belong to this nation was neither open to debate nor susceptible to shifting political whims. Since its ratification, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed the belonging of some of the most vulnerable among us, including generations of children born to immigrant parents. It has protected marginalized, despised, and unpopular people who, when born here, do not need to fear exile or banishment. Birthright citizenship has always been a solution rather than a problem, and our democracy depends on it remaining just that.

Dissenting Conservative Justices Signal that Ending Birthright Citizenship Is Their Movement’s Next Goal

Josh Kovensky, June 30, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]

Is This the Most Corrupt Administration Ever?

Martin Pengelly, June 29, 2026 [Zeteo]

The [New York] Times headline was stark: “Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.” The lede described how last year Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick secured a deal with the president of Kazakhstan to give “a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips, and other critical goods.”

“Within weeks,” the Times’s Eric Lipton and Paul Sonne wrote, a firm part-owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump joined with partners to take a 20% stake in “a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project.” Lipton and Sonne also noted how Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment company controlled by the Lutnick family and overseen by the commerce secretary’s sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, worked to raise $210 million in capital for an entity related to the deal, work that would “typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.”

In November, six days after the Trump boys bought in, the U.S.-Kazakh deal was signed. It was just the tip of the iceberg. One or both of the Trumps and Lutnicks “have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project,” the Times said, citing federal filings.

“All 14 of these companies have either benefited directly from offers of financial assistance from the Trump administration, or have pending permit applications before the Commerce Department, which Mr. Lutnick oversees, the Times found. The total amount of federal funding that the Trump administration has provided or is considering providing to the companies exceeds $8.9 billion, according to public statements by the companies and federal government.”

Trump bought up to $5M in Axon stock before ICE contract with Taser specifications

[Drop Site Daily, June 29, 2026]

Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million in Axon Enterprise stock on February 10, two weeks before ICE posted a notice seeking roughly 17,800 Tasers with specifications that procurement experts and policing analysts told CNBC matched only Axon products.

Trump’s second-term windfall: $1.4B in crypto earnings

[Politico, via The Big Picture, July 02, 2026]

The president’s latest financial disclosure underscores how central the cryptocurrency industry has become to his business empire. Disclosures reveal a staggering crypto haul. The through-line of this week’s reads: the presidency as a revenue center.

Trump’s Moneymaking Run: Unrivaled in Presidential History

[New York Times, via The Big Picture, July 02, 2026]

The Times tallies the scale of presidential self-enrichment against the historical record. Read it with this week’s crypto and mining-deal stories.

Abbott Laboratories was investigated for poisoning babies. After a $500,000 donation, Trump let them off the hook.

[More Perfect Union, June 29, 2026]

Letters from an American, June 27, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, June 28, 2026

…But, as Scherer discovered, that was a lie. He examined National Park Service budget documents showing that the walkway replacement cost taxpayers $689,232, all part of a $1.3 million project that includes new hardware for nearby doors. Last year, Scherer reports, the National Park Service spent $347,503 to replace the stucco on the colonnade wall so Trump could hang pictures of the U.S. presidents alongside plaques featuring his own opinions of them. Documents say the project was a “Rush project at request of POTUS.”

Scherer explains that Trump has redirected taxpayer money from national parks around the country to his own projects, leaving the parks unable to make needed repairs or hire staff. Expected funding for more than 900 Park Service projects never arrived—including $424,000 to replace a guardrail on the edge of a cliff in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park that National Park Service employees identified as “a significant safety hazard for visitors.” For some parks, nearly 70% of approved funds have been pulled back.

Trump has also pulled National Park Service staff to Washington, D.C., for his Freedom 250 events, a crisis because the Park Service has lost almost a quarter of its staff since he took office. In his 2027 budget, Trump calls for cutting staff by another 3,967 full-time employees, or 31%.

That budget also asked for another $10 billion to beautify Washington, a sum that Scherer notes is nearly eight times as large as all the money spent on National Park Service projects in 2025. The Senate Appropriations Committee stripped that request out of its marked-up version of the president’s budget….

Strategic Political Economy

Why are a record number of American adults living with their parents?

[RT, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2026]

How Many People Have Ever Lived in the United States? 

Davis Fetz [via Naked Capitalism 07-04-2026]

For most of the country’s history, demographic record-keeping was unfortunately far from complete, especially when it came to births. But the census has counted the population since 1790, and combining those counts with historical birth-rate estimates and immigration records produces a defensible number: about 642 million people have lived in the United States since it became independent in 1776. A little over half of them, about 53 percent, are alive today. And of the 546 million children born in the United States, roughly one in eleven, some 49 million, died before reaching the age of five. Had those same children been born under today’s conditions, only about three million would have died so young.

Global power shift

Global hydropower outlook report puts China at the head of the pack

SCMP, via Naked Capitalism 06-28-2026]

Kill Chain Dominance: China’s is Producing More ‘Flying Radar’ Systems Than the World Combined Under the KJ-500 Program

[Military Watch Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 06-28-2026]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Explaining the Numbers in Gaza

Karen Kwaitkowski [via Naked Capitalism 07-04-2026]

[Yves Smith comments: “Important. A well-supported analysis that concludes that “well over a million” Gazans have died in Israel’s genocide.”]

Without Causes 

[New Left Review, via Naked Capitalism 07-03-2026]

[An important response to Hillary’s recent argument in the Financial Times, “The world may not like Trump’s Gaza plan — but there is no alternative.”]

Felonomics

Musk demanded proof people died from USAID cuts. He got it — and lost it. 

Judd Legum [via Naked Capitalism 07-04-2026]

‘Republicans Created This Crisis on Purpose’: Federal Data Shows ACA Enrollment Plunging

[Common Dreams]

Number of parents worried about “putting food on the table” soars

[Newsweek, via Naked Capitalism 06-29-2026]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

The ‘Vibecession’ Is Over. The ‘Permacession’ Is Here.

The Atlantic, via The Big Picture, July 03, 2026]

The gap between the data and the mood hardens into something more permanent. A sharp framing of why good numbers aren’t lifting spirits.

The US is better off than it was in 1976. So why does it feel worse?

[Vox, via The Big Picture, July 03, 2026]

America’s 250th birthday feels bleak. The numbers tell a different story. A bicentennial-to-now ledger that complicates the declinist mood. More fuel for the great why-are-we-so-grumpy debate.

[TW: The professional class stubbornly clings to the mistaken view that the economy is doing so fine, because they are persoanlly doing fine. Except there’s hard, cold reality, which is partly captured in the next few links.]

The world added nearly a million new millionaires in 2025 — but most people got poorer

[Quartz, via The Big Picture, July 03, 2026]

Global personal wealth rose 10.8% last year, the fastest pace in years, yet median wealth fell in most markets.

We Crunched the Data: There’s a Grocery Price Emergency in America 

Lael Brainard and Rohit Chopra [New York Times, via The Big Picture, July 02, 2026]

[And then there is this brilliant analysis of the fakery and errors which badly distort official economic statistics. This is one of the most important articles of the past few years. Anyone you know who are befuddled by the sour mood of so many Americans – such as most operatives and activists in the Democratic Party – should be cajoled into reading this article.]

[Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong.

Eugene Ludwig, 02/11/2025 [Politico]

Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation rate falls to lowest in 50 years, outside of Covid era 

[CNB, via Naked Capitalism 07-03-2026]

Requiem for America on the Fourth of July – The con of neoliberalism has gutted our democracy and paved the way for fascism.

Chris Hedges, July 03, 2026

Health care crisis

Millions Lose ACA Coverage After Trump and Republicans Let Subsidies Expire 

[The Intellectualist, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2026]

Predatory finance

Mega takeovers drive record $2.8tn in dealmaking

[Financial Times, via The Big Picture, July 02, 2026]

The finance curse is devouring the UK 

[LFF, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2026]

The Trillion-Dollar Borrowing Binge Lifting the Stock Market to Risky Heights 

[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2026]

Big oil’s secretive trading arms are having an extraordinary year 

[Economist, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2026]

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Crime Pays: The Egg Bandits Made A Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing 

Matt Stoller, July 01, 2026 [BIG]

Dismissals of Unfair Labor Practice Charges Have Surged Under Trump 

[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 07-02-2026]

Visa and Mastercard: The Original Gangsters of Electronic Collusion

[The Sling, via The Big Picture, June 28, 2026]

A pointed antitrust argument against the payments duopoly that taxes every swipe. The swipe-fee fight, made readable. Pending legislation would force Visa and Mastercard to compete for merchant business and crack the cartel they’ve formed with banks.

Restoring balance

A Wildly Undervalued Tool For Restoring U.S. Democracy – Uncapping the U.S. House is very achievable and incredibly impactful.

Christopher Armitage, June 29, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

Chinese breakthrough could make desalinated seawater cheaper than bottled water 

[Independent, via Naked Capitalism 07-01-2026]

China’s first AI-powered cancer vaccine production line set to launch in Beijing

Julie Zhang, 29 Jun 2026 [South China Morning Post]

IBM Says It Can Fit Nearly 100 Billion Transistors On a Chip

[ZDNet, via Naked Capitalism 07-01-2026]

Disrupting mainstream economics

What is economics? A logical explanation

Richard Murphy, June 29, 2026 [Funding the Future]

1. If every human being has needs that cannot be met alone, then every human being depends upon relationships with others.

2. If people depend upon one another to survive and flourish, then every society must organise those relationships.

3. If economics studies how societies organise themselves, then economics is the study of how societies manage the relationships on which life depends.

4. If every person possesses unique but finite potential, then society should seek to create relationships that help each person realise that potential.

5. If people flourish when they can realise their potential, then the purpose of an economy is to create the conditions in which this is possible.

6. If all human life depends upon the natural world, then every economy depends upon its relationship with nature.

7. If the natural world provides the energy, materials and ecological systems on which life depends, then no economy can exist independently of nature.

8. If the people, relationships, knowledge, institutions, infrastructure and natural systems within a society embody the capacity to meet need and create future wellbeing, then that capacity is its societal capital.

9. If societal capital is the total productive, caring, creative and regenerative capacity embodied within a society, then the purpose of economic activity is to create, maintain, renew and wisely use that capital….

31. If measures such as GDP record flows of economic activity but ignore changes in societal capital, then they cannot by themselves define economic success.

32. If the purpose of an economy is to create, maintain, renew and wisely use societal capital so that everyone can realise as much of their finite potential as possible within planetary limits, then economics is the study of how societies manage the relationships that make this possible….

This understanding of economics also suggests a different accounting framework.

Conventional economics is primarily concerned with measuring flows of money, income and production. It pays much less attention to the underlying capacity that those flows create, maintain, restore or destroy.

This framework begins with a different question. It asks how society’s capacity to meet needs and enable people to realise their potential changes through time.

That capacity is what I have called societal capital. It is the productive, caring, creative and regenerative capacity embodied in the people, relationships, institutions and natural systems of a society.

Disrupting mainstream politics

How Newt Gingrich destroyed the ability of the Democratic Party – and the nation – to do policy: Why Wall Street Isn’t Yet Afraid of the Left

Matt Stoller, June 28, 2026 [BIG]

… Right now, Russ Vought, Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, is operating creatively and effectively to do deeply malevolent things. He thought very hard about how to run budgets to organize the government. But there’s basically no analogue on the left, little capacity to govern. And that’s why Mamdani, despite a mandate for significant change, can’t go as far as he otherwise might. What I want to do is trace where this gap came from, and pose some suggestions on how to address it….

In 1995, the Republican Party took control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Led by Newt Gingrich and a small group of right-wing politicians who called themselves “Jihadists,” these men sought to revamp a legislative chamber held by the Democrats since 1949. Though the Reagan era had been conservative, no one in America had experienced an outright House Republican majority for forty-six years….

In 1995, his goal wasn’t just to pass legislation, but to fundamentally re-gear Congress so it could no longer serve as the brains for the Democratic Party, as it had for the last half century. That was an institutional task, and he set about restructuring the institutions.

First to go was the Office of Technology Assessment, a nonpartisan think tank that conducted long-term studies on important scientific and engineering topics, like how to decommission the Space Shuttle or early warnings on climate change. Gingrich also slashed Congressional staff by a third, eliminated dozens of subcommittees, and killed budgets for the legislative service organizations that helped specific groups of members, like the Black Caucus, the Caucus on Women’s Issues, the Environment and Energy Study Conference, and so forth. Most importantly, the Democratic Study Group, a network of staff and members who organized the rhythm of the House, disappeared….

The effect was revolutionary. From 1949 to 1995, there was immense institutional knowledge within Congress. There were staffers who know everything there was to know about the Mississippi River and could go toe-to-toe with the Army Corps of Engineers on reclamation projects. There were dozens of staff who understood the Post Office. The Antitrust Subcommittee had a swath of antitrust lawyers who could investigate industries and develop litigation….

And the culture changed, as the Democratic Party and liberal elites became dependent on the Clinton White House. The West Wing created a template for the Democratic insider, which was someone who pretended to be nerdy and detail-oriented, but was in fact just a political operative with an Ivy League degree. Pretty soon, the only way anyone could think about governing was through the lens of deference to fake experts, whether economist, pollster, or corporate lawyer.

Anyone who knew anything about governance, and wanted to act using public power, was perceived to be some sort of dirty hippie loser. Here’s a clip from The West Wing demonstrating the cultural attitude, where a main character sneeringly mocks protesters against globalization. Corporate trade agreements, he argues, bring world peace….

The Democrats used to have a ready army of people who knew things, funded by the Federal dollars. After 1995, they could only get competent people from big corporate law firms or people otherwise skilled at raising money from the wealthy.

In 2006, when Nancy Pelosi led the Democrats to finally take back the House of Representatives, she promised a lot. But she did not rebuild the committees, or OTS, or the legislative service organizations. It turns out, Pelosi realized, centralizing power in her hands, as Gingrich had, made her job a lot easier. The Democrats had decided that living in Newt Gingrich’s world was quite comfy.

The consequences for governance were catastrophic. Almost immediately, Pelosi’s new majority faced a financial crisis. But from 2007-2011, the Financial Services Committee in the House, run by Pelosi-ally Barney Frank, did not issue a single subpoena. It did not have access to a single Bloomberg terminal. And Frank actually yelled at the bailout inspector general, Neil Barofsky, when he published reports revealing new and useful information about foreclosures and banks. What eventually became Dodd-Frank was written by Goldman Sachs lobbyists, passed to the Fed, to Treasury, and then to Barney Frank. Individual members did their best to strengthen it, but there just wasn’t much expertise or capacity to do that.

Similarly, when Barack Obama won the Presidency, the Democrats did not rebuild governing capacity….

Without knowledge or experience, it’s impossible to govern. And that became obvious during the crisis of inflation that ultimately destroyed the Biden administration. When prices began spiking, there was simply no capacity to even assess what was happening. Democrats were hearing from their political operatives that voters were in a rage, but their economists were telling them inflation had come down. So they were paralyzed. They simply had no way to rebut their experts, who were clearly wrong.

And this dynamic brought Trump into office. During her only debate against Trump, Kamala Harris couldn’t name anything specific she’d do differently about inflation. Her main argument was the “best economists in our country,” citing 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists, the Wharton School, and Goldman Sachs, preferred her plan to Trump’s. For thirty years, Democrats had deferred their understanding of money, power, and business to a cloistered class of economists and academics. When these experts are wrong or unsure, the Democratic Party was unable to govern.

And that gets to Mamdani. From 2025 onward, the populist left or democratic socialists, however you want to frame it, have diagnosed the problem of the Democratic Party as being corrupt, too in thrall to corporate influence or insufficiently dedicated to a certain way of winning elections. And those critiques are accurate, insofar as they go. However, there is still little intellectual culture, no ability to independently assess information, and little respect for what Gingrich did to lobotomize the left and our public institutions.

For example, there simply is no left-wing vision of what to do about the Federal Reserve. No one talks about it, few even notice it exists. To the extent it matters, it’s either “independence is great” or “capitalism is bad,” both of which are different flavors of not having done work. Similarly, there is no left-wing view of how to organize Google, or the U.S. military. The massive centers of power in America, from Wall Street to big tech to military spending, are mostly absent from any political discourse.

Is there anyone on the left who is thinking about how to use OMB? Of course not. Is there anyone who knows trains, or airline regulation, or Pentagon procurement? No….

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Ford’s AI Hiccups Lead Carmaker to Rehire ‘Gray Beard’ Engineers 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 07-01-2026]

County With 37 Data Centers Asks Schools To ‘Conserve Electricity’

[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 07-01-2026]

On June 26, the County Manager of Henrico County, Virginia [adjacent north to Richmond], John Vithoulkas, sent an email to thousands of county employees asking them to help the local government conserve electricity. “Beginning July 1^st, the rate we pay for electricity used in all Henrico County government and school facilities will increase dramatically — by 25%, increasing costs by an estimated $5 million next fiscal year. We anticipate more rate increases for electricity in the years ahead,” a copy of the email obtained by 404 Media said (emphasis his).

Climate and environmental crises

Warming Skies Have Triggered a New Era of Unpredictable Storms 

[Atmos, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2026]

Ocean warming above 1.5°C triggered year-round marine disruption across globe, study shows 

[PhysOrg, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2026]

‘This is terrifying’: The Colorado River, a lifeline for seven states, is drying up at its source

[Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2026]

Democrats’ political malpractice

You Can’t Solve Half a Problem – The moderate’s delusion.

Hamilton Nolan, July 03, 2026 [How Things Work]

… the philosophy of moderates, their approach to politics, only works if the people on the other side are moderates as well. Theirs is a game with intelligible rules played by people who live in horror of being perceived as extremists. When a moderate comes up against someone whose political beliefs are stronger than their beliefs in decorum, the moderates get destroyed. They get yanked towards their opponents position due to their own abhorrence of sweat, of conflict. If moderates had deep ethical beliefs, they would recognize the need to change their strategy when their opponents grew more radical. Sadly, the moderate mind, lulled into paralysis by the air-conditioned air of Washington, DC conference rooms, always seems unable to rouse itself to evolve past the rudimentary epoch of polite political jousting.

Americans today are living in the socioeconomic rubble left by the failure of the incrementalists. The Democratic Party, dazzled by the passing success of Clintonian triangulation theory, has been institutionally unable to recognize that that era has passed, and a new and more brutal period of political war has settled upon us. As a result, we have all been subjected to the humiliating spectacle of mainstream liberal institutionalists harrumphing about norms as an increasingly fascist Republican Party gleefully smashes up all of their hallowed traditions with hammers. The destruction of the Trump era, of course, does not affect the material lives of Democratic political leaders one bit. They suffer only mild chagrin. Regular people pay a higher price.

The thing that Democrats, as a party, have still not yet accepted is that they have to solve the problems. Incrementalism, by definition, solves only part of a problem, which to the regular people who suffer the genuine consequences is the same as not solving the problem. What does this mean, concretely? It means that you need to give people decent health care that they can afford, rather than boasting about taking minor steps down the long road towards that goal. It means that you must give people wages that they can live on, rather than boasting about small economic gains that still leave them too broke. It means that you must attack the power of billionaires until the billionaires do not have too much power any more, rather than advocating for modest tax increases that leave an oligarchy substantially in place. It means you have to expand the Supreme Court and put in term limits and end the antidemocratic unaccountability of the institution, rather than hoping that the inherent robustness of our storied institutions will somehow reassert itself in time to save the day….

… What is propelling the popularity of the socialists in certain districts is less an upswell in Marx-reading and more the fact that these candidates are touting both policy positions and a fighting attitude that would solve the problems of the people. Medicare for All solves a problem; incremental improvements to Obamacare do not. Aggressive wealth taxes combined with aggressive promotion of mass unionization solve a problem; minor tax increases on the rich and “business and workers can thrive together” platitudes do not. Expanding the Supreme Court and imposing term limits on justices solves a problem; calling on the next Democratic president to appoint someone liberal does not. This list can go on and on and on. The point is that in each of these cases, the left-most position is the one that would actually make a significant positive material impact on the macro-level problem, whereas the incremental approach would mitigate the underlying problem to such a small extent that the average person could be forgiven for not perceiving the change at all. Instead of thinking of the differing approaches to these issues on a left-to-right or radical-to-conservative axis, it can be helpful sometimes to just ask: “What would it take to actually solve this problem [?]

…. Institutionalists who imagine that they are playing a civilized game with honorable peers are neither savvy nor realistic when they are actually facing religious zealots, corrupt strongmen, gutter racists, and fascists whose goal is to crush their opposition by any means. Achieving your political ends means, first, accurately assessing who your opposition is and what it will take to overcome them. That assessment will naturally lead you to more radical measures as your opponents themselves grow more vicious. An unwillingness to accept this will leave you impotent, as today’s Democratic Party institutionalists are.

Taxing Elon Musk’s wealth from a trillion dollars to $900 billion will not alter the fact that a small handful of ultra-rich oligarchs hold wealth and power that exceeds that of the majority of America’s citizens combined. No. You need to relocate enough wealth and power from the oligarchs to the public that the underlying problem is solved. What is the point of saying “We’ll start with a little, and then down the road we’ll get more”? You’ll never get more. You will get beaten, because you did not attack your opponent with enough force to stop him from coming back and beating you. Moderates seem not to comprehend that it takes roughly the same amount of political capital to do a little bit of good as it takes to do a lot of good. It is almost as hard to raise taxes on billionaires by 5% as it is to raise taxes on them by 90%, because it is the direction that generates the opposition, more than the magnitude. Billionaires are going to fight against you raising their taxes, period. If you’re going to have the fight, it might as well be over a change that would, if you win, solve the problem. Moderates are shocked when they can’t mobilize Americans over policies that would not meaningfully change their lives for the better….

Establishment Democrats Are Embracing Loserdom – Some centrists would rather have Trump triumph than forge an alliance with the left.

Jeet Heer, June 29, 2026 [The Nation]

… CNN reports, “One Democratic lawmaker sitting in a battleground district told CNN that they are so concerned about the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America that they have recently begun having serious conversations with donors about leaving the party altogether.”

James Carville, former campaign advisor to Bill Clinton, expressed the same idea in more florid terms. On a podcast, Carville ranted about Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Mamdani-backed DSA candidate who won a congressional primary on Tuesday. Carville cited some extreme positions the candidate took when younger (such as criticizing interracial marriage), which she has since disavowed. Despite his own constantly stated distaste for purity tests, Carville made no allowances for Avila Chevalier changing her mind. Instead, he said,

“Lady, I ain’t in the same party as you. I’m sorry. I’m just not. And I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘s’ word: schism. I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. We’re a big tent.’ And there’s just some shit I can’t be in the same tent with.”

Carville went on to say that Democrats should “negotiate the terms of a schism” with DSA. In another interview, he insisted that if Avila Chevalier wins her seat, Democrats “should not seat her in the caucus. Her views are totally against anything that any Democrat has. We believe in pluralism.” Carville seems not to be aware of the irony of praising pluralism while calling for a purge.

Writing in more measured terms, Jaimie Harrison, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, also pushed for a schism in a post on X.com….

Resistance

Inside the Luddite Festival Harnessing Gen Z’s Rage Against Big Tech

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 07-04-2026]

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

It’s Been Two Years Since the Supreme Court Made Homelessness a Crime. The Result Speaks for Itself.

[Slate, via Naked Capitalism 06-28-2026]

The South Rises Again

A Citizen’s Guide to Ken Paxton

[Popular Information, via The Big Picture, June 28, 2026]

Paxton’s victory was even more impressive considering the ethical controversies that have plagued his tenure as an elected official. As Attorney General, Paxton has been indicted on felony securities fraud charges, investigated by the SEC, impeached by the Texas House, and sued by the State Bar of Texas for professional misconduct. He was repeatedly accused of using his government position for personal gain — including by members of his staff. Judd Legum assembles the rap sheet on the Texas AG turned Senate hopeful. Dense, sourced, and the kind of accountability reporting that travels.

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Beyond the Headlines: The Supreme Court’s Final Decisions

Joyce Vance, June 30, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

Campaign Finance, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission: Read the opinion here. Justice Kavanaugh wrote the opinion, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett. Justice Kagan wrote the dissent, which Justices Sotomayor and Jackson joined.

Like Citizens United, this is a First Amendment case. The majority held that a federal law that limits the amount of money political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate for federal office violates the First Amendment. To get there, the Court had to reverse yet another longstanding precedent. That’s becoming commonplace with the Roberts Court.

In 2001, the Court ruled the other way in a Colorado case. Justice Kavanaugh wrote it had been “rejected by subsequent cases and is no longer good law.” And just like that, at the whim of the majority, the law, apparently, can change.

Justice Kagan writes in the dissent that the majority “jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity.” She adds later that “To count on disclosure to prevent corruption is as much as to give up on the goal itself. Which is, sad to say, what this Court does today.”

Shortly after Marc Elias argued this case in December, he was our guest on Five Questions, and I asked him about it:

• Joyce: You argued a campaign finance case before SCOTUS in December, that we’ve been following here. How, if at all, given that it could be decided as late as the first week in July, are you expecting that case to impact this election, and what about future ones?
• Marc: The case, NRSC v. FEC, was brought by Republicans to challenge one of the last remaining limits on money in politics: the restrictions on coordinated spending between political parties and candidates. I represented Democratic committees that intervened to defend the coordinated expenditure limits after Trump’s Department of Justice broke with decades of precedent and refused to defend this cornerstone of our campaign finance system. A law that both Democratic and Republican administrations had long defended was suddenly deemed unconstitutional by the Trump Administration.

If the Court strikes down these limits, wealthy donors could circumvent individual contribution caps by routing massive donations through party committees that can coordinate directly with candidates. Political parties would become mere paymasters to settle invoices from campaign vendors. It would trigger a massive upheaval of our campaign finance system, right as the midterm campaigns are ramping up. It would further empower wealthy donors while threatening to drown out the grassroots activists that often power Democratic campaigns through small-dollar contributions.

As if the world post-Citizens United didn’t already stack the deck in favor of the wealthy and powerful, now it gets worse. None of this benefits everyday Americans who don’t have millions of dollars to throw at candidates.

[TW: I think these decisions by the extremists on the Supreme Court will finally be overthrown and discarded once we return to the principles of civic republicanism, one of which is a suspicion of and hostility to concentrations of wealth, and the tendency of concentrations of wealth to amass political power and bend the powers of government to their own ends. For example, self-interest should be subordinated to the General Welfare.]

The Spoils System Returns – Conservative Legal Minds Call It “Original Intent”

Mike Brock, June 29, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

The Supreme Court of the United States this morning, by a 6-3 vote along the only line that matters anymore, overturned a ninety-one-year-old precedent and dismantled the constitutional settlement that has governed the American executive branch since the assassination of James A. Garfield. The case is Trump v. Slaughter. The precedent destroyed is Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. The statutory regime nullified is, in effect, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and everything that grew from it — every congressional protection for an independent commissioner, every for-cause removal restriction, every attempt by the legislative branch over a hundred and forty-three years to insulate the operations of the federal government from the personal whims of the man sitting at the desk in the Oval Office….

John Yoo took a victory lap on television. “This decision is, perhaps, the most important decision about the operation of the government since 1935,” he said. “All those agencies were designed by Congress to be outside the president’s control, and the court says clearly that is not consistent with the vesting by the Founders of the executive power only in the president.” Yoo’s theory of the executive is the same theory it has always been. It is the theory he wrote into the legal memoranda that authorized the United States government to torture prisoners in defiance of the Geneva Conventions — the theory that the Vesting Clause is a constitutional solvent that dissolves every statutory, treaty-based, and common-law restraint on the personal will of the president….

Letters from an American, June 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, June 30, 2026

“To show the importance of the Slaughter Case, 90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed!” President Donald J. Trump wrote this afternoon. He continued: “Today’s Historic Slaughter Decision by the Supreme Court is the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years. Such a Monumental Ruling at such an important time!”

AGENCY INDEPENDENCE IN ONE AGENCY: HUMPHREY’S EXECUTOR IS COWERING IN THE BASEMENT OF THE ECCLES BUILDING 

Nathan Tankus, July 2, 2026 [Notes on the Crises]

So, here we are. The unitary executive theory is now the official law of the land in the United States of America. Every administrative agency is now supposed to be a direct conduit for the president’s will. Any government employee should be removable by the president. Well…except for a few employees. (We’ll get back to that in a moment. )) I’ve been warning about the coming imposition of unitary executive theory since early on last year. My first coverage of the Trump administration’s attack on Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook emphasized that Humphrey’s Executor was on the chopping block because of the right wing legal world’s infatuation with unitary executive theory….

The 6 justices in the majority are quite clear that they are simply killing 90 year old precedent wholesale:

“Its powers, however, do not belong to the President or his appointees alone; they instead belong to five Commissioners, each of whom serves for seven years and may be removed by the President only “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” 38 Stat. 718, 15 U. S. C. §41. We hold that such protection from removal is contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution. […] If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.”

American Necrocracy: How the U.S. Government Became a Death Creator

Jim Stewartson, July 01, 2026 [MindWar]

Trump vs. Slaughter—Invalidated Humphrey’s Executor, 1935, which ruled that Congress can limit a president’s power to fire certain government officials. This means that Trump can replace leaders, commissioners, and boards at these agencies:

• Federal Trade Commission
• National Labor Relations Board
• Federal Communications Commission
• Securities and Exchange Commission
• Federal Election Commission
• Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
• Consumer Product Safety Commission
• Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board
• Merit Systems Protection Board
• Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
• Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission

Who might Trump put in charge of nukes, or hazardous chemicals, or workplace safety? This is a recipe for actual national disaster, and another way for the necrocracy to increase its kill count: by replacing governance with grift, patronage, and racial malice….

Civic republicanism

Benjamin Franklin, Champion of the Wealth Tax

Harold Meyerson, July 03, 2026 [The American Prospect]

In December of 1783, shortly after he’d negotiated and signed the peace treaty with Britain in which Britain relinquished its claim to the 13 united states, Franklin wrote a letter to his fellow Founding Father Robert Morris in which he assessed the rival claims of taxpayers to their property and the government’s power to tax or even expropriate it:

“All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.”

[TW: This is completely opposite to John Locke’s veneration of property rights. Franklin is only echoing the English countryman republicans of the 1600s, such as Algernon Sydney, James Harrington, and John Milton. But generations of American elites have been miseducated with the wildly misleading myth that the American republic was founded on the ideas of Locke and Adam Smith. ]

“Great National Discussion”: The Discourse of Politics in 1787 

[TW: Republicanism As Civic Humanism]

Isaac Kramnick [The William and Mary Quarterly, Jan., 1988, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Jan., 1988), pp. 3-32]

… Behind this republican discourse is a  tradition of political philosophy with roots in Aristotle’s Politics, Cicero’s Res Publica, Machiavelli, Harrington, Bolingbroke, and the nostalgic country’s virtuous opposition to Walpole and the commercialization of
English life. The pursuit of public good is privileged over private interests and freedom means participation in civic life rather than the protection of individual rights from interference. Central to the scholarly enterprise of republicanism has been the self-proclaimed “dethronement of the paradigm of liberalism and of the Lockean paradigm associated with it.”

In response to these republican imperial claims, a group whom Gordon S. Wood has labeled “neo-Lockeans” has insisted that Locke and liberalism were alive and well in Anglo-American thought in the period of the founding. Individualism, the moral legitimacy of private interest, and market society are privileged in this reading over community, public good, and the virtuous pursuit of civic fulfillment. For these “neo-Lockeans” it is not Machiavelli and Montesquieu who set the textual codes that dominated the “great national discussion,” but Hobbes and Locke and the assumptions of possessive individualism….

Madison’s adulation of heterogeneous factions and interests in an enlarged America, which he introduced into so many of his contributions to the Federalist, assumed that the only way to protect the rights of minorities was to enlarge the political sphere and thereby divide the community into so great a number of interests and parties, that

• “in the 1st. place a majority will not be likely at the same moment to have a common interest separate from that of the whole or of the minority; and in the 2d. place, that in case they shd. have such an interest, they may not be apt to unite in the pursuit of it. It was
  incumbent on us then to try this remedy, and with that view to frame a republican system on such a scale & in such a form as will controul all the evils wch. have been experienced.”

In Federalist No. io Madison described the multiplication of regional, religious, and economic interests, factions, and parties as the guarantor of American freedom and justice….

[TW: The conservative / (anti)Republican / MAGA / Trump-Miller-Vought attack on voting access is thus a direct assault and the civic republican ideas embedded in the fundamental design of the American government. As is their attack on birthright citizenship.]

The Founders’ Warnings About Excess Wealth Have Come Appallingly True

Igor Volsky, July 3, 2026 [The New Republic]

… the Founders were deeply worried that concentrations of wealth would corrode self-governance and hollow out the republic from within. In their study of history, they saw how wealth inequality fueled political division, class conflict, and social unrest, eroding governance and ultimately contributing to failed states like the Roman Empire.

James Madison’s Federalist, Number 10 explicitly links political instability to economic disparity, citing the inherent tension between property owners and non–property owners. Madison saw a role for government to address economic inequality in his 1792 essay Parties, noting that it should do so “by political equality of rights … and by withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches.” Madison warned that if the state favors financial speculation, it creates an artificial aristocracy that distorts public policy and subverts democratic representation….

Jefferson believed a concentrated financial class would inevitably capture government institutions, transforming a republic of equals into a playground for the wealthy. Because of this, he championed structural limits to inequality, for instance by advocating for the abolition of laws that kept massive estates intact across generations to ensure wealth was continually broken up and redistributed through inheritance. He even authored two laws as a Virginia state legislator banning feudal inheritance practices that were in place across Europe….

… 150 billionaires collectively spent a record-breaking $2 billion on federal races, and many have been rewarded with positions of real power in the government. Trump empowered Musk to gut essential workers and services through DOGE while securing new federal contracts and ending regulatory actions that threatened $2.3 billion in potential liabilities for his companies. Trump selected Cabinet members from the top 0.0001 percent of America, and his signature tax law will reward the richest 1 percent of Americans with $121 billion in net tax cuts in 2026 alone. Is it a surprise then, that in the first 16 months since Trump was reelected, the collective fortune of America’s 974 billionaires grew by $1.96 trillion, or 30.6 percent?

Today’s extreme wealth concentration is precisely the oligarchic threat the Founders envisioned. The American dream cannot survive when unlimited wealth for a few destroys opportunities for the rest of us….

Reining in billionaire control is incredibly popular: 77 percent of voters support raising taxes on the ultrawealthy, including 65 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of independents. Three in five (62 percent) prefer a candidate who supports raising taxes on billionaires, versus just 12 percent who prefer one who opposes it—a 50-point gap. Among Democratic primary voters, that gap widens to 79 points (83–4). This is because voters are living the consequences the Founders warned of—they cannot afford housing, health care, childcare, or other basic needs….

Voters Rank Billionaires, Then Corporate Landlords as Top Villains to US Society and Economy

Jessica Corbett, July 02, 2026 [CommonDreams]

After finding last fall that a majority of voters believe life in the United States is getting worse, and many are “extremely worried” about issues including cost of living, division, authoritarianism, wealth inequality, and the climate crisis, the polling firm Data for Progress decided to have Americans name the “bad actors” most responsible for the country’s concerning conditions.

In a pair of surveys conducted last month, Data for Progress asked more than 2,000 Americans to rate the impact of various groups or industries on the US economy—“things like jobs, prices, and economic growth”—as well as American society, or “things like feelings of community, well-being, and social trust.”

The top villains, according to respondents, are the nation’s nearly 1,000 billionaires, then corporate landlords. Rounding out the top 10 were sports gambling marketplaces, artificial intelligence companies, cryptocurrency firms, payday lenders, the Republican Party, social media giants, the Democratic Party, and for-profit universities….

Oligarchy’s Ancient Origins 

Matt Simonton, July 1, 2026 [Project Syndicate]

The struggle between democracy and oligarchy in classical Greece was bitter, with oligarchies relying on skillfully designed political institutions to shore up unpopular regimes. As concerns grow over the “rule of the few” in the United States, Americans should consider how their own institutions are doing oligarchs’ work for them….

… Oligarchs viewed themselves as a rarefied minority set apart by their breeding, wealth, manners, and superior education, which rendered them fit to rule. They were, in a word, the “good” of Critias’ epitaph, as opposed to the unwashed majority—the demos—who lacked the training and discernment necessary for politics, and whose misplaced priorities could result only in hubris. It was the duty of every right-thinking member of the elite to hold back the tide of ignorance by whatever means necessary….

The Federalists, in particular, sought to downplay the loss in democratic power that might come with the incorporation of the separate states into the strong federal union they envisaged. As numerous scholars have pointed out, the proposed Constitution of 1787 was far less democratic than many state politicians and constituents preferred. But in the first of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton assured readers that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.” In other words, it was an excess of democracy, rather than its deficit, that would lead to political instability….

… To maintain the status quo is to do the oligarchs’ work for them….

Matt Simonton, Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University

On oligarchy: ancient lessons for global politics 

Edited by David Edward Tabachnick and Toivo Koivukoski [Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2011]

Chapter 3 “Overcoming Oligarchy: Republicanism and the Right to Property in the Federalist”

Jeffrey Sikkenga

…Plato’s most systematic analysis of oligarchic regimes is found in Book 8 of The Republic. In the beginning of Book 8, the conversation returns to a discussion interrupted at the end of Book 4 about the relative justice of five regimes: aristocracy (the rule of philosopher-kings), timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. The ensuing conversation between Socrates and his interlocutors Glaucon and Adeimantus focuses on the oligarchic soul because, according to Socrates, regimes acquire their character from the psyche of those who establish and hold the ruling offices….

…Socrates portrays the moneymaker’s soul as ‘in a sense two-fold, born from a combination of the desire to acquire security and the desire to acquire honour. For the moneymaker, wealth satisfies both desires. But money makers are not oligarchs – that is, human beings moved by distinctly oligarchic political principles. Moneymakers are politically happy if the city allows unlimited acquisition and the laws ‘diligently hold down by force’ crimes against property. But oligarchs demand that the city honour wealth by imposing a property qualification forholding office that excludes the vast majority of inhabitants.

According to Socrates, the oligarchic soul comes into being when the rich face a democratic revolution that insists on equality….

Unlike money-makers who gather up their property and flee when threatened, these wealthy people have become willing to risk ‘impeachments, judgments, and contests’ in order to defend the dignity and justice of the moneymaking way of life, which resides not so much in the simple accumulation of wealth as in the nobler fact that such a person rules himself through the dominance of the orderly (moneymaking) desires over the disorderly (spendthrift) desires. In their view, the justice of oligarchy is that it recognizes the moral excellence of the acquisitive person’s orderly soul and publicly distinguishes it from lower ones that lack these virtues. For such people, oligarchy must be fought for because it is the only regime that gives the city’s highest authority and honour to the best human beings, the people who deserve these distinctions. What makes some moneymakers ‘truly oligarchs’ is their moral attachment to a specific notion of justice that opposes the democratic idea of equality. Thus, while acquisitive desire for wealth is born from fear and shame, Socrates suggests that it becomes a bold demand for political honour fueled by a growing attachment to what the rich see as the nobility and justice of oligarchic distinction….

Aristotle notes, however, that there are a variety of oligarchic arrangements, ranging from the rule of newly rich moneymakers to dynasties of a very few old, wealthy families who are not permitted to engage in moneymaking. What unites these oligarchs indeed, what makes them oligarchs is that all of them believe that only the rich deserve to rule, and they enforce this idea by having a high property qualification for voting and office holding. The variety of oligarchies shows, however, that oligarchs disagree over why wealth is worthy of honour. Oligarchic regimes devoted to the endless accumulation of wealth believe that the life of acquisition is the good life. For them, what makes human beings noble is the act of overcoming material privation and freeing oneself from necessity. But the other types of oligarchies show that the passion fueling oligarchs cannot be reduced to the desire to acquire money. For these oligarchs, wealth is honourable because it is the only means to a higher end, hence, Aristotle says, these oligarchs ‘are held to occupy the place of gentlemen’ by the many and ‘in most places’ even mistake themselves for aristocrats. These gentlemanly oligarchs believe that both wealthy moneymakers and the poor should be excluded from office because both groups are ‘vulgar’ (apeirokalia): that is, inexperienced in the nobler matters that are necessary to elevate the mind in preparation for political rule. There seem, then, to be several kinds of oligarchies rooted in different notions of what type of human being is truly good and deserves to rule. Yet within these differences lies the common idea of all oligarchy: an unbreakable link between wealth and political merit. To be an oligarch is to believe that the rich (at least certain rich people) deserve mastery over the city.

[TW: Slightly different than Thorstein Veblen’s analysis of The Leisure Class, but not much. I want to emphasize here that civic republicanism is based on the belief that all individuals have reason and are capable of self-government if they are not steered astray by false prophets and demagogues. Hence, the high value placed on free public education for all — which many conservatives today have become emboldened enough to explicitly oppose. Leo Strauss and Curtis Yarvin are very open about the need for society to be ruled by elites who trained and educated to spin and weave myths and lies to keep the masses in place. A republic requires an honest system of national discourse in which to debate issues and consider policies to address them – which is the context for the next two links.]

The Counterfeiters at the Seam

Mike Brock, July 02, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

… The operation is counterfeiting. Peter Thiel’s religious theories are to Christianity as the conservative legal movement’s theories about executive power are to the Founding tradition. Both are forgeries. Both borrow the authority of a tradition to authorize what the tradition, in its actual texts, forbids. Both work only on marks who have inherited the vocabulary of the tradition without the reading of it….

The counterfeiters work the seams where the reading has thinned. They locate, with the diagnostic precision of forgers who have studied their marks, the exact places in the American mind where the vocabulary of Christianity and the vocabulary of constitutional republicanism are held with reverence but no longer read with care. And at those places, they insert their forgeries.

Consider the Christian seam.

The tradition Thiel is counterfeiting is not a hazy thing. It is a specific chain of documents, produced by a specific institution, extended across a specific series of generations, each pope reading his predecessors and writing his own contribution into the accumulated record. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum, an encyclical on the condition of labor and capital that formed the foundation of what has come to be called Catholic social teaching. Leo XIII wrote against unregulated capitalism, against the reduction of the worker to a factor of production, against the arrangement in which a small class of proprietors accumulated wealth on the backs of a much larger class who were denied a just wage. He wrote in favor of the right of workers to organize, the moral obligation of the wealthy to consider the effects of their arrangements on the poor, and the responsibility of the state to intervene when private power crushed the weak.

Every subsequent pope has written into that chain. Pius XI wrote Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, extending the analysis to the concentrations of financial power that had produced the Depression. John XXIII wrote Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris in the early sixties, extending it to development and to the arms race. Paul VI wrote Populorum Progressio. John Paul II wrote Laborem Exercens and Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and Centesimus Annus, the last of which, published in 1991 on the centenary of Leo XIII’s original document, extended the tradition to the moral evaluation of the collapse of Communism and the resulting temptation to imagine that unregulated markets had been vindicated. Benedict XVI wrote Caritas in Veritate on the moral shape of globalization. Francis wrote Laudato Si’ on the environment and Fratelli Tutti on human fraternity. And Leo XIV — the American, the Chicagoan, the man who took his name from the man who started the chain — wrote Magnifica Humanitas in May of this year, extending the tradition to the moral evaluation of artificial intelligence, and calling for the technology to be, in his word, disarmed.

That is the tradition. It is one hundred and thirty-five years of continuous magisterial teaching, each document reading its predecessors and writing forward. Any American Catholic who has read even three of these documents knows what the tradition says. The tradition says that human dignity is prior to profit. The tradition says that the accumulation of wealth without regard for the common good is a moral evil, not a moral neutrality. The tradition says that when a technology or an arrangement threatens the humanity of the person, it must be subjected to conscience and to public oversight. The tradition says that the wealthy have a positive obligation to the poor that is not discharged by charity but is fulfilled only in the reform of the arrangements that produced the disparity.

The tradition also says, with unmistakable clarity in text after text, that the concentration of power in the hands of a small class of private proprietors is one of the specific moral dangers the Church exists to name.

Now consider what Thiel does with this tradition.

Thiel has said, in public, at a lecture series in Rome no less, that the figure the New Testament calls the Antichrist will manifest in our era not as an individual with a black hat but as a world government promising to protect humanity from existential threats such as AI or global warming. This is not a joke made in passing. This is Thiel’s actual eschatology, delivered with the seriousness of a man who has spent his private hours reading René Girard and building a religious framework for his political-economic project. And the framework does specific work: it names any coordinated human response to the concentrations of technological power — precisely the responses the Church’s social teaching has been calling for since 1891 — as the sign of the coming Antichrist.

This is the counterfeit. Thiel takes the vocabulary of Christian eschatology — Antichrist, apostasy, the Beast, the false prophet — and inverts it. In the actual tradition, the sign of Christ is the constraint of power in service of the weak. In Thiel’s counterfeit, the constraint of power is the sign of the Antichrist. The pope who asks the wealthy to slow down is, by that request alone, structurally the Antichrist. Not because he means to be. Not because he plots to be. Because his position — the position of moral authority calling for restraint on private power — is, in Thiel’s theology, the mark of the beast.

The tradition condemns what Thiel is doing. The counterfeit uses the tradition’s own vocabulary to condemn what the tradition commands….

The forgery is exquisite. It requires the tradition’s authority to work. It could not be delivered in a secular vocabulary — a secular defense of oligarchic power would be recognized instantly for what it is. So the forgers reach into the sacristy, pull down the vestments, and preach oligarchy from the pulpit….

Now consider the constitutional seam.

The tradition here is likewise not a hazy thing. It is a chain of documents produced by specific men in a specific decade, extended forward through a specific series of legal generations, each interpreting the founding texts against the accumulated jurisprudence. In 1787 and 1788, a series of essays appeared in New York newspapers under the pen name Publius, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, arguing for the ratification of the proposed Constitution. We now call them The Federalist Papers. They are the closest thing the American republic has to a set of founding intentions written by the founders themselves, in real time, addressed to the citizens whose votes would decide whether the document would come into force.

Federalist 69 is Hamilton’s essay on the presidency. It is written to answer a specific charge — that the proposed executive would be a monarch in republican clothing — and Hamilton answers the charge point by point. He compares the president to the King of Great Britain across a sequence of powers, and at every point he demonstrates that the president is less powerful than the king. The president serves four years; the king serves for life. The president can be impeached; the king cannot. The president is elected; the king is hereditary. The president shares the treaty-making power with the Senate; the king holds it alone. The president shares the appointment power with the Senate; the king holds it alone. The president cannot dissolve the legislature; the king can. The president has no religious authority; the king is the supreme head of the Church of England. The president has a qualified veto that Congress can override; the king has an absolute veto. On charge after charge, Hamilton demonstrates that the American executive is a bounded office, constrained by the other branches, checked by the electoral cycle, disciplined by impeachment, and comprehensively unlike the monarchical power the Revolution had been fought to escape.

And Hamilton, at the end of the essay, delivers a line that ought to be branded onto the desk of every American law student in every constitutional law course in the country: “What answer shall we give to those who would persuade us that things so unlike resemble each other?”

That is the founding tradition’s answer to any argument that the American presidency was designed to be more powerful than King George III. Hamilton wrote the answer in 1788. He wrote it to demolish exactly the argument that Peter Thiel made at Aspen on Tuesday.

Federalist 69 is the tradition. It is not obscure. It is not disputed. It is one of the most famous essays in the American constitutional canon, taught in every survey course on the founding, cited in Supreme Court opinions across two centuries. Any American who has read it — really read it, with attention to what Hamilton is doing — knows that the constitutional design was, at every point, the deliberate construction of a bounded and constrained executive….

Now consider what the conservative legal movement has done with this tradition.

Beginning in the 1980s, a group of lawyers associated with the Federalist Society, the Reagan Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and a cluster of academic postings began developing what they called the unitary executive theory. In its early versions, the theory made a narrow claim: that the president had complete authority over subordinate executive-branch officials, and that so-called independent agencies were, to some degree, in constitutional tension with Article II. This was a debatable position, held by serious lawyers, and if it had remained in that form it would have been unremarkable.

But the theory did not remain in that form. Across four decades, the movement’s scholars developed it into something the early proponents themselves would not have recognized. In John Yoo’s hands it became a theory that the president’s war powers lie beyond the reach of statute — the theory of the torture memos, the theory under which the executive may disregard the laws Congress writes to constrain him. And in the hands of the theorists closest to the current administration, it has become a doctrine under which the president can ignore statutes that limit executive discretion, can direct the Justice Department against his political opponents, can pardon his associates for federal crimes, can order military operations Congress has not authorized, can fire the head of every independent commission Congress created to insulate its work from him, can defy congressional subpoenas, and can, in the most extreme versions now circulating, suspend the constitutional order in a declared emergency without answering to any other branch. Some of the theory’s own founders have recoiled from what it became; Steven Calabresi, who helped build the early doctrine, has objected loudly to some of its current applications. The objections have not slowed it. A counterfeit, once deposited, does not need its engraver’s permission to circulate.

And these theorists claim — with the entire apparatus of citation and footnote and law review article and originalist methodology — that this is what the Founders intended. They cite Federalist 70 selectively, extracting Hamilton’s argument that the executive requires energy while ignoring that Hamilton’s whole point was that the bounded executive he had designed would supply the necessary energy without becoming a king. They cite the Vesting Clause of Article II — the executive power shall be vested in a president — as though the clause were a freestanding grant of unlimited power rather than the designation of an office whose powers are enumerated in the sections that follow. They make much of the fact that Article I grants Congress the legislative powers herein granted while Article II omits the qualifier — as though the men who spent the summer of 1787 enumerating, qualifying, and dividing every power they named had smuggled an unbounded one through a participle. They do not, ever, deal seriously with Federalist 69. They cannot. Federalist 69 is the document that answers their argument in advance, in the words of the founder whose energy-of-the-executive argument they cite when they want energy and abandon when they want to explain why the founder they cite for energy also spent an entire essay demolishing the very kingship they are trying to reconstruct.

The tradition condemns what the unitary executive theorists are doing. The counterfeit uses the tradition’s own vocabulary to authorize what the tradition forbids.

This works only on marks who have inherited the word originalism without ever having read the Federalist Papers. It works only on Americans who know that the Constitution is sacred but have never sat with the texts that explain what it means. It works only where the reading has thinned. And where the reading has thinned, the Federalist Society and the Claremont Institute and the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the whole apparatus of conservative legal scholarship have inserted a counterfeit constitutionalism in which the president can do what the actual Constitution was written to prevent….

A Crisis of Exploitable and Profitable Ignorance – The For-Profit Disinformation Machine and What Your State Can Do About It

Christopher Armitage, June 30, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

…Steve Bannon described the strategy in 2018, talking to the writer Michael Lewis. The Democrats don’t matter, he said. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit. Commentators since have treated the quote as a propaganda slogan, but read it again. It is a purchasing strategy. Bannon was telling Lewis what the customers of the for-profit disinformation industry are actually buying, and they are not trying to convince anyone of anything specific. They are buying confusion. They are buying the collapse of the shared factual ground on which coordinated public action depends. A public that cannot agree on what happened yesterday cannot organize around what needs to happen tomorrow, a public that cannot identify a specific perpetrator cannot hold that perpetrator accountable, and a public too exhausted to sort truth from lie will eventually stop trying. That exhaustion is the product being sold.

We have seen this operation before, and the tobacco version of it is the one most people remember. Internal memos later revealed that tobacco executives knew by the 1950s that their product caused cancer. They hid the knowledge and spent decades funding scientists, public-relations firms, and friendly journalists to manufacture doubt about the research. When the lawsuits finally caught up with them, they argued their public statements were protected commercial speech. The courts disagreed, juries disagreed, attorneys general disagreed, and the tobacco companies ended up paying more than two hundred billion dollars in settlements and accepting restrictions on how they could advertise. The lie was a product. The product was sold. The sellers paid for the harm they caused.

Oligarchs took that loss personally. How dare they be held accountable?

As I researched the For-Profit Disinformation Machine, I started to notice a pattern that reminded me of something that on its surface might seem unrelated.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration wanted to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua. Congress said no, and passed a law called the Boland Amendment making it illegal to fund the Contras, the right-wing guerrilla force trying to do the overthrowing. The administration decided to fund them anyway. Part of the money came from secretly selling missiles to Iran. Part of it came from something uglier. Contra leaders and their American handlers moved cocaine into the United States, sold it through West Coast dealers, and routed the profits back to the war in Central America. The CIA knew. In some cases, the CIA helped.

In 1996, a reporter named Gary Webb at the San Jose Mercury News published a three-part series called “Dark Alliance” that laid out the supply chain. The Contras. The cocaine. The Los Angeles dealers. The CIA’s awareness of the operation. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times attacked the series. They attacked Webb personally. The Mercury News eventually backed away from his reporting. Webb was pushed out of journalism and could not find work. In 2004, he killed himself.

Three years after Webb’s series ran, the CIA’s own Inspector General released a report confirming the substance of what Webb had written. The agency had indeed worked with Contra-connected drug traffickers, had indeed protected some of them from prosecution, and had indeed known that cocaine profits were funding the war. The major papers that had destroyed Webb’s career did not retract their attacks. They wrote polite correctives and moved on. Webb was already dead.

That is what happens when a supply chain runs through institutions the legal system is structured to protect. The producers were never the story. The distributors were never the story. The question of who profited was treated as a conspiracy theory even after the CIA itself admitted the conspiracy was real. The blame sat with the users, the parents, and the neighborhoods, which is exactly where the producers and distributors needed the blame to sit in order to keep doing what they were doing.

This is the template we are working with. If we accept the framing that disinformation is a problem of gullible consumers, we are already inside the same trap the crack users were in. The producers keep operating. The distributors keep distributing. The blame sits with the people at the end of the chain. And the industry that put the product there in the first place never has to answer for any of it….

The Room at Aspen

Mike Brock, July 03, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

On Tuesday afternoon in Colorado, one of the most powerful venture capitalists in America stood on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival and told the room that the first American pope is working for the Chinese Communists.

The room laughed.

That is the story. Everything else is footnote….

The question I want to sit with is not what Thiel said. Thiel has been saying versions of this for two decades, and The Sovereign Individual Was the Blueprint covers the ideological genealogy from Davidson and Rees-Mogg to Curtis Yarvin to the current administration. The question is what Aspen thought it was doing.

Aspen is not a fringe venue. The Aspen Ideas Festival is where the American governing class goes to be seen thinking. Its attendees include sitting senators, cabinet secretaries, hedge-fund principals, university presidents, foundation heads, editors of the country’s remaining serious magazines, and the CEOs of firms whose names appear on every school of public affairs in the country. The panel Thiel appeared on was titled Humanity at the End of History. The other panelist was Fukuyama. This was framed by the festival as a marquee event, one of the two or three sessions the week’s attendees would remember.

And on Tuesday afternoon that room laughed at a joke about the first American pope being an agent of the Chinese Communist Party….

This is not because the American governing class has become theologically sophisticated and rejected the encyclical on its merits. It has not read the encyclical. It is because the American governing class has decided that Peter Thiel is one of them, that his money makes him one of them, that his taste and his manners and his Stanford degree and his Palantir contracts and his willingness to sit on a panel with Fukuyama make him one of them, and that anything he says from within the frame of “provocative tech billionaire” belongs inside the range of acceptable opinion.

He can lecture on the Antichrist in Rome in March, blocks from the Vatican, and remain welcome at Aspen in July. He has said, on the record, that the Antichrist will manifest not as an individual but as a world government promising to protect humanity from existential threats such as AI or global warming….

How Chinese philosophy influenced US founding fathers – From the Mandate of Heaven to the ‘pursuit of happiness’, the US and China share a rich intellectual tradition of ethical governance

Chow Chung-yan, 26 Jun 2026 [South China Morning Post]

…Western political commentary frequently depicts China as the ultimate cultural and ideological antithesis to the West. Yet, a deeper dive into history reveals that ancient Chinese philosophy did not just sit on the periphery of Western thought; it actively inspired both the European Enlightenment and the American founders.

To see this connection hidden in plain sight, one need only look at the architecture of American democracy itself. Sitting atop the East Pediment of the US Supreme Court building is a monumental trio of ancient lawgivers: Moses, Solon and Confucius.

Sculpted by Hermon MacNeil in the 1930s under the direction of architect Cass Gilbert, these figures were chosen to represent the core foundational pillars of American jurisprudence. MacNeil wanted to trace the lineage of American law. He included Confucius because he believed that true justice must prioritise collective civic virtue and social harmony over mere individual rights. Today, this statue of Confucius sits directly above the window of the chief justice’s office suite, serving as a silent, historic guardian watching over the highest judicial seat in America….

Both Jefferson and Franklin were avid consumers of literature detailing Chinese governance. The declaration’s foundational premise that “all men are created equal” was a radical departure from the rigid British aristocratic class system. Historian Martin Powers, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, argues convincingly that the American founders did not construct their democratic and egalitarian frameworks in an intellectual vacuum. His research shows that both Jefferson and Franklin drew immense inspiration from Chinese political structures, particularly the concept of a merit-based state apparatus….

Franklin took this critique of inherited status a step further by directly citing Chinese tradition. Defending his opposition to hereditary honours, he wrote: “Thus among the Chinese, the most ancient, and from long Experience the wisest of Nations, honour does not descend, but ascends.” In the Chinese model, honours were granted to parents based on the achievements of their children, a concept that completely inverted European feudal logic….

Why the West Still Can’t Decode China’s Rise

Arnaud Bertrand [Beijing Review, via Naked Capitalism 07-03-2026]

This mirrors a very ancient Chinese intuition that the grandest ambitions ultimately rests on self-cultivation.

First of all, he explains that “national seclusion” during the Ming Dynasty is the original sin. Many people assume that China is driven by a victim narrative where they blame the West for the century of humiliation following the Opium War of 1840. Xi’s perspective clearly shows this isn’t the case: It blames itself! The West taking advantage is but a byproduct of a decline China authored first.

You cannot understand the way China behaves today if you don’t understand that. The drive isn’t to avenge the humiliation. It’s to never again be the country that let it happen. Hence so many of China’s landmark initiatives: the almost sacred status of reform and opening up, the relentless focus on science and technology, the insistence on integrating into, not withdrawing from, the global economy. All of it traces back to one lesson: When we closed the door, we lost everything.

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