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This is the first of two parts of the second part of a longer three part series. Part one covered COVID.

POTUS Joe Biden wasn’t just a senile fool who insisted on running for re-election when obviously senile, costing the Democrats the 2024 Presidential election and giving us Trump 2.0, he was also the nominal architect of three mass-death events that rank with this awful Century’s worst.

So yea, I’m back to hammering nails in the dying ghoul’s coffin so people don’t forget what he was and what he (or the administration with his name on it) did.

Last time I pounded home the Biden administration’s horrific, criminally negligent responsibility for ~1M deaths of American citizens and residents.

This time I’m going to be pounding home the extent to which Biden & co. knowingly provoked Russia into invading Ukraine in February 2022, put the kibosh on a peace deal Russia and Ukraine had allegedly worked out on in April 2022, and squandered massive fortunes pouring money and weapons into the yawning black maw that is Kyiv under Zelensky, and in so doing signed the death warrant of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, mostly the former.

And because the trap that Russian President Vladimir Putin fell into was loaded not only with billions worth of military preparations and massive economic sanctions, but also with the biggest and most brutally effective propaganda campaign of my lifetime (and I lived through the post-9/11 Karl Rove Great War on Terror nightmare as a full-grown ass adult), trying to speak up for a modicum of reason and objectivity got anyone even mildly opposed to the dominant narrative labeled a “Putin puppet” and cast out of polite liberal American society.

That wasn’t new in 2022, of course. By that point we’d enjoyed six years’ worth of RussiaGate panic and the neo-McCarthyism from the establishment shitlibs in charge of the Democratic Party and their “vote blue no matter who” idiot supporters.

Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 presidential campaign kicked off RussiaGate the day after she lost the election to Trump as a great way to distract from how shitty her campaign was and the fact that the Democratic party put its thumb on the scale in her favor against Bernie Sanders, went full-on commie hunter like the ’64 Goldwater girl she once was against Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. Clinton said on Campaign HQ with David Plouffe (that’s former Obama 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe) that the Russians have “got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate” and calls her “the favorite of the Russians.”

Gabbard filed a $50 million defamation lawsuit but then dropped it to “defeating Donald Trump in 2020 (ie the future worthless Trump Director of National Intelligence dropped the suit so she could focus on helping Biden beat her future boss. Oh the places you’ll go , indeed.).”

So I should have been hardened to that kind of crap by 2022, but despite Mueller coming up completely empty (“the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”) and RussiaGate adding up to a giant distraction that helped Trump get away with tons of bribe-taking and other real crimes (emoluments clause anyone?) because the Dems only seemed to care about his antics if it interfered with their Ukraine plans or could somehow be linked to Russia and Putin.

I mean if they tried to impeach Trump for taking bribes from foreign countries, that might hit Dem legislative playas like Nancy Pelosi and Bob Menendez right in the wallets.

Finding out later that that bullshit was a psyop from the get-go fills me with rage and I’d love to go all Borger, Texas on any of the fuckers involved should I ever get the chance.

Remember the Hunter Biden laptop story — you know the bombshell pre-election NY Post article that no one could post on Facebook (Zuckerberg later apologized) or share on Twitter (even via DM) which revealed a great deal of lucrative scumbaggery on the part of Hunter Biden, some of it maybe even involving “the old man”, some of which took place in Ukraine where Hunter enjoyed a $50,000/month gig at a natural gas company despite knowing fuck all about natural gas or Ukraine?

Remember how fifty-one former intelligence officials — including James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta — signed a one-paragraph statement saying the laptop story (later confirmed to be true) has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They concede in the letter itself that they have no evidence.

Politico ran it as “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.”

In 2023, former acting CIA director Michael Morell told the House Judiciary Committee he organized the letter after a call from Antony Blinken, then a Biden campaign adviser, and that a purpose was to give Biden a “talking point” for the debate. FWIW Blinken denies it was his idea. Since I don’t believe a word that double-genociding mofo says, rest assured I’m just including it for the record.

Blinken, of course, became Biden’s Secretary of State and ran Ukraine policy for four years because of course Sleepy Joe was too senile to run a fucking lemonade stand by 2022.

Did anyone happen to catch the study covered by FAIR showing that American corporate media were seven times more likely to quote think tanks with military-industrial funding than those without? Good times were had gaslighting everyone’s liberal family and friends.

I lost friends, relationships with work colleagues and online friendly acquaintances, and my family, and marital relations were deeply strained by this most epic fucking gaslighting campaign (which was presaged by the Atlantic Council’s John Deni in his Dec, 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine” oh yea, Deni is also a research prof at the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute).

And who could forget Ivan Krastev’s Feb. 3, 2022 New York Times op-ed which warned, “Europe Thinks Putin Is Planning Something Even Worse Than War” — and the horror Putin planned?

Why nothing less than a negotiated European security architecture that acknowledges Russian interests. Krastev passionately argued that “an invasion “could, in a perverse way, save the current European order.” And God knows, perversity is what the current European order (and its ruling Epstein class) is all about.

The WSJ and NYT truly know their audiences and the goldfish memories they have because both papers beat the war drums while Putin was begging for negotiations (the Russians even drafted a full signature ready document) and then spent the next three years calling the invasion of Ukraine “unprovoked” and insisting that the rest of the Western MSM media do the same.

But before I can get to hammering on the coffin I’m preparing for Genocide Joe Biden’s reputation and historical standing, I have to cover some historical background.

That ought to chase off all the fucking Americans reading this. Goddamn, it’s crazy-making to be a student of history in the USA in the short-attention-span 2020s. Well, so be it.

This is going to be quick and link heavy because I’m writing a blog post for a topic that merits multiple books.

NATO Stopped Being a Defensive Alliance in the 1990s Under Bill Clinton

Despite assurances to then Soviet Premier Gorbachev from President GHW “Poppy” Bush’s Sec of State James Baker that NATO will not move “one inch eastward” when Gorby allowed German re-unification, NATO moved east even more relentlessly than the Wehrmacht did in 1939-1942.

Just look at this fucking map.

And Bill Clinton (who was busy with other things and barely cared about foreign policy) and his administration (some of whom very much cared about foreign policy and will recur in administration after administration to the present day) were warned by fifty foreign policy veterans (including Robert McNamara, former CIA director Stansfield Turner, Paul Nitze, Jack Matlock, Richard Pipes, and Senators Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Sam Nunn) that NATO’s eastern expansion was “a policy error of historic proportions.”

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On September 7, 2026

8 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 06, 2026

By Tony Wikrent

On September 6, 2026

13 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 06, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Don’t look away any longer – Solidarity with Hüseyin Doğru

[defenddemocracy.press, Aug 30, 2026 ]

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

A Twenty-Year-Old is Dead Because the United States Government Put a Monitor on His Leg – Pierre Damas Bel, Wright State University, class of 2029

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

Pierre Damas Bel was twenty years old. He wanted to be a doctor. He was in JROTC. He graduated high school in May and started at Wright State University in Ohio a few weeks ago. On August 31, he called his father on a video call at 8:03 in the evening and said, “I’m not feeling okay mentally because of the bullying.” His father told him to come home so they could talk. Around eleven that night, police came to his father’s door and said Pierre had parked his car on the shoulder of an interstate in Springfield, Ohio, walked into oncoming traffic, and been hit by a tractor-trailer. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

He was wearing an ankle monitor. ICE had put it on his leg after summoning him to a mandatory in-person check-in. He had come to the United States as a child under Temporary Protected Status. His parents fled Haiti in 2024 because armed gangs were burning their neighborhood down. The family had a pending asylum case. In late July, the Trump administration terminated Haiti’s TPS designation, putting roughly 350,000 Haitians on notice that the United States government intended to deport them to a country whose capital the United States itself will not fly passenger aircraft into because it is too dangerous. The offer ICE made to the Haitians of Ohio was this: wear a monitor or accept $2,600 and a flight to Port-au-Prince. Pierre wore the monitor.

It was too heavy to play soccer in. It restricted him to a seventy-five-mile radius. It was visible under his clothes. When his JROTC unit distributed uniforms, Pierre did not receive one, and his father believes the omission was because of the device on his leg. Classmates saw it and taunted him. On Instagram in late July, before he died, Pierre wrote: “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

His father said Pierre felt like he was treated like an animal.

The Republican Party did this. Not “the system.” Not “policy.” Not “immigration debates.” The Republican Party, as a coordinated political organization, made a set of decisions that produced exactly this outcome at exactly this scale on exactly this timeline. They ran a Vice-Presidential candidate who stood on a debate stage and said Haitians in Springfield were eating pets. He said it knowing it was false. He said it because he wanted an atmosphere. He got the atmosphere. A twenty-year-old walked through that atmosphere with a monitor on his leg for the last few weeks of his life, in that same town, and now he is dead on the shoulder of an interstate….

Inside Trump’s Nightmare for Haitians in Springfield: ‘We’re Following Our Orders’ – The most urgent moral test in all of Trump’s America today is happening in a small Ohio city – and we as a country are failing it miserably.

Asawin Suebsaeng, Sep 03, 2026 [Zeteo]

However bad you think things must be in Springfield, Ohio, today, the reality on the ground is worse.

Even if you are looking on, as a distant observer, in disgust at recent headlines (including about the suicide of 20-year-old student Pierre Damas Bel), it is difficult to grasp the scale of what is happening in and around this small Midwest city, and to its Haitian population, their friends, and neighbors.

For years, Donald Trump and his party have waged a protracted campaign of racist lies, fear, and demagoguery on Springfield. This summer, that campaign culminated in the Trump administration’s ICE clampdown in the city, following President Trump’s destruction of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that once shielded the Haitian community. The crackdown – blessed by the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority that this president cemented – is unlike anything else occurring now in Trump and JD Vance’s America.

The president and his allies are orchestrating horror and degradation all over the country. But in Springfield, the heightened level of fear is so widespread, and the state-imposed terror against a vulnerable minority so constant, that it is impossible to see this as anything but the Trump administration’s proof of concept for the president’s militarized vision of what America should be – a place where everyday people are afraid to go outside, in a republic of “law and order” that the federal government meticulously and arbitrarily constructs. It is the latest front in Trump and his party’s mission to codify MAGA’s brand of American racism and sadistic cruelty into law.

Pentagon secretly employs conservative influencers to promote Hegseth, attack critics

[Drop Site Daily, 08-30-2026]

The Pentagon has quietly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings into government roles, including retired colonels Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson, without disclosing their assignments, according to The Washington Post.

Maness, Schlichter, and Anderson have published columns and social media posts defending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and attacking military critics without disclosing their Pentagon ties.

Maness and Schlichter, who have over 135,000 and nearly 620,000 X followers, respectively, hold active “.civ” government email addresses assigned to the office of Undersecretary of Defense Anthony Tata, though a Pentagon spokesman declined to say whether any are paid or detail their roles.

WSJ: Pentagon to take stake in Venezuelan oil venture: The Pentagon will reportedly receive a 35% stake in “North American Blue Energy Partners,” run by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman close to Rodríguez who authorities have investigated after allegations of money laundering.

The stake will come through “penny warrants,” allowing Washington to acquire shares for a token price with little upfront spending. The U.S. could also buy 20% of the company’s future oil output at cost.

What Might Happen to Trump’s Ill-Gotten Gains

[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2026]

ICE arrests in San Francisco Bay Area area up nearly 70%, data shows

[ABC 7 Eyewitness News, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2026]

A single signature by Trump can remove you from the internet

[Il Fatto Quotidiano, via Naked Capitalism 09-02-2026]

Yesterday the Trump administration hit Autistici/Inventati, a European technology collective whose main activity is providing digital infrastructure, with a banking blockade with PayPal and Banca Etica closing its accounts.

Trump’s DOJ Blocked Serious ICE Shooting Charge Over Federal Prosecutor’s “Strongest Possible” Objections

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 09-04-2026]

War on voting

I Doubt You’re Surprised – There’s a whistleblower addressing the USPS plan to implement Trump’s EO on mail ballots

Joyce Vance, Sep 01, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

War

U.S. military commanders call Iran war “unsustainable”

Drop Site Daily, September 1, 2026

Four senior U.S. commanders formally warned War Secretary Pete Hegseth that the prolonged Iran operation is unsustainable and is already weakening the military’s ability to confront threats elsewhere, including threats to the U.S. homeland, according to the Washington Post.

The objections appeared in a classified August 14 assessment covering the worldwide availability of U.S. forces and weapons.

Those involved in the warning include the Navy’s top admiral, Daryl Caudle, and the commanders of the European, Southern, and Indo-Pacific commands.

Caudle reportedly warned Hegseth that the Navy cannot maintain its current support for the war indefinitely, with barely one-quarter of the destroyer fleet reportedly ready to deploy.

The Pentagon attacked the publication of the classified information but did not deny that the commanders filed formal objections.

Information Overlord: Dmitry Orlov Changes His Hypothesis for US Collapse

By Nat Wilson Turner

On September 5, 2026

17 Comments

From me this week

Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years, Part 1: COVID — NatWilsonTurner.com
Irving Berlin Defined American Music — Let It Roll
Short the Saudis in Combat Sports and Everywhere Else — The MMA Draw

Worth watching

Disgraceful Degradation — Dmitry Orlov. Orlov, one of the founders of “collapseology,” moves to YouTube and makes a major change to his famous analogy that US collapse will resemble Soviet collapse.

I feel sorry to have led people down a garden path that doesn’t lead to anything specific. People wanted to know when to throw the bags full of cans of spam and shotgun shells into the back of the pickup truck and drive for the hills. Feel free to do that anytime you like, I kept telling them. But I feel that I must do better. And now I believe that I finally can. If I think about something long and hard, sometimes a good idea does eventually pop into my head. I have no idea how that happens. It just happens. or it doesn’t. And in this case, it has finally dawned on me that there was to begin with a flaw in my comparison of the USA and the USSR. They’re not quite symmetrical after all.

There is a key difference that have that I have been neglecting to take into account. Yes, they were both 20th century military and industrial superpowers, and they both espoused opposing now defunct ideologies. and my superpower collapse soup analogy applied almost equally to both of them. But there is a rather important difference between them. The US is a colonial empire much like the British Empire and other western empires were once. These empires were based on the exploitation of their colonial possessions. They sucked resources out of them while preventing their social and economic development. Along the way, they saddled them with permanent debt servitude. They enforced their trade policies through military means. But the heavy-handed tactics of previous colonial eras are no longer necessary. Instead, there is control of mass media, cyber warfare, color revolutions, the IMF, the World Bank, and the US Treasury with its endless sanctions. These are all means of coercing compliance. from countless from countries around the world. And what this compliance means is willingness to export products and commodities in exchange for US government debt.

This is the wealth pump which the US has been running for decades to drain wealth from around the world to export inflation and to subjugate much of the planet. This wealth pump has become less effective over time. But even if it stops working altogether, there is a fall back to an older American technique, piracy. How well it can be made to work in the 21st century remains to be seen. But it won’t fail for the lack of trying.
Cold War 2.0 #84: Russia Secretly Helps Iran Develop Supersonic Missiles — Syriana Analysis, with Tarik Cyril Amar. Tarik Cyril Amar’s weekly appearances on Syriana Analysis are a weekly must listen to me. I love their dynamic, their accents, their humor, and they are subject matter experts I trust as much as I trust anyone about these topics (I trust no one about these topics).
Russia’s Ukraine Endgame — Putin Has Lost Patience With Zelensky — Vladimir Brovkin. Former Harvard Prof Dr. Vladimir Brovkin understands Russia better than most. He’s worth listening to.
Setback for Trump: Iran intensifies US strikes as Vance denies wedding attack — Janta Ka Reporter. Great daily anti-Imperialist news round ups, and presenter Rifad Jawaid’s vicious and hilarious commentary on Trump regime buffoonery is always amusing listening — even when covering the most awful shit.
On Sh*t… Another Private Credit Fund Just Blew Up — Eurodollar University. My go to for coverage of private credit’s struggles.

The AI bubble and its doomers

Did 700 AI bots actually form a civilization? — User Mag. Betteridge’s law of headlines in action. Doomerism is the other side of the coin of AI hype.
Bill Gates Warns A.I. Is More Dangerous Than Big Tech Will Admit — The New York Times. What for the doomer swerve. He’s playing up the scary trying to save MSFT’s investment into OpenAI. This is straight bullshite.
Dwarkesh Patel’s wildly popular but dangerously misleading account of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident — Gary Marcus. Marcus calls out the well-written and compelling AI doomer BS, with a classic Douglas Hofstadter line about Ray Kurzweil.
Red Alert: OpenAI is poised to cross an AI safety redline — Gary Marcus. Everytime you think Scam Altman can’t make things worse, here he comes with some new outrage.
The new Sanders-Casar Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act – and why I oppose it — Gary Marcus. I am generally politically aligned with Sanders and Casar but I do not trust them on tech issues.
Taxpayers Must Not Be on the Hook for Bailing Out the AI Industry — Truthout. Oh but we will be.

Politics and corruption

Michael Needham — The White House Hack Tells All — John Helmer. A great piece on one of the newest idiots in the Trump administration, possibly the least qualified Deputy National Security Advisor in US history.
How a Brazilian Billionaire Helped Shape Trump’s Beef Import Plan — The Wall Street Journal. Joesley Batista met with Trump a day before the president announced a plan to waive tariffs on beef imports, angering farmers and ranchers.
A Crash Course Into the 14 Names on Rep. Thomas Massie’s Epstein List — bekahdayyy. Fine folks.
Rahm Emanuel: ‘You Don’t Like My Ideas? Show Me Yours’ — Rolling Stone. This asshole….
Rahm Emanuel and Brothers to Donate $550,000 to Train Palestinian Pediatric Doctors in Israel — Haaretz. Cynical.
Democrats shocked after 2 members cross aisle to help Republicans — CNN. Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez rescued a GOP procedural vote, reportedly to clear the way for Golden’s lobstermen bill. It also let Johnson proceed to messaging votes Democrats oppose, including a resolution condemning socialism.

Also worth your time

Paid actors, AI writing: How a new kind of video business cashed in on America’s divided politics — Semafor
US Crude Oil Production Is Showing A Lot Of Weakness — HFI Research. Not good for Team America.
Spy-scammer shootout — Events in Ukraine. Ukraine just over the top insane.

Support my work at NatWilsonTurner.com

Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years, Part 1: COVID

By Nat Wilson Turner

On September 2, 2026

39 Comments

From the vantage point of September, 2026 it might seem like pointless assholism to kick cancer-ridden, senile old Joe Biden when he’s down.

After all, we’ve got a rancid dotard in Trump threatening to nuke Iran in the midst of what John Mearsheimer is calling the greatest geo-strategic disaster in US history, why both with ol’ black-hearted Joe?

The reason is simple.

Until Americans, particularly Democrats reckon with just how vile, stupid, and deadly the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit and the end of the republic will only escalate.

There is currently a well funded counter-revolution occurring in the Democratic party in which centrist Dems and the MSM are aligning to destroy anti-genocide candidates like Graham Platner in Maine (got him) and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan (they’re still trying although he’s up in the polls).

If Dem voters don’t belatedly realize that their party establishment leadership is as corrupt as the GOP and actively push to purge them, we will not be able to vote our way out.

Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

So let’s look at the Delaware liar’s abysmal record as US President.

I’m going to argue that the senile asshole and the people around him actually running the country were responsible for not one, not two, but three mass death events that may or may not meet the legal definition of genocide, but certainly meet the moral one.

We’ll start with COVID.

Somehow Biden’s COVID Policies Were Worse Than Trump’s

An idiot like Trump, who’s openly an anti-science ignoramus could have been expected to bungle the response to a once-in-a-century pandemic like COVID. And of course Trump’s policies were a disaster. I don’t have time or space to litigate that here.

I’m just saying that as awful as Trump was on the issue, Biden managed to be even worse — when competence and sanity were key parts of his campaign pitch.

But Biden explicitly promised a return to best practices, “follow the science” and all that.

Instead we got “take the vax” and “get back to work.”

There was never a correction of the bad science of 2020 to clearly explain to people that COVID was spread via aerosols in the air, was rarely transmissable outdoors, and could be largely contained indoors with good ventilation systems and air quality monitoring.

There was also the huge lie that the vaccine would prevent transmission. That lie fooled a lot of people because many vaccines do prevent transmission (measles, polio, mumps, etc), but not for a corona virus like COVID. It shouldn’t have been a hard sell — people know that there’s no point in making a common cold vaccine because it’s a corona virus and changes too fast. We’ve accepted the need for new flu vaccines every year for the same reason.

But no explanations were forthcoming from the ghouls in the Biden administration. Just quiet announcements that data was going to be restricted²

It was the gaslighting of the Biden era that was the hardest thing to take (as long as his policies didn’t give you COVID that is). Four years of assholes insisting “he’s not senile, he’s got a stutter,” “the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”, “the IDF is investigating” and all that crap. Was enough to drive a person insane. It certainly strained my relationships with friends and family and cost me at least one decade-long creative partnership.

The injury added to the insult was diverting money for COVID relief and prevention diverted to law enforcement³ and other bullshit.

Nearly twice the toll of the first year

444,583

Covid deaths under Trump

Weeks ending 1 Feb 2020 through 16 Jan 2021.

776,832

Covid deaths under Biden

Weeks ending 23 Jan 2021 through 18 Jan 2025 — 1.75 times as many, in a period when vaccines were free and universally available.

Both figures are sums of CDC’s own weekly provisional counts of deaths with Covid-19 on the certificate (dataset r8kw-7aab, data as of 27 Aug 2026). 2021 alone — the administration’s first year — killed more Americans than 2020 did.¹

Bar chart of recorded Covid deaths and CDC excess deaths by year, 2020 through 2024. Recorded deaths peak at 463,267 in 2021; excess deaths peak at 530,876 the same year. The excess-death series stops after 2022, when CDC quit publishing it.

The green series ends after 2022: CDC’s excess-death dataset stops at the week ending 16 September 2023 and was never resumed. The gap in the chart is the blackout, drawn to scale.

If Biden Was Out of It, Who Actually Did This?

Funny you should ask.

I happen to think it’s important to lay the blame where it belongs with murderous vermin like Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Obama’s ebola coordinator whose hiring was supposed to signal a return to competence.

Instead he pulled shit like retweeting MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle calling the OSHA vaccine rule “an ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations” which retweet was then cited by The Fifth Circuit as an endorsement when it stayed the rule, and Gorsuch pointed to it when the Supreme Court killed the mandate that January. The chief of staff’s own tweet helped sink the only workplace-safety rule the administration attempted.

Then there was Covid-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients, a management consultant and one-time Facebook board member with no public health background, wwho was somehow selected to run the response as a logistics problem for the entire vax-only stretch: the May 2021 unmasking, the Delta summer, the December 2021 rapid-test shortage, the blame-the-unvaccinated presser that December.

Criticized on the way out for rosy predictions of a Covid-free summer and for the test shortage; Public Citizen went after him on global vaccine access. He failed upward to become Biden’s chief of staff in February 2023 with God only knows how many American corpses ground under his wing-tips.

Somehow Zients’ Deputy Response Coordinator Natalie Quillian didn’t save the day, I guess her experience as Deputy Campaign Manager hadn’t really prepared her for handling a pandemic. Go figure.

And who can forget CDC Director Rochelle Walensky who wrote the May 2021 guidance telling vaccinated people to unmask at roughly 35% full vaccination, the statement that vaccinated people don’t carry the virus, the December 2021 isolation cut from ten days to five under airline pressure, and the February 2022 Community Levels metric that turned the map green. A regular magician of mass murder!

And then there’s Zients’ replacement as Covid-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, who kicked off the “personal risk assessment” era and fobbed off the government’s responsibility to lead a united national pandemic strategy off on individuals left to fend for ourselves.

Jha’s October 2022 National Strategy for Improving Indoor Air Quality is the document that proves they knew what ventilation would take but for reasons that have always baffled me, the chance to do well by doing good (ie it would have been a massive honest graft and payoff opportunity, the kind good government runs on) and funding and leading a national campaign to improve indoor ventilation in schools, hospitals, nursing homes and workplaces….instead he declared the pandemic over while hundreds of thousands died.

And let’s have a special shout-out for the The Biden-Harris transition COVID advisory board: Co-chairs David Kessler, Vivek Murthy, Marcella Nunez-Smith. Members Ezekiel Emanuel, Michael Osterholm, Céline Gounder, Atul Gawande, Luciana Borio, Rick Bright, David Michaels, Julie Morita, Loyce Pace, Eric Goosby, Jill Jim, Jane Hopkins.

Special plaudits to board members David Michaels and Ezekiel Emanuel (older brother of disgraced ex-Chicago Mayor Rahm and UFC and WWE owner Ari Emanuel).

Michaels, an epidemiologist and Obama’s head of OSHA for eight years, who publicly called for an emergency OSHA standard covering inhalation hazards but was awful quiet when Biden (or someone not senile acting on his behalf) killed his own OSHA’s proposed rule.

Emanuel joined five other former transition COVID advisory board members in publishing three JAMA viewpoints calling for a “new normal” of life with COVID, explicitly rejecting elimination, just as Omicron peaked.

Dr. Emanuel boldly said “we’re not going to defeat the coronavirus. It’s here to stay.”

The White House distanced itself from the papers — and then adopted the posture seven weeks later with the Community Levels change.

But never fear, Zeke got his back when he was very early to distance himself from the Biden administration’s disastrous COVID policy. Family trait of the Emanuels to be on both sides of every issue.

Follow and support my work at NatWilsonTurner.com on Substack.

Notes

1. Four ways to count the dead

“Excess deaths” means different things depending on the baseline, and the answers differ by a factor of two.

Measure	2021	2022	Baseline
Recorded Covid deaths CDC provisional counts, r8kw-7aab	463,267	246,297	None — a direct count of death certificates.
CDC excess deaths, all causes CDC xkkf-xrst, summed by year	530,876	331,469	Observed deaths minus the average expected from prior years.
Same, conservative version observed minus the upper bound of expected	443,697	232,223	The cautious read of the same CDC data — the floor.
Academic pandemic baseline Paglino & Stokes et al., Science Advances	538,708	—	County-level model, March-to-February years. Year one was 620,872.
Peer-country gap Bor et al., JAMA Health Forum	1,098,808	820,396	Deaths that wouldn’t have happened at the death rates of 21 peer countries. Only partly Covid.

These measure different things and are not additive. Excess deaths include overdoses, missed screenings and untreated disease — everything a wrecked health system does to people, not only the virus. ↩

2. The order in which the counting stopped

1 May 2021	CDC stops investigating breakthrough infections that don’t end in hospitalization or death. Everything milder goes uncounted — including the data that could have tested the claim that the vaccinated weren’t spreading it.
20 Feb 2022	The Times reports the CDC is withholding most of the data it collects — booster effectiveness for adults 18 to 49, hospitalizations by age, race and vaccination status, wastewater. The stated reason was fear the numbers would be misinterpreted.
25 Feb 2022	“Community Levels” replace community transmission, four days before the State of the Union. The threshold for a green county moves from under 10 weekly cases per 100,000 to as many as 200. Most of the map turns green overnight and the mask recommendations lapse with it.
Spring 2022	Free testing winds down and reported cases detach from wastewater readings. From here the case count measures who can still get a test, not who is sick.
18 Sep 2022	Biden, on 60 Minutes at the Detroit Auto Show: “The pandemic is over.” The line complicated his own administration’s pending request for Covid funding.
11 May 2023	The public health emergency ends and the authority to collect goes with it. CDC stops reporting new cases nationally, loses the power to compel labs to report results, and electronic reporting of negative tests ends. Hospital reporting drops from daily to weekly.
16 Sep 2023	The last week of data in CDC’s excess-death dataset. The tracker simply stops, and was never resumed — which is why the chart above has nothing to show after 2022.
30 Apr 2024	Federal hospital reporting requirements expire and reporting goes voluntary. CMS reinstated mandatory reporting for Covid, flu and RSV on 1 November 2024.

No single order shut this off. It went piece by piece over three years, each removal defensible on its own, the sum of them leaving the country unable to say what was happening to it. ↩

3. The Covid money that went to the police

This one isn’t an inference. The administration campaigned on it in public, and the spending was tallied by reporters.

13 May 2022

Biden asks cities to spend more relief money on police. A Rose Garden event and a fact sheet urging state and local leaders to “deploy as many dollars as possible before the summer months.” By then $10 billion of American Rescue Plan money was committed to public safety, $6.5 billion of it from State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds across 300-plus communities — which the White House itself called one of the largest single-year federal commitments to state and local law enforcement on record.

7 Sep 2022

The Marshall Project tallies where it landed. Of $101 billion allocated by governments through the first quarter of 2022, $52.6 billion was booked as “revenue replacement” — and roughly half of that, an estimated $26.3 billion, went to criminal justice. The LAPD took over $300 million for officer salaries; Alabama put $400 million toward two new prisons. Community violence intervention, the program Biden kept naming, got $187 million — under 1 percent. The figure is a keyword tally of vague Treasury filings, so treat it as an estimate rather than an audit.
More on the same flow: The Appeal, EPIC on relief money buying police surveillance tech, Prism.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 30, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War on voting

Judge Talwani’s Most Recent Order On Voting By Mail – It’s Long, It’s Complicated, And It’s Definitely Worth Your Time

Joyce Vance, Aug 28, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

After the Supreme Court made a (purely procedural) decision about Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting, rejecting judicial action in the case brought by blue state AGs because it wasn’t “ripe” for a decision yet, Judge Indira Talwani did the logical thing. She gave the plaintiffs in that case and in the case brought by the League of Women Voters a push toward updating their lawsuits. The government showed off the final rule it wants to use to implement the executive order. The ripeness argument is now moot. The administration zeroed it out when the Postal Service announced its final rule was ready to publish. The rule was published on Wednesday….

In essence, the Supreme Court directed her that the government hadn’t taken enough steps toward implementing Trump’s EO for the court to know what that implementation would look like and whether it was lawful. Too soon, the Supreme Court told Judge Talwani. You need to wait for the government to do more.

Now, the government has done more….

Judge Talwani also took a gentle, but satisfying slap at the Court, pointing out that the Trump administration isn’t exactly playing by the rules when it comes to court orders: ….

With the background laid out, we hit a critical juncture in the Judge’s decision. Here’s the most important thing to understand: the government defendants, who just days ago were arguing that the plaintiffs’ case wasn’t ripe for the court to decide, are now arguing that it’s too late for the court to intervene. Yes, you read that right. Too early has now become too late, with no Goldilocks spot in the middle. So much for the “justice” in Justice Department.

Here’s how Judge Talwani explains it. It’s worth reading her full layout: ….

The bottom line here is so grotesque that it’s impossible to imagine any other Justice Department advocating for such a plan, and any court taking longer than a few moments to reject it, as Judge Talwani did today. She notes that the government defendants “offer no reply to Plaintiff States’ assertion that compliance for the 2026 midterm elections will be impossible for many of them.” And what’s at stake is the right of Americans to vote. She notes the “significant risk of disenfranchisement” and finds that “In light of the State election officials’ unrebutted declarations that compliance with the Final Rule at this late date is impossible, the risk of irreparable harm to voters in those jurisdictions is grave.^”As for the League of Women Voters, their members face irreparable harm for the same reasons—because they live in states that will be unable to comply with these new measures, and so, their ballots will not count.

This is another key point we should all note. Why won’t the ballots count? It’s not because the voters involved aren’t eligible to vote. They are. It’s not because they’ve done anything wrong—failed to register or vote in a timely fashion. They haven’t. Americans will be disenfranchised because Donald Trump does not want them to vote. No legal sleight of hand can legitimize that….

We’ve now reached the point in this case where the lawfulness—or not—of what Trump wants to do to our elections takes center stage. The case will go back to the Supreme Court and the Court will have to decide whether the Constitution, which clearly leaves this bit of election administration up to the states, still matters. Will the Roberts Court decide to undo 250 years of American democracy? Are there five votes left for the rule of law? One hopes that even on this court, a majority, however slender, that will do the right thing exists….

The Battle Over Mail-In Ballots

Robert Kuttner, August 28 2026 [The American Prospect]

… How does Trump get to dictate Postal Service meddling in partisan politics? As our colleague David Dayen has been writing for more than a decade, one reason is that the last two Democratic presidents, Biden and Obama, have been asleep at the switch.

Obama did not fill a single vacancy on the Postal Service Board of Governors during his entire eight-year term of office. As Dayen pointed out in a piece for The New Republic in 2014 (long before he joined the Prospect), the inspector general of the Postal Service proposed that the USPS provide basic postal banking, but it never happened—because the Postal Service’s board was still dominated by George W. Bush appointees. And Biden left in place Trump appointee Louis DeJoy as postmaster general because he never bothered to appoint enough board members to fire him….

States Are Quietly War-Gaming Trump Interference in the Midterm Elections

[The Allen Analysis, Aug 25, 2026, via Naked Capitalism 08-26-2026]

Democratic officials are preparing for seized voting machines, blocked mail ballots, rogue county officials and an attempt to prevent elected members of Congress from taking their seats.

Wyoming’s Primaries Were a Preview of Trump’s Midterm Interference – Mother Jones

Sophie Hurwitz, Aug 29, 2026 [motherjones.com]

Revisiting: Can Federal Troops Be Stationed At The Polls In 2026?

Joyce Vance, Aug 27, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

… The Bangor, Maine, Daily News reported earlier this week that the Republican nominee for Governor, Bobby Charles, told a group of young Republicans, “I’m going to ask Tom — three or four weeks before the election, maybe three — I’m going to make an appeal for ICE and marshals to be at our voting booths.” He continued, “Do you think the illegals who are being paid money are going to like that?”

Charles was taped. You can listen to the audio—exclusively obtained by the Daily News—here.

“Tom” is a reference to Tom Homan, Trump’s “Border Czar.” Apparently Homan and Charles are pals; Charles says they were on Fox together in the audio. (Homan, you may recall, was reportedly investigated for taking what he thought was a $50,000 cash bribe from a man who was actually an undercover FBI agent. Pam Bondi summarily dropped the investigation early in her tenure as AG.) Homan is decidedly in support of Trump’s anti-immigrant policy. He blamed state and local law enforcement for the federal presence in Minneapolis when he took over from Gregory Bovino after the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And Trump, of course, has been working the whole “illegal immigrants voting” narrative, despite the absence of evidence to support it, as a convenient excuse for interfering with the upcoming elections. It’s the basis for his contested executive order to use the Postal Service to control who can get a mail ballot….

War

Lawrence Wilkerson: U.S. Considers Nuclear Strike Against Iran

Glenn Diesen, Aug 19, 2026, via Naked Capitalism 08-24-2026]

By Tony Wikrent

On August 30, 2026

22 Comments

Mid-Week Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On August 26, 2026

32 Comments

Have some health issues flaring up and minor surgery on Friday, so may not post much till Monday, although I’ll try. Anyway, an open thread so you can discuss what’s going on. As usual, if I covered a topic in the last week, please comment there instead.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 23, 2026

By Tony Wikrent

On August 23, 2026

12 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 23, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Denmark deploys first conscripts to Greenland

[Euractiv, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2026]

War on voting

Time to Raise Hell: Trump Taking GOP Voter Suppression Efforts to Heights Never Seen

Thom Hartmann, Aug 21, 2026 [Common Dreams]

Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election.

It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028.

Also this week, the Center for American Progress released an extraordinarily disturbing fact sheet summarizing an investigation they published that documents fifteen separate, interlocking tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are engaging in right now to rig this fall’s election….

THE BACKDOOR OPTION THAT COULD KEEP THE GOP IN CONTROL OF CONGRESS

[[Seymour Hersh, via Lambert Strether’s Water Cooler 2026-08-19]

From Joel McCleary, a former aide on security issues to President Jimmy Carter:

McCleary’s notion is that many of the secret military and intelligence powers initially aimed at warning about a nuclear attack or other extraordinary national security threats are now being turned on political issues: namely the prospect that the Republican Party might lose control of both chambers of Congress, as polls are saying may happen in November’s election. “Note who works the switch,” McCleary said. “Formally, the secretary of homeland security is the president’s lead agent for continuity. In practice, the homeland security apparatus now runs through Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy in the White House who now sits atop an elevated office far above its old standing.

“The working hypothesis,” McCleary added, “is that Miller is the de facto head of the continuity machinery, which means that the on-off switch for the Constitution that COGCON entrusts to the president is, day to day, in the hands of an unconfirmed White House aide.

“The problem is that no legal framework distinguishes between a nuclear attack and a border dispute, between a civilization-ending pandemic and a political protest, between a genuine cyberattack on national infrastructure and a manufactured pretext for invoking extraordinary authority. The president alone defines the emergency. The president alone activates the response. The president alone signs the pre-draft orders. And no institution—not Congress, not the courts, not the military chain of command—has been given the legal tools to determine, in real time, whether the emergency is genuine and whether the response is proportionate.

“This is not a partisan observation,” McCleary said. “It is a structural deficiency that endangers the republic regardless of which party holds the White House.

Experts raise alarms over Census Bureau report Trump is touting on noncitizen voting

[NPR, via The Big Picture, August 20, 2026]

A highly unusual Census Bureau report that President Trump is using to reup dubious claims of widespread illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens has ties to a Trump-aligned think tank, NPR has learned. Work on the analysis was not conducted by career civil servants at the Census Bureau, and the team behind it included individuals affiliated with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank started by officials from Trump’s first administration, according to a Census Bureau employee who NPR has agreed not to name because they fear retaliation at work. NPR finds the highly unusual Census Bureau report behind the president’s claims has ties to a Trump-aligned think tank.

Can We Stop a Coup With State of Emergency Declarations? The founders built fifty state governments to protect us in crisis such as these.

Christopher Armitage, Aug 15, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

… Governors have declared states of emergency for far less than any single one of these. Together they represent the largest sustained assault on constitutional governance in American history.

None of these are separate crises. The Epstein files are the web we’re caught in. Many of the people starting these wars and funding the authoritarian takeover are in those files. That’s the key. The DOJ takeover, the firing of FBI agents, the smearing of survivors, the consolidation of power, the war: all of it traces back to people protecting themselves from what those files contain, while aiming to make permanent a world where a Jeffrey Epstein type would become President for life rather than appear before a jury.

The federal investigation into Epstein’s co-conspirators is dead, and the Trump administration has spent over a year actively covering it up. SDNY had an active investigation. DOJ headquarters ordered the files transferred out of SDNY, and the investigation stopped. The FBI closed it in July 2025 with a two-page memo claiming no evidence existed. Director Kash Patel, went before Congress and attacked the credibility of the survivors. When Congress “forced” a release of the files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the DOJ produced roughly half of what it had collected, included the survivors’ personal information and intimate details of their abuse, and protected the names of the abusers.

Pam Bondi indicted zero co-conspirators in the fourteen months she ran the Justice Department. Trump fired her on April 2. Todd Blanche, his former personal defense lawyer and the man who personally conducted the Ghislaine Maxwell interview, took over as acting attorney general and was confirmed to the job on August 8 by a vote of 50 to 49….

… Do we hope that elections clear all this up on their own? Do we give this admin 2.5 years to continue building a MAGA army, purging the military and federal government of non-loyalists, attacking elections, and covering up criminal activities?

…. [The powers various states give their governors in emergencies.] Read that list again with the economy in mind instead of a hurricane. A governor operating under those authorities can put people on a payroll immediately, start public works without waiting out the ordinary bidding calendar, and move money, staff, and functions between agencies to wherever they are needed. Franklin Roosevelt did that nationally in the Great Depression. The emergency statutes already on the books give a governor a state-sized version of it, available the day the declaration is signed.

The founders built the country this way because they knew this exact thing could happen. The answer they left us is not in Washington, where every federal check has already failed. It is in fifty state capitals, each with a governor who can act immediately and a criminal code no federal pardon can reach. That is why a captured federal government does not have to mean a captured country, even with a transnational criminal organization calling itself the Republican Party and its oligarch owners running the executive branch.

One state has already started without an emergency declaration, and what happened there tells you both that this works and why the emergency power matters.

New Mexico’s House of Representatives voted unanimously in February to create an investigative subcommittee into Epstein’s operation at Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County. Attorney General Raúl Torrez reopened the state’s criminal investigation the same month. The subcommittee issued twenty subpoenas to state agencies, local law enforcement, federal agencies, and banks including J.P. Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank….

What we get out of this is a democracy with a functioning justice system. That’s way better than saying “the pedophile in charge of the country just started a war, we better get out the vote in 3 months and hope they haven’t rigged the game too much!” ….

War

Iran’s Secret Plan to Escalate the War

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, August 18, 2026]

Intercepted communications and other intelligence suggest a strategic shift by hard-line leaders to raise the costs for the U.S. and its regional allies

Iran’s Weapons Production Doubled in Past Year Despite US, Israeli Strikes

[Sputnik, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2026]

SCOOP: Trump’s Iran War Has Burned Through Well Over 90% of Key Long-Range Missiles

Asawin Suebsaeng, Aug 17, 2026 [Zeteo]

Sources tell Zeteo the percentage of critical long-range missiles that the Trump administration has depleted in its failing war is in ‘at least the high nineties.’

Why the World’s Most Powerful Navy is Losing the Logistics War

Sal Mercogliano, YouTube

The Tail That Couldn’t Keep Up: How the US Navy Ran Its Own Sailors Short on Food and Soap

Larry Johnson [via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2026]

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

The Sex Criminals and Child Abusers of ICE and CBP

Spencer Ackerman, 18 Aug 2026 [forever-wars.com]

… A new report by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, released today, pulls back the curtain on a stunning level of sexual criminal behavior within ICE and CBP. Out of 152 cases of identified immigration officials or contractors accused or convicted of criminal behavior, 131 of them, or 86.2 percent, were charged with sex offenses. Seventy-eight of them—51 percent of the entire cohort—”committed sex offenses against children—the single largest category on the list,” the report states. Cases involving a CBP officer, the report finds, “are more likely to involve underage victims” than those of an ICE officer. Yet fully half of ICE officers accused or convicted of sex offenses (12 of 24) had a minor as their victim….

A County Attorney Makes a Stand Against ICE in Montana

Gabriel Furshong, August 18, 2026 [The New Republic]

In April, Audrey Cromwell, the top cop in Gallatin County, a rugged and fast-growing part of Montana made famous by Paramount’s hit Yellowstone TV series, received a surprising phone call. It was a local reporter wondering what Cromwell thought about a press release from Austin Knudsen, the state’s hard-line Republican attorney general, accusing Cromwell of “stealthily” enacting a sanctuary city policy and demanding she rescind the policy within five days.

But Cromwell, a Democrat who ousted a 26-year Republican incumbent in a razor-thin race for county attorney in 2022, had never established such a policy. Nor had she received any direct communication from Knudsen.

The ostensible subject of the press release was a mundane question of bureaucratic procedure. In October, the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement had requested confidential criminal justice information, or CCJI, on a Gallatin County resident. Because the request pertained to a deportation proceeding, which is a civil rather than criminal matter under federal law, the records department asked Cromwell’s office for guidance on whether to comply with the request. In response, a civil legal assistant in Cromwell’s office advised that a court order would be required to release the information….

Trump Moves to Strip American Bar Association of Its Power – Donald Trump is opening a new front in his war on higher education.

Malcolm Ferguson, August 21, 2026 [The New Republic]

President Trump is trying to take away the American Bar Association’s ability to accredit law schools due to its being too woke.

The ABA is the leading accreditor for almost 200 law schools in the United States. Without its accreditation, a school’s graduates may not qualify to take the bar exam, and the school itself may not qualify for federal funding—two massive implications. Now the Education Department has published a 500-page report recommending the removal of that long-standing power because it believes the ABA is trying to “inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.” ….

Private Prison Giant Gave Trump-aligned Super PAC $1.4 Million After Landing Mega ICE Contracts

Freddy Brewster, Luke Goldstein, August 20, 2026 [The Lever]

The buck stops somewhere else: A look at Trump’s tendency to avoid blame when things go awry

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2026]

Report: Trump Wants to Move Ford-Class Carrier’s Island for Appearance

[Maritime Executive, via Lambert Strether’s Water Cooler 2026-08-20]

“In addition to the remarkable decision to remove the electromagnetic launch system and weapons elevators from future ships in the Ford-class carrier program, the White House has reportedly asked the Navy to relocate the entire superstructure to place it amidships.” More: “The intended practical advantages to this layout notwithstanding, the Navy is now studying a revamp of the design to put the island amidships, the way it was on older generations of pre-nuclear, conventionally-powered hulls. The motive is in part to make the ships more aesthetically pleasing for the president, according to new reporting by The Hill and the Washington Post. The Navy’s engineers have “begun moving out on options to meet the President’s intent,” a spokesperson confirmed to The Hill.” And: “The Washington Post reports that the cost of the redesign would be in the range of several billion dollars, on top of the $13 billion base price per unit. This extra cost would add to previously-announced multi-billion dollar change orders to remove the ships’ electromagnetic catapults and weapons elevators, two systems that the Navy has had significant difficulty in bringing to maturity.”

Strategic Political Economy

Years of US tariffs on China have largely failed to reduce dependence on Chinese suppliers

[Peterson Institute for International Economics, via Naked Capitalism 08-17-2026]

Global power shift

U.S. Pulls Last Aircraft Carrier Out of the East Asia: Iran War Killing West’s Anti-China Military Pivot

[Military Watch Magazine Editorial Staff, August-17th-2026]

Russia’s India Route, China’s BRI and Pakistan’s Dilemma: A New Battle for Eurasian Connectivity

[India Narrative, via Naked Capitalism 08-18-2026]

Numbers travel further than rhetoric here. Russian crude supplied roughly 2 percent of India’s imports before 2022; by July 2026 the figure had reached 55.5 percent, a new high struck even as the Gulf burned (Discovery Alert 2026; see Figure 1). That is not diplomatic friendship. It is structural dependence, running in both directions, since Moscow now needs this buyer nearly as much as Delhi wants the discount, and Farrell and Newman’s (2019) network logic applies squarely: asymmetric position, not sentiment, is what generates leverage.

How China destroyed US sanctions against Iran, Russia, and North Korea

[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2026]

Why China’s Grip on Iron Ore Is a Warning for the US Navy

[The National Interest, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2026]

China Is Moving Fast on AI. It’s Also Keeping It in Line.

[Barron’s, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2026]

China’s green revolution and what it means for the world

[The Week, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2026]

China Exports 1 Million Automobiles in a Month … Twice

[Clean Technica, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2026]

Oligarchy

Trump’s Billionaire Boys Club: How Donald Trump has stacked his administration with investment bankers and billionaire businessmen and women

[Public Citizen, August 17, 2026, via Lever News]

… Among Public Citizen’s key findings:^[5]

President Trump has hired at least 57 individuals with assets of ‘as much as’ $100 million or more to run the government’s public agencies or to act as U.S. ambassadors overseas;^[6]

The combined declared assets of those 57 individuals range from $13.9 billion to more than $34.8 billion;

At least 31 of these individuals have declared assets of $100 million or more;^[7]

Eight of the individuals are worth as much as $1 billion or more;

Nearly 34% of Trump’s cabinet are worth as much as $100 million or more;

Seventeen of these 57 ultra-millionaires are U.S ambassadors, the remaining 40 individuals have senior positions within a wide range of federal agencies;

The appointment of some individuals to senior government positions indicates a striking correlation to multimillion dollar donations to Trump’s presidential political campaign, associated political action committees, or his 2025 Presidential Inaugural Committee;

In total, 30 of the 57 individuals listed in the table below provided more than $65 million in campaign contributions to Trump associated political committees during the 2024 Presidential election cycle.

Monopoly Round-Up: What Happens When Oligarchs Stop Being Polite

Matt Stoller, Aug 16, 2026 [BIG]

Before getting to the full round-up, I want to go over something that is a pretty common tool used to push back against populist policy – the capital strike. That is when an employer or financier uses their ability to withhold capital to threaten a political entity in order to secure desired policy changes. In the 1920s, then-Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon explained the basics: “Just as labor cannot be forced to work against its will, so it can be taken for granted that capital will not work unless the return is worth while.”

We are seeing this situation play out right now, as Paramount CEO David Ellison has told executives at his company that he will move the studio out of California if the Attorney General, Rob Bonta, does not allow his merger with Warner Discovery. He is also threatening to move CBS out of New York City to punish New York Attorney General Leticia James….

But in addition to being interest in and of itself, the Ellison threat is a useful lens to understand what will happen as the populist wave crashes into an entrenched class of oligarchs. After all, right now, there are virtually no examples of challenging billionaires directly, the Paramount-Warner example stands alone. But that will soon change, and we can expect similar reactions from Ellison’s cohort as they face real democratic pushback.

What could this rolling set of conflicts look like?

Let’s go back to Andrew Mellon, who was Treasury Secretary but also the owner of the aluminum monopoly, Alcoa. In 1930, when Democrats in Congress tried to lower the protective tariff on aluminum imports from five to two cents a pound, New York Senator Royal Copeland got a threat which caused him to change his position. If that tariff change happened, Alcoa would offshore its production to Canada. Copeland said the “people of this country are at the mercy of this monster monopoly, no matter what we do.” It was on “account of fear of the power of this corporation to bring distress, poverty, and unemployment to the American toiling masses” that he reversed himself, and maintained the tariff, and Alcoa’s profit margins, at a high level.

Ultimately, New Dealers did break the power of Alcoa, but it took until the 1940s to do that, with a ground-breaking antitrust case, explicit government investment in new aluminum companies, and bauxite and power resources from public lands. The capital strike in 1930 did block the reduction in tariffs, because Mellon had the capital, and the government didn’t develop an alternative means of delivering aluminum for years….

Get ready for a lot more of this dynamic, because we now live in a society where a small number of firms and individuals command trillions of dollars in capital, with tight control of intellectual property and infrastructure. Of course, it’s conceptually easy to destroy these threats of capital strikes, the government could simply supply capital when the superrich balk. That’s why what Mamdani is doing with grocery stores is so infuriating to the rich. You’d also need to break monopolies, weaken copyright and patents, and generally impose public utility rules on vital infrastructure.

The answer, in other words, is democracy. But if you go to Hollywood right now, you’ll find some workers who now want the Paramount-Warner merger to go through, because they believe it’ll keep jobs in California. Threats work, at least until we stand up to them and win.

They Don’t Care

Aurelien [via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2026]

… we have arrived at a situation where you can exercise power and authority, and have influence and demand respect, without the need to have any knowledge of things you are responsible for, to tell the truth about what you do know, or even to regard the search for truth itself as a justifiable and important pursuit.

But the origins of this problem lie, I think, not with Foucault or Derrida (though I’ll touch on them briefly) but with something very different: theories developed by right-wing economists in the 1960s and 1970s.

For years, economists on the fringes had been trying to persuade governments that inflation could be controlled by changes in interest rates. Putting rates up, they claimed, would (theoretically) reduce the demand for money, so that inflation would go down, at least for some values of “inflation,” and some types of interest rates. Inflation was a huge problem in the 1970s as a result of the 1973 oil price shock, and, whilst it was falling substantially by the end of the decade, the Tory government that came to power in 1979 was obsessed with inflation as a threat, and brought these ideas blinking out of the shadows and applied them. Now in practice, the result was a disaster: high interest rates pushed the Pound up and made exports un-competitive, companies went out of business, unemployment doubled, and, ironically, inflation shot up again as high interest rates increased costs. Whoops. But what’s important here is that this is the first known sighting of the idea that knowledge and truth were something to be imposed by fiat, not sought. There was no supporting evidence whatever for the hypothesis linking inflation and interest rates, but those involved didn’t care. The theory was by definition right because it was intellectually persuasive to them, and indeed it continues to have an influence even today.

As economies became more and more virtual, as production of practically everything was outsourced to China, and everything became financialised, statistics became steadily more ethereal. Once, the economic news would be about the balance of payments, the strength of sterling or the rate of unemployment and changes in industrial production. These were all real things that you could in principle measure, and had real effects on peoples’ lives. But now the powers that be have decided that they don’t care about such things and the practical effects on peoples’ lives. Indeed, they don’t care about the real world at all, the world in which we live. This became clear to many people for the first time in the 2008 economic crash, where an astonished public discovered that most of the wealth that was supposed to exist actually didn’t, and that for years clever bankers had been selling sliced-up underperforming mortgages to each other, which were actually worth nothing. Yet if anything, the problem has become worse, with the financialisation of financialisation itself, where the ruling class simply doesn’t care about the real world, but works itself into lathers about futures prices of barrels of oil, and how low they can get them so they can sell them at a profit later. No matter how often they are told that you can’t buy and sell things that don’t exist, they don’t understand and anyway they don’t care….

… knowledge today is derived from norms, and norms are enforced by power, just like the deconstructionists said, although probably not in the way they expected. Truths are normative truths, not pragmatic ones. Thus, Immigration is a Good Thing, costs and practical difficulties do not exist, and anyone who draws attention to them is a fascist. Thus also, entire institutions, in some weird Idealistic sense, are declared inherently “racist” or “sexist.” This is not a judgement about actions of individuals or even groups, but a judgement about the Idealist essence of vaguely defined entities which in fact are changing an evolving all the time. Since the essence of such institutions is decided in advance and can be taken for granted, any search for actual knowledge abut how they operate is unnecessary: critics just don’t care….

This Palantir Billionaire’s Passion Project is Criminalizing Homelessness

Sophie Hurwitz, Aug 22, 2026 [Mother Jones]

Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of the weapons-tech company Palantir, is also a major force behind the Trump administration’s policy of pushing unhoused people toward incarceration.

Lonsdale, a longtime critic of “housing first” policy—which proposes that homelessness be solved by supplying those in need of housing with somewhere to live—argues that fining and arresting people for sleeping in public will push them into mental health treatment….

The Cicero Institute, a lobbying group he founded eight years ago, has been instrumental in passing laws criminalizing camping or sleeping in public in 16 states, according to the New York Times. In total, the think tank has worked to pass 241 pieces of legislation in the past 5 years, on issues ranging from education to healthcare. Its c4 arm, Cicero Action, has engaged in lobbying related to military spending and defense contracts, according to the National Homelessness Law Institute. But time and again, Lonsdale and Cicero return to their push to eliminate unhoused people from public life….

Felonomics

GRAPH: Price increases since the start of the Iran War 2/28/26

[@charliebilello via The Big Picture, August 17, 2026]

Economists Blame $40 Trillion Debt Milestone on Two Things: GOP Ineptitude and Tax Cuts for the Rich

Jake Johnson, August 20, 2026 [CommonDreams]

Elon Musk Broke the FAA — Palantir Is Picking Up the Pieces

[The Verge, via The Big Picture, August 20, 2026]

On August 6 the Minneapolis air route control center lost radar and communications for two hours, disrupting more than 1,100 flights across a 330,000-square-mile, nine-state sector. Musk’s DOGE was supposed to rebuild the nation’s air traffic control system, but it ended up paving the way for Peter Thiel’s company to take over.

Bad Food: It’s not hard to follow the money

Joyce Vance, Aug 22, 2026 [Civil Discourse ]

Trump Is Blocking Billions of Dollars of Grants That Would Fix the Grid

[Canary Media, via The Big Picture, August 16, 2026]

Jeff St. John on the Department of Energy canceling or stalling funding for thousands of projects meant to shore up a stressed grid — and not only in blue states.

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

The Enshittification of Big Food: Why the food on your shelf keeps getting worse

[The Future Market), via The Big Picture, August 19, 2026]

Mike Lee traces the 1990 swap of beef tallow for partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in McDonald’s fryers. The trans fats proved more dangerous than the saturated fat they replaced, and by the late 1990s were blamed for roughly 50,000 premature American deaths a year.

Copper squeeze builds with spreads surging and price near record

[Mining.com, via Naked Capitalism 08-18-2026]

How an Alleged Wage-Fixing Scheme Is Fueling Historic Labor Uprisings

[Sentient, via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2026]

Oil Majors Reap $93 Billion Windfall From the Iran War

[Oil Price, via Naked Capitalism 08-17-2026]

Rising US life expectancy isn’t what it seems

[Salon, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2026]

Health care crisis

Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects

Matt Kristoffersen, August 13, 2026 [Yale School of Public Health]

A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.

For the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, the researchers modeled what would happen if the United States adopted a national public insurance program like the one proposed in the Medicare for All Act. Using 2024 spending, insurance coverage, and mortality data, they estimate that the universal coverage would reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20% — even after accounting for the additional care that uninsured and underinsured people would receive.

Hospital Prepayment Rules Add New Wrinkle to Patients’ Financial Responsibility

[MedPage Today, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2026]

Her Brain Was Broken. It Was Fixed With Sound—Not a Scalpel

[Wired, via The Big Picture, August 19, 2026]

One woman’s meth addiction was so bad, the only option left might have been brain surgery. Then a single session of noninvasive, focused ultrasound seemed to do what years of treatment could not. Emily Mullin on Erin McNulty, missing for weeks and years into methamphetamine use, and the focused-ultrasound procedure that reached her without surgery.

The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized

Paul Krugman [via The Big Picture, August 18, 2026]

Krugman examines the framing fight in Michigan’s Senate race, and why “socialized medicine” is an odd attack line against a system that already is. And there’s nothing radical about wanting to end insurance company parasitism

Restoring balance to the economy

Are Insurers Overcharging in Your State?

Brian Shearer and Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, Aug 17, 2026

In April, I published two papers describing how property insurance is too expensive, and More Perfect Union just posted a great video explaining it. Today, we’re also releasing a new data tool that lets you see exactly how much insurers may be overcharging in your state, drawing on 25 years of insurance regulator data across every state and five major insurance lines.

Everything from auto and homeowners’ insurance to workers comp and liability insurance has become more expensive than necessary. Property insurance is one of the few markets where the government has veto-power over the prices and yet state insurance regulators have allowed the costs to creep up to $1.1 trillion per year. That’s twice what people pay for all utilities combined, so this is a major part of the overall affordability crisis. And it’s not just consumers who pay – businesses across the country are being price gouged too. Insurance is one of the biggest costs for restaurants and small businesses, and a major cost for developers building affordable housing.

The reason prices are so high is simple. Insurers are charging more than they need to cover losses from actual claims, generating extra revenue to pay for wasteful spending on dividends, stock buybacks, excessive advertising budgets and high agent commissions, private jets, and other expenses….

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

The Flock Uprising Is Just the Beginning

[Salon, via The Big Picture, August 16, 2026]

The public rebellion against Flock’s AI-powered surveillance cameras — sold to local governments as mere “license plate readers” — has turned into a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops.

Flock Cameras Are Going to Get Drivers Killed

[Jalopnik, via The Big Picture, August 16, 2026]

Justin Hughes on how often the readers get it wrong, and what happens when police act on a bad hit.

Technology and Constitutional Rot

[Yale Law School, via Naked Capitalism 08-18-2026]

Technological change affects the Constitution not only by creating new problems of constitutional interpretation, but also by changing the distribution of economic and political power. New technologies alter what governments and private actors can know, control, predict, and accomplish. When constitutional institutions fail to adapt, large shifts in power and control can lead to constitutional rot: the process by which a democratic republic becomes less democratic and less republican over time. The United States has suffered from increasing constitutional rot over the past four decades; rapid technological change has made the rot worse.

Our Second Gilded Age has many similarities to the technological and economic upheavals of the First Gilded Age, which was also a period of constitutional decay. We now live in the Algorithmic Society, where public and private decision making increasingly depend on algorithms, artificial intelligence, platforms, large-scale data collection and digital surveillance. The Algorithmic Society produces an Algorithmic State, including a National Surveillance State organized around prediction and prevention. These changes disproportionately strengthen the executive branch, weaken Congress, limit practical judicial oversight, and increase government’s dependence on powerful private firms and privately-owned technological infrastructure.

Large global technology companies increasingly exercise governing power over communications, commerce, national security, access to information, and public debate. As a result, government and technology firms engage in repeated attempts at mutual co-optation, blurring traditional distinctions between public and private power. Digital platforms reshape the public sphere through an attention economy that weakens knowledge, intensifies political polarization, and erodes trust. These changes exacerbate four central features of constitutional rot: growing wealth inequality, political polarization, loss of trust, and policy disasters.

Despite these dire circumstances, the United States has recovered from periods of constitutional rot before. The First Gilded Age gave way to the reforms of the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Today constitutional renewal involves a different set of reforms: new digital privacy laws and new antitrust, civil-rights, and due-process protections. Renewal means reconstructing and improving the knowledge institutions that underwrite our democracy. It requires structural changes that better allow Congress to check and oversee the executive branch. And it requires reforms that secure and strengthen our system of democratic representation.

Meta faces a $1.4 trillion reckoning in latest trial over social media addiction

[Engadget, via Naked Capitalism 08-18-2026]

Facebook Is Drowning In Islamophobic AI Slop Calling for Violence Against Muslim Americans

[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 08-18-2026]

Climate and environmental crises

The Strait of Hormuz Isn’t the Only Major Shipping Route in Crisis

Kate Aronoff, August 21, 2026 [The New Republic]

Two other vital maritime waterways are snarled—due not to war, but the climate. This is the new normal….

Water levels in Germany’s Rhine River—one of Europe’s busiest shipping routes—have been at record lows amid weeks of drought, forcing cargo carriers to cut shipments to as little as one-fifth of normal capacity. Those problems didn’t start this summer, either. Rising temperatures caused by climate change have meant less snow in the Alps during the winter, and so less meltwater draining into the Rhine in warmer months. ING, the Dutch banking giant, estimates that the halt of traffic on the Rhine will lower Germany’s gross domestic product by 0.3 percentage points this year, which is especially bad news considering the country was on track to grow by just 0.8 percentage points all year. German insurer Allianz likewise estimates that the brutal two-week heat wave in June will cut all of Europe’s GDP by 0.3 percentage points. In May, Allianz analysts had already projected that the countries most exposed to extreme heat—France, Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain—will see economic output that’s 5 to 7 percent lower than it would have been otherwise by 2030.

It’s not just Europe. The cost of shipping goods through the busiest lanes in the Panama Canal have jumped to record highs amid falling water levels and increased traffic from vessels redirected from routes disrupted by the Iran war. The Financial Times reports that transit slots on the canal’s most commonly used locks are being auctioned off for 16 times the average price for the same period last year. The ongoing El Niño—on track to be the strongest such event in 76 years—has seen wet season rainfalls slip below previous levels. Climate change has already made rainfall there much less predictable, meaning extreme droughts and floods both threaten to “push canal infrastructure past its operational limits,” The New York Times reported….

Low Rivers, High Stakes: Europe’s Nuclear Cooling Crisis

Felicity Bradstock – Aug 21, 2026 [oilprice.com]

Democrats’ political malpractice

Hakeem Jeffries’ Betrayal Shows Why Democratic Voters Are So Enraged

David Sirota, August 17, 2026 [The Lever]

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) announced his opposition to Medicare for All on the same day a CBS News poll found 90 percent of Democratic voters support the idea — and 72 hours after a Yale University study showed the program would save 114,000 American lives and $1 trillion every single year.

Here’s some important context: Jeffries has raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign cash from healthcare PACs in the 2026 election cycle and didn’t face any primary challenge holding him accountable to Democratic voters’ desires, despite him representing a deep New York City blue district….

All the Change in the World

Thomas Frank [Harper’s, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2026]

… Despite its text-inflected architecture and its staggering price tag, the Obama Center is, in fact, not a presidential library at all: it houses no official presidential records for researchers to dig through. Those are stored in a National Archives facility somewhere in suburban Maryland. With this magnificent granite chunk, in other words, the vanity side of postpresidential structures has finally and totally eclipsed the research side. Instead of archives, the Obama Center features beautiful landscaping, a restaurant and bar, an athletic center, and up in the tower an Obama museum that trumpets what is flattering to its subject and omits what is not….

I intend no insult when I use the word “elite”; it is the only word that accurately represents the dazzling list of names one finds on the Obama Center’s donor wall. In the fifty-million-dollars-and-up category we find Jeff Bezos, of Amazon and the Washington Post; Connie Ballmer, the wife of a former Microsoft CEO; Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb; TWG Global, an AI-focused holding company; a foundation associated with the private-equity billionaire Glenn H. Hutchins; and a mystery donor identified as Anonymous.

These patterns persist in the more densely populated donor categories: tech and private equity, multibillionaires and dynastic wealth; great foundations and the biggest of big corporations. Eric Schmidt and Sean Parker are there, as are Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. Ken Griffin, a financier who supports conservative causes, shows up in the 1-to-9.9-million-dollar category, along with the personal foundation of the Walmart heiress Alice Walton and the Walmart Foundation itself….

Fifteen years ago, conservatives used this sort of anodyne sentiment—then as now one of Obama’s favorite modes—to spin nightmares about our “radical” president and how he intended to “socialize” America. Others, like me, brushed it off because we came to see Obama as a moderate’s moderate, a would-be Blue Dog Democrat, a man who honored norms, precedent, and incrementalism to a self-sabotaging degree. This man was no progressive, we would realize: he was a fan of the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman; chose Larry Summers as his principal economic adviser; and longed to strike a “grand bargain” with the Republicans in Congress. (Cuts to Social Security and Medicare in exchange for tax increases, for those who don’t remember.)

To judge by the Obama Center, however, one might wonder whether those right-wingers were on to something after all. Summers and the pursuit of a “grand bargain” are not mentioned in the museum; they have been removed from the official account. But Rules for Radicals is sold in the gift shop. And the museum does describe—at length and in some detail—the history of left-wing protest in America. Exhibit after exhibit carries visitors to the unavoidable conclusion that Barack Obama was somehow the bearer of the sacred flame of reform, the heir of the Progressives, the women’s-suffrage movement, the New Deal, the civil-rights movement, the various upheavals of the Sixties, the Eighties Chicago mayor Harold Washington, and pretty much any other left-wing insurgency you can think of. He was, the museum suggests, the most progressive president anyone could possibly hope for.

Powerful institutions cloaking themselves in the trappings of radicalism has been a familiar phenomenon ever since the nation’s corporations, foundations, electric utilities, and intelligence agencies decided a while back that they needed to depict themselves as intersectional warriors against colonialism and white supremacy. But here the stratagem indicates something more meaningful….

Resistance

The Supreme Court’s Greatest Weakness: A History of Successful Defiance – How states, presidents, and Congress have repeatedly defied the Supreme Court and won

Christopher Armitage, Aug 16, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

America Has the Parts to Build What the EU Built: A Toolkit for Beating Autocrats.

Christopher Armitage, Aug 18, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]

Just a few months ago, Hungary held an election with roughly 80 percent turnout and threw Viktor Orbán out of power after sixteen years. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party, which ran on naming the Orbán government’s corruption openly and promising specific measures to dismantle it, won 53.18 percent of the vote and 138 of the 199 seats in parliament, a two-thirds supermajority, while Orbán’s Fidesz took 55 seats. Magyar’s 3.3 million votes were the most any party has ever received in democratic Hungary. The textbook case of a seemingly successfully captured regime ended at a ballot box the regime itself had spent over a decade engineering to be unloseable.

Orbán lost because several conditions converged, and one of them was that the European Union spent years successfully deploying a working soft-power apparatus that starved his patronage system of the money it ran on. Over the course of the Orbán government’s standoff with Brussels, the EU froze tens of billions of euros earmarked for Hungary on rule-of-law grounds, with around 18 billion still frozen at the time of the election and over a billion permanently forfeited when the first tranche of suspended funds expired at the end of 2024. That money had been the lifeblood of the Fidesz network, much of it historically funneled to Orbán-connected oligarchs who in turn kept the regime’s coalition loyal. Cut off the money and the coalition gets fragile. When Tisza ran a credible challenge, the coalition broke. The collapse was policy doing exactly what it was designed to do….

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Deploying To SCOTUS: Big Oil’s Dark Money Army

Freddy Brewster, August 20, 2026 [The Lever]

Dark-money conservative groups and Big Oil interests have quietly mobilized behind a landmark Supreme Court case that could restrict when and how states and municipalities can seek climate damages from fossil fuel companies. At the center of the case is an oil and gas company linked to a major Trump donor and personal ally of Justice Samuel Alito.

Suncor Energy Inc. v. Board of County Commissioners of Boulder County will decide whether states and local municipalities can sue oil and gas companies that knew fossil fuels contributed to worsening natural disasters and hid it from the public. Suncor is partially owned by Elliott Investment Management — a private equity firm led by Trump donor Paul Singer, who has vacationed with Alito — and has attracted the attention of the dark money network associated with Leo Leonard, the billionaire-backed architect of the far-right Supreme Court….

Consumer Watchdog found that at least 16 of the groups that filed amicus briefs supporting the oil and gas companies are funded by the Koch Network, a petrochemical-fueled conservative coalition, and nine of the groups received funding from Leo’s dark money machine. Ten of the groups were partially bankrolled by the Sarah Scaife Foundation, a conservative nonprofit that helped fund the Heritage Foundation as it wrote the Project 2025 blueprint to remake the federal government under the second Trump administration.

How the Supreme Court Kicked Off America’s Sports Betting Addiction Crisis

Madiba K. Dennie, 08.18.26 [Talking Points Memo]

In 2017, Americans legally wagered $4.9 billion on sporting events. Last year, they bet over $165 billion. And the true costs of their bets were even higher: One-quarter of sports bettors, surveyed by U.S. News last summer, worried that they couldn’t control their gambling. Over 30,000 people reach out to the National Problem Gambling Helpline every month.

“Problem gambling,” a term referring to an inability to control gambling behavior that results in personal or financial harm, is at least twice as common among sports bettors as among gamblers in general. It’s unsurprising, then, that Congress enacted a law decades ago that prohibited sports gambling throughout much of the country. But in 2018, the Supreme Court struck that law down, freeing states to partner with the gambling industry to profit off their vulnerable residents. A growing body of research shows Americans are now paying the price.

Before the Court’s decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, only four states authorized some form of sports betting. One year after Murphy, 19 states and the District of Columbia authorized sports betting. Today, 39 states and Washington, D.C., have laws authorizing sports betting. Most allow people to place mobile bets, which means that millions of Americans now carry an addictive bankrupting device in their pockets.

The consequences have been predictably grim. A June 2026 study of patient records showed that in states that legalized sports betting, diagnoses of gambling disorder increased by more than 60 percent since the Court’s ruling. A March 2026 study found statistically significant increases in people falling 90 or more days behind on their car loan and student loan payments—both in states that legalized sports betting and in counties within 15 miles of a legal state….

[TW: I have written a number of times that one of the key principles of civic republicanism is a civic duty to “do good.” Such abhorrent Supreme Court decisions can be easily struck down by simply defining these principles of civic republicanism if we somehow manage to revive the philosophy. ]

Civic republicanism

How 10,000 American Cities Got Their Names

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, August 18, 2026]

Carl Churchill mines a century-old federal report in which geographer Henry Gannett of the United States Geological Survey catalogued the origins of some 10,000 town and city names. Good semiquincentennial reading. The federal government used to catalog the origins of town names nationwide. A 334-page report reveals the influences that shaped American communities as they spread across the country.

[TW: Conservatives like to stoke the cultural war issue of “patriotism.” And liberals and the left have stupidly allowed conservatives to dominate the discussion of public virtue, and “patriotism.” What could be more patriotic than understanding the historical background of where you live? The national government in the 1920s funding a United States Geological Survey project to identify and record the origins of town names is a great example of promoting the General Welfare – in no small part because there is no immediately obvious link to the General Welfare. Contrast this to Margaret Thatcher’s notorious principle of conservative economics / neoliberalism, “There is no such thing as society.” As conservatives like to argue, USA is a republic, not a democracy. But they have no idea what the actual governing principles of a republic should be. In fact, they are hostile to those principles, because they point to imposing strict and severe limitations on capitalism and “free enterprise” and a fundamental hostility to concentrations of economic power.]

The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA

[WSJ, via Naked Capitalism 08-20-2026]

Without CIA funding that helped keep NeXT afloat in the ’80s, Steve Jobs might not have made a triumphant return to Apple—and the iPhone might not have its foundational operating code.

[TW: Just one example of Alexander Hamilton’s policies and how USA was actually built (see the links at the end): government promotion of science and technology.”]

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Uncategorized Page 1 of 118

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 06, 2026

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