Within hours of Charlie Kirk’s shooting last month, politicos in the White House and lawyers at the Justice Department and Homeland Security scrambled to draft up back-of-the-envelope plans for a crackdown on their domestic foes, sources tell me. Illegal immigrants, anti-ICE protesters, leftists, trans people, gamers, Hamas supporters, Antifa; the administration had a hard time pinning down who exactly was the new enemy, so they ended up including them all.
But how to do it? How to destroy the “enemy within”? The answer was to frame the Kirk assassination and political violence generally as a national security problem and not merely one of law enforcement….
As one source close to the White House told me, the gruesome spectacle of Kirk’s bloody assassination was traumatic for the many administration officials who knew him personally; especially Donald Trump, who narrowly survived his own assassination attempt last year. Their anxiety about domestic terrorists walking among us, hiding in plain sight, is in large part attributable to this.
Asked if the murder was traumatic event for MAGA, Mike Howell, a former homeland security official and president of the Heritage Foundation-backed Oversight Project, replied simply: “100%.”….
The administration’s frantic planning session precipitated by Kirk’s murder was formalized days later in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. Called “NSPM-7” by insiders, the sweeping directive targets radical left “terrorism” by relying on so-called indicators like “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” speech. (I’ve reported on the significance of NSPM-7 here.)
Banking compliance expert Poorvika Mehra told American Banker that NSPM-7 “is basically asking you to follow the money, but within ideological movements, and compliance teams immediately ask which customers put the banks at risk.” She anticipates that banks will respond to NSPM-7 by simply dropping affected clients rather than deal with the headache….
British journalist and political commentator Sami Hamdi was detained by U.S. immigration officers at San Francisco International Airport while on a speaking tour, reportedly after criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said Hamdi appeared to have been taken into custody following pressure from far-right activist Laura Loomer, who publicly claimed credit for the detention. Hamdi had just spoken at CAIR’s Sacramento gala on Friday and was scheduled to appear at the group’s Florida event the following night. Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin posted on X that Hamdi’s visa was revoked and that he was in ICE custody “pending removal,” adding: “Under President Trump, those who support terrorism and undermine American national security will not be allowed to work or visit this country. It’s common sense.”
Thomas E. Brzozowski, October 27, 2025 [justsecurity.org]
Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designations are one of the most powerful legal instruments in America’s counterterrorism arsenal. Originally conceived to combat international terrorist networks like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS), these designations trigger sweeping financial sanctions, severe criminal penalties, and extensive surveillance authorities. President Donald Trump’s comments at a White House roundtable on “Antifa” earlier this month make it likely that his administration will designate this decentralized anti-fascist movement as an FTO — a move that would create an unprecedented expansion of counterterrorism authorities into the domestic political space….
Once an organization is designated as an FTO, providing “material support” to it becomes a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison, or life if the support results in death. The statutory definition of “material support” is intentionally expansive and includes providing: “currency or monetary instruments, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, personnel, and transportation.” Only medicine and religious materials are explicitly exempted.
The breadth of this definition reflects Congress’s determination to eliminate all forms of assistance to designated organizations. The statute applies to U.S. persons regardless of where the prohibited conduct occurs, creating global reach for American terrorism prosecutions. The Supreme Court’s decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project clarified that even speech intended to promote peaceful conflict resolution may constitute material support if provided to a designated organization….
Jessica Washington, October 29 2025 [The Intercept]
The Department of Justice has brought federal charges against Illinois House candidate Kat Abughazaleh and five other activists for protesting outside of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago.
The 11-page indictment, which was filed on October 23 and unsealed Wednesday, accuses Abughazaleh and the other protesters of using “force, intimidation and threat” as part of a conspiracy to prevent an unnamed ICE agent from “discharging his duties” and to “injure him in his person or property.”
[Migrant Insider, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2025]
A FEDERAL JUDGE IN CHICAGO RULED last Wednesday that starting this week ICE agents can now face arrest and contempt proceedings if they conduct unlawful, warrantless arrests, marking a dramatic shift in immigration enforcement oversight in the city.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings found that ICE agents violated the terms of a consent decree by detaining people without proper warrants, following a surge in such arrests amid increased enforcement activity. According to the judge’s order, ICE agents must now wear body cameras and have them turned on. They also cannot arrest anyone complying with their appointment dates at immigration courthouses.
Julia Ainsley and Didi Martinez of NBC News reported today that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s rush to get new recruits onto the street has meant they have pushed into their training program more than 200 people who have disqualifying criminal backgrounds, fail drug testing, or don’t meet the academic or physical requirements.
The budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed in July—the one they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—included more than $170 billion over four years for immigration and border security. The law tripled ICE’s annual budget, giving it “more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined,” according to Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy law and policy institute.
Part of that money was to hire about 10,000 deportation officers. As O’Herron notes, a 2017 report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found that to hire 10,000 officers would require vetting 500,000 applicants….
In August, ICE began to offer a $50,000 signing bonus and got rid of its age limits. To fill the ranks, Ainsley and Martinez note, ICE has already shortened its training program from 13 weeks to 6. They report that nearly half of those dismissed from ICE over the past three months could not pass an open-book exam. Others could not run 1.5 miles in less than 14 minutes, 25 seconds, or do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups.
Sociologist Ian Carillo called attention to a 2020 article by political scientists Adam Scharpf and Christian Glässel looking into why secret police agents are often “surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect.” By examining the 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina from 1975 to 1983, they discovered that the ranks of secret police are filled by those who perform poorly in merit-based systems. Facing firing for their poor performance, they turn to more burdensome secret police work.
Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker established the “Illinois Accountability Commission” to compile evidence against federal agents who have harassed, intimidated, brutalized, and detained American citizens and legal residents in Illinois. “None of this is about crime or safety,” Pritzker said. “If it were, there would be coordination with local law enforcement and judicial warrants…. Under normal circumstances,” he said, “federal agency supervisors and inspectors general would enforce proper legal procedures and protocols and hold accountable those who violate them.” But Trump has fired 17 inspectors general and installed cronies at the Department of Justice, while MAGA congress members refuse to hold hearings or conduct oversight. Administration officials are acting as if they are “immune from investigation or accountability,” Pritzker said “They are not.”
…Trump himself has called for jailing Pritzker and Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “for failing to protect” ICE officers. Priztker, a billionaire and potential 2028 presidential candidate, has suggested Trump should be removed from office via the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Miles Taylor, who served as Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during the first Trump administration and authored an infamous, anonymous 2018 New York Timeseditorial, said Friday, “Feels like we’re going down the rabbit hole pretty fast here, folks.”
California state Sen. Scott Weiner (D-11), one of the Democrats running for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s seat in the next cycle, said: “They’re now explicitly taking the position that state and local elected officials are committing crimes when they attempt to protect their communities from the ICE secret police.”….
Yesterday, one of the men Trump freed from accountability was arrested for allegedly plotting to murder the House minority leader.
A story in three parts.
“I will kill him for the future,” 34-year-old Christopher Moynihan stated via text, according to New York court records. “Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” he went on.
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, October 21, 2025 [The New Republic]
House Speaker Mike Johnson brushed off assassination threats against Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Tuesday, claiming that—despite the wannabe assassin’s conservative politics—the left is still at fault….
…Johnson chose to throw the responsibility back at America’s ideological left.
“I will tell you this, the violence on the left is far more prevalent than the violence on the right,” Johnson said Tuesday. “The assassination culture that’s been advanced now—this is the left, in almost every case that is advancing this, and not the right. Let’s not make this a partisan issue, you don’t want me to go there.
“The rhetoric that you saw on display Saturday, we highlighted yesterday, it plays into this. There are people that get triggered—there are deranged people in society when they hear elected officials participating in a rally that was paid for by [George] Soros and sponsored by Communists, with signs and placards and mantras that were repeated that, ‘We should bring death to fascist politicians.’ They call every Republican a fascist now,” Johnson said, referring to the peaceful No Kings protests that took place across the country this past weekend….
In addition to deploying tens of thousands of federal agents from across the federal government to carry out his deportation agenda, President Donald Trump is rapidly expanding the network of state and local police going after immigrants through partnerships with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
The aggressive, nationwide law enforcement regime, all taking place under orders from the White House, amounts to what scholars, attorneys, and now a federal judge say are steps toward the creation of a national police force. And the ranks of ICE partners won’t be filled with just local cops: In at least three states, the administration is joining forces with agencies typically tasked with environmental and marine protection, lottery control, and gaming to target immigrants….
Every Thursday afternoon I do a Substack live with Michael Cohen (@therealmichaelcohen) and Lev Parnas (@levparnas) we call “Unleashed”. I amusingly refer to it as “Two Felons and a Spy.”
These two men have a decade and a half of experience working directly for Donald Trump on a day-to-day basis: Cohen as Trump’s personal lawyer and Parnas as his Russia-Ukraine fixer on the project that got Trump impeached. They both suddenly found themselves and their integrity by turning against Trump when investigated for charges of fraud.
But no good deed goes unpunished, and Trump’s Department of Justice quickly prosecuted both of them….
Of all the people who are on the never-Trump train, these two have special insight that no other people in the never-Trump world have. They know what is in Trump’s mind, and they also know all of his cabinet members personally. So when Parnas and Cohen speak, I listen very, very carefully.
In the continued discussions about the rising levels of rhetoric equating the Democratic Party to violent extremism. I had to pose one question:
Will Trump order violence against Americans?
Cohen was unequivocal, “No. He won’t. That’s not the way he operates. He does nothing directly.” Lev Parnas agreed that Trump himself is a coward and won’t order violence with the words coming out of his mouth, “Go kill people.”
But … they added a caveat.
They both agree that Trump will let someone else order the killing for him.
A few weeks ago, I asked them, “Who in the administration will get Trump to issue the order that will result in killing Americans?”
Almost simultaneously, they both said, “Stephen Miller.”
The role of Stephen Miller is now to shape the political environment to get Trump to allow him and his secret Police, ICE, to characterize the opposing party as a terrorist organization. In a further step towards single-party rule and dictatorship, on August 26, Miller stated, “the Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” ….
It’s hard to watch. People being treated like they are less than human because of their perceived immigration status….
In early October, federal agents with Border Patrol, the FBI, and ATF arrested 37 people in a raid on a Chicago apartment building at 7500 S. South Shore Drive. They banged on residents’ doors overnight, according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times, “pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said.”….
Earlier this month, at West Loop Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois, ICE was forced to release two sisters it pulled out of their car at a school pick up, because they have legal status under DACA. But that didn’t stop the masked agents, captured on video by a quick-thinking teacher, from surrounding the car and smashing its windows before dragging the two out. One of the sisters cried out her name and where she lived to bystanders, an apparent effort to prevent being “disappeared” into ICE custody….
In Portland, Oregon, on October 5, ICE agents threatened to arrest and kill an ambulance driver. The incident is documented by witness reports filed with the ambulance crew’s employer and its union by different individuals, as well as 911 calls, dispatch reports, and emergency communications. The ambulance was called to the ICE office to treat an injured protester, but agents refused to let the ambulance leave once the patient was loaded….
A video filmed in September that recently went viral shows ICE firing on protestors and hitting Presbyterian minister David Black in the head with a pepper ball. The minister, who was injured, is now suing. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin tweeted that the shooting was justified because….
There are now so many of these stories flooding the country, and they come with such rapidity, that it’s impossible to keep up with all of them. In other words, these incidents aren’t the exceptions. They aren’t unusual. And there’s every indication that they are tolerated, even encouraged, by Trump’s machine.
Trump promised he’d deport violent criminals. Instead, ICE is going after legal residents and terrorizing children. The message: if you’re an American citizen, don’t exercise your First Amendment rights unless you want to become a target too….
…The Trump administration is playing another long game, or trying to, in the streets of US cities under Democratic Party governance, using existing presidential emergency powers to send National Guard, Army troops and ICE agents to hunt down and arrest suspected undocumented immigrants and detain and deport them, without the due process demanded by the Constitution. What’s happening now may be a trial run for the use of those forces to interfere on the behalf of the president and the Republican Party in states where the Democratic Party has a chance to win crucial seats in next fall’s Congressional elections. I’ve been told by someone with inside knowledge that planning for such action is now under way in the White House….
…as we have all learned over the last several months, Stephen Milller is Trump’s operational lead – if not his puppeteer. Miller, the white nationalist who is Trump’s deputy chief of staff in charge of increasingly everything, is the one who makes things happen in Trump’s White House.
Unlike Trump, Miller is not stupid, nor does he suffer from dementia. He knows full well that what Trump is saying is not true. (He may well be the one encouraging Trump’s demented fantasies.)
So we know the answer for him is No. 3: He’s knowingly, intentionally lying.
And given what we know about him, from his own words, it’s not hard to figure out why: He wants a national cleansing.
He wants MAGA and the state to wipe out the opposition. He wants, in short, a civil war. And he thinks he can start one in Portland and Chicago.
“The issue before [u]s now is very simple and clear,” he tweeted on Saturday. “There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.” ….
New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (with whom I have had my differences) asked several experts about Trump and Miller’s intentions. The answers, published this morning, were revelatory.
“If Trump, Miller & Co. are not hoping to provoke violence, they sure act as if they are,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote in an email to Edsall. “It’s not simply about provoking violence, though, but inflicting it, as ICE has been doing all along. The spiral of violence usually begins with official violence.”
Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start, explained:
”The quickest way to piss people off is to send soldiers into their neighborhoods especially when there’s no reason for them to be there. It’s inherently provocative, and Trump and his team understand this. Research by the political scientist Robert Pape shows that the single most powerful predictor of suicide terrorism is the presence of foreign troops on local soil. People hate, hate, hate that. They hate the humiliation, the powerlessness, the feeling of being occupied.
“Once citizens begin to view their own government’s security forces as an occupying army, violence becomes inevitable. Trump’s team knows this. In fact, that’s the point. They are not trying to restore order; they’re trying to trigger the very unrest that would justify further crackdowns. In the end, violence serves their ultimate end: They want to create the illusion of disorder so they can tighten control and stay in power indefinitely.” ….
Over four decades as a journalist, I’ve covered seven presidents, 20 Congresses, and thousands of staffers. I’ve never encountered one as sinister as Stephen Miller.
I see it in the darkness of his eyes, the venom of his words, the malevolence of his affect. And also by the deliberate brutality of his campaign from the White House to deport immigrants and crush dissenters….
Trump’s newest presidential memoranda criminalizes critics of empire, capitalism, Christian nationalism, abuses by the state and those who fight racism and gender discrimination.
Fascists, historically, are surprisingly candid about the world they intend to create. Those they target, despite this transparency, are surprisingly obtuse about what is coming.
The most ominous warning to date from our homegrown fascists is the latest Presidential memo, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” It accuses any critic of law enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the American empire, capitalism, the Christian right, the persecution of immigrants and those that decry discrimination based on race and gender, as well as those who question white, male patriarchy, described as “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” of fomenting “violent revolution.”
It is a declaration of war on the so-called “radical left,” those the Trump administration blames for “heinous assassinations and other acts of political violence” from the murder of the right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk to “the 2024 assassination of a senior healthcare executive and the 2022 assassination attempt against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.” ….
The memo brazenly inverts the rule of law. It turns the law into an instrument of injustice. It uses the decorum of federal agencies, the courts and trials to legalize state crimes. It is grounded in magical thinking, bizarre conspiracy theories and a paranoia that sees the most tepid acts of dissent or criticism as treason….
I spent two years with the architects of our emergent fascism when I wrote my book, “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” They do not hide their vision for America. They plan to make the legal system subservient to dogma. They hate the “secular humanist” society based on science and reason. They dream of making the Ten Commandments the basis of the legal system. They plan to teach Creationism or “Intelligent Design” in public schools and make education overtly “Christian.” They brand the LGBTQ community, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals, and those dismissed as “nominal Christians” — meaning Christians who do not embrace the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible — as deviants. These deviants are worthy only of being silenced, imprisoned or killed. They condemn government assistance programs, especially for the poor. The climate crisis is a hoax. They call for the federal government to be reduced to protecting property rights, “homeland” security and waging war. They want church organizations to run social-welfare agencies and schools. They demand the expansion of the death penalty to include “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder. They call for a return to white, male patriarchy by mythologizing the past. They demand women be denied contraception, access to abortion and equality under the law. The only legitimate voices in public discourse and the media, to them, are “Christian.” America is sacralized as an agent of God. Those who defy the “Christian” authorities, at home and abroad, are agents of Satan.
These Christian fascists are incapable of dealing in the world of ideas, nuance and complexity. Stunted by emotional numbness and an inchoate rage, they are unable to communicate in any language other than threats and coercion. Diplomacy, scholarship, culture and journalism are an anathema. One’s duty is to obey.
…“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left wing terrorism,” Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said, referring to the issuance….
The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and “entities” whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following “indicia” (indicators) of violence:
anti-Americanism,
anti-capitalism,
anti-Christianity,
support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
extremism on migration,
extremism on race,
extremism on gender
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
“The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts,” the directive states ….
In his latest attempt to turn the US military on an American city, President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he was sending troops to Portland, Oregon and had authorized them to use “Full Force, if necessary.”
“At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social….
President Trump said Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively have broken the law, a significant broadening of his attacks on journalists and their First Amendment right to critique the government.
A day after asserting that broadcasters should potentially lose their licenses over negative news coverage of him, Mr. Trump escalated his condemnations of the press, suggesting such reporters were lawbreakers….
Trump’s new EO is the formal declaration of the rabid fascist war to crush political opposition. It is a statement of the administration’s intention to designate any institutions organizing and funding political opposition as agents of domestic terrorism, and then to use the toolset of “anti-terrorism” to harass, disrupt, and destroy them. The order first lists off some disparate recent events—the killing of Charlie Kirk and United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the pot shots taken at Trump during his campaign, the (half ass, not really) “assassination attempt” on Brett Kavanaugh—along with quasi-imaginary “Riots in Los Angeles and Portland” to paint a picture of a crisis of political violence….
Emma Long [The Conversation. via SCOTUStoday 09-23-2025]
A 1964 Supreme Court ruling looms large in President Donald Trump’s effort to win a libel and defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, two Times journalists, and Penguin Random House, whom he’s accused of trying to damage his reputation and disrupt his 2024 campaign, according to The Conversation. The court’s decision in New York Times v. Sullivan made it clear that public officials have to clear a high bar to win defamation suits, proving not just that there were factual errors, but also that false information was published “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” The ruling “provided the press in the US with one of the most protected spaces in the world in which to operate.”
This afternoon, a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia returned an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey. The two-count indictment is about a page and a half long. It charges Comey with….
Only one prosecutor signed the indictment, which is unusual. Trump’s newly appointed U.S. Attorney and former criminal defense lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, signed. Typically, the signature of the U.S. Attorney is accompanied by those of the prosecutor or prosecutors who worked on the investigation and will be handling the guilty plea or trial that comes next….
…We have a system of “notice pleading” in our criminal justice system, which means a defendant is entitled to notice of the charges against them so they can prepare a defense. It’s likely Comey’s lawyers will ask for a bill of particulars, which will force the government to specify the precise statements he is charged with making and the factual basis for the charges….
Donald Trump’s latest foray into financial innovation, the proposed USD1 Stablecoin, raises serious concerns about conflicts of interest and the potential looting of the U.S. Treasury. As advocates point out, if Trump were to consolidate control over what could soon become the largest stablecoin exchange, he would gain a private channel to influence and profit from dollar-denominated digital transactions worldwide. While the venture is not yet the dominant player, the combination of presidential authority and business ambition makes its rapid ascendance almost inevitable. What looks like a new tool for global finance could instead become a funnel for enriching Trump and his allies.
The danger becomes clearer when considering Trump’s control over the Treasury itself. The Department is responsible for deciding which stablecoin issuers are permitted to purchase U.S. Treasuries as the “backing” for their digital coins. By blurring the line between state power and personal enterprise, Trump could ensure that his exchange enjoys privileged access to government debt instruments, securing liquidity and legitimacy while starving competitors. This mechanism effectively transforms public debt—paid for by taxpayers—into a private revenue engine. In other words, Trump would wield Treasury policy not for national stability, but for personal enrichment.
Schuyler Mitchell, September 26, 2025 [Mother Jones]
…I spoke with Chip Gibbons, policy director at the nonprofit civil liberties advocacy organization Defending Rights & Dissent, about the Trump administration’s playbook for crushing free speech.
Gibbons has spent a decade submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI—including asking for the FBI’s antifa files in 2017—in an attempt to shed light on its domestic surveillance activities….
According to the Miami Herald, over 1,000 detainees in Florida’s immigrant internment camp have effectively “disappeared,” with family and attorneys unable to track their whereabouts.
Michael Tomasky, September 22, 2025 [The New Republic]
…We learned of all this the same day that Trump decided it was time to just stop pretending and ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute three specific individuals: New York Attorney General Letitia James, Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, and former FBI Director James Comey. He declared all three “guilty as hell” and wrote on social media: “We cant [sic] delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”….
…The Justice Department is being destroyed—slowly at first, and now all at once. Most of the lawyers in the Civil Rights Division have left or are leaving. Ditto the Federal Programs Branch, the office that’s supposed to defend an administration’s claims in court. Reuters confirmed in July that 69 of 110 lawyers in that branch were skedaddling. The exodus figure for civil rights back in May was a similar 70 percent….
Combine this with what happened last week to Jimmy Kimmel, and I think we can now just say it. The United States of America is no longer a democracy. It’s not a totally authoritarian state. I’m obviously writing these words of dissent, as are hundreds, thousands of others like me. We’re still having elections, so far. Most courts are still functioning normally. At many levels where the White House can’t just do turnkey autocracy, there is ferocious resistance. And there is a defiant public making their voices heard, alongside a not-insignificant faction of Trump voters who are growing disillusioned with what they’re seeing. And as the polls tell us, the mad king is failing to win people over, and public opinion, at least much of the time, still matters too. These facts can reassure us….
…In McKibben’s telling, everything about solar is going better than anticipated. Solar efficiency is increasing exponentially with prices falling through the floor. The material bill for solar is also in freefall. Everything surrounding solar is going amazing, too. Battery capacity is improving even faster than solar generation, and the best new batteries use the incredibly abundant element sodium (not lithium) to store those useful electrons. Long-haul transmission lines are crisscrossing the world.
Hyper-reliable electric cars keep getting cheaper, and the batteries are lasting much longer than we used to think they would. Some of these vehicles are nigh-miraculous, from the ebikes that get 5 miles to the penny, to the world’s heaviest EV, a dump truck that shuttles to a quarry atop a hill where it is loaded with rocks, then regeneratively brakes its way back down the hill, accumulating enough charge to get back up to the top again (a perpetual motion machine!). Heat pumps and induction tops are actually more efficient than burning natural gas – in other words, it’s cheaper to convert sunshine into electrons and electrons into heat than it is to just burn gas…
Then there’s the capacity. China’s solar capacity growth is insane – the solar equivalent of a new coal plant is coming online every eight hours. But it’s even more intense in poor regions of the global south, like in Pakistan, where a legion of installers have learned their craft from Tiktok videos set to songs from popular musical films, leading to one of the most rapid electrification rollouts in human history. The closer a country is to the equator, the more sense solar makes, of course, so solar is sweeping some of the poorest countries in the world, liberating them from the need to attract foreign currency they can use to buy dollar-denominated barrels of oil….
Fossil fuels are valuable because they are a chokepoint on the entire productive economy. Anyone who’s seen the Mad Max documentaries knows how this goes: even the most mid, paunchy, straw-haired boomer with volcanic bacne and shitty dress-sense can seize power over the whole population if he controls the supply of one of life’s essentials.
The fossil fuel industry is a magnet for people who love a chokepoint. These people are born tollboth operators and they never stop hunting for turnpikes. They are landlords for ancient corpses, charging the whole world rent to keep the lights on. They are chokepoint-trophic.
…Long before the Kirk slaying, a similarly designed effort sought to reclassify nonprofits within the liberal fundraising infrastructure, as well as the left-wing institutions that support Palestine, as domestic terrorists. That failed, but that was before there was a shooting of a conservative celebrity to exploit. This is their Saddam Hussein-era Iraq, and they really want to invade. One of the things they want most of all, as they wanted after Oklahoma City and as they wanted after 9/11, is to define their enemies as terrorists so their violence can only be seen as counter-terrorism. Counterterrorist violence enjoys legitimacy by default.…
After Pat Robertson died in 2023, I wrote this, about Robertson’s fantastical attributions of blame for 9/11:
“It’s irrelevant that they offered no material explanation for how gays and liberals were the real culprits for 9/11. What mattered instead was the signal they sent, that there didn’t need to be a material explanation for the attacks—there just needed to be a pre-existing enemy, here at home, whose works bore a culpability for the 9/11 atrocity that was realer than the truth. Not only was there no need to reassess, as Sontag suggested, America’s military and economic relationship with oppressive Arab and Muslim governments, Robertson and company saw in the War on Terror a new front for a culture war, which for them meant a religious war.”
…In 2025 as in 2001, the goal remains wielding permanent political, economic and social power. In the intervening years of the War on Terror, its normalized violence became ever more available as an option for those dreaming of such enduring dominance….
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the U.S. federal government is openly engaging in an unconstitutionalcriminal conspiracy to persecute, dismantle and disenfranchise its political opposition with the clear goal of making future elections a foregone conclusion….
Here are the five pillars of the Trump regime’s new doctrine:
Sanctify Charlie Kirk as a martyr. Kirk’s murder was a perfect flashpoint for the Trump regime to turn its narrative of white, Christian, male persecution into a war cry against Democrats. Kirk is no longer a racist, misogynist podcaster; he is a slain Christian crusader. (“See you in Valhalla”)
DARVO Kirk’s murder. Within hours, Trump blamed Kirk’s murder on the “radical left” with no evidence. This is the abuser’s favorite tactic—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender. Never admit you were wrong. Always blame your own victims. This has not relented in this case in spite of facts that contradict the narrative.
Expand the enemy to Democrats. While Trump initially blamed the “radical left” and many of the initial actions are aimed at scapegoats like “Antifa” and transgender people, the rhetoric is far more broadly aimed at “Democrats,” “the left” and liberals.
Convert outrage to quasi-legal machinery. While continuously applying rhetoric designed to dehumanize political enemies as “violent terrorists,” the regime promises to abuse powers such as RICO, conspiracy, and insurrection against increasingly broad categories of people.
Use emergency powers to complete a de facto coup. The regime will weaponize unrest caused by its own violence and oppression to unconstitutionally seize more power through declaring emergencies, expand the militarization of blue cities, and ensure that mid-term elections are either meaningless or “postponed.”
Each part of this plan has been either openly promised, or heavily implied in public statements by Trump or his closest advisors in the last few days. There has been no deviation from their pre-determined narrative….
Neo-COINTELPRO
COunter-INTELligence-PROgram (COINTELPRO) was J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign against his political targets….
The Trump regime has a different approach. It displays its anti-democratic goals proudly and makes no illusions about what it wants or how it intends to get it. While it took decades of investigations to uncover the damage Hoover had done, one of the most alarming things about the Trump regime is that its neo-COINTELPRO is not clandestine, it is overt. There is no apparent concern about future consequences….
…The original paper, authored by six researchers and published last year, is still available thanks to The Internet Archive at this link.…
The study’s findings are not surprising to anybody living in the real world:
“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
The timing for this apparent censorship could not be more suspect. As members of Congress, MAGA influencers and the president himself have signaled that they’re out for leftist blood….
Andrew Marantz, September 18, 2025 [The New Yorker]
Broadcasting from the White House, the Vice-President seemed to complete the merger of politics and red-meat live streams—and to threaten more ominous crackdowns ahead.
Michael Tomasky, September 19, 2025 [The New Republic]
Trump 2.0 has executed any number of offenses against the Constitution, human decency, and more. But here’s why the Jimmy Kimmel matter is different—and the most dangerous move yet.
Nitish Pahwa, Sept 04, 2025 [Slate, via The Big Picture, September 14, 2025]
The entire Trump family just cashed in on another big cryptocurrency payday. This Labor Day, the digital-assets firm World Liberty Financial—which the president’s three sons co-founded just a year ago—launched a public sale of its flagship WLFI tokens, spurring $1 billion worth of trades on popular crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance (all of whose founders havetieswith the current administration). Collectively, the Trump family already holds billions of World Liberty coins, and the public trading—carried out mostly overseas and involving few retail traders—boosted the value of those tokens. Per the Wall Street Journal, the four male Trumps involved made as much as $5 billion on Monday, in what was “most likely the biggest financial success for the president’s family since the inauguration.”
…. The companies behind the $TRUMP meme coin (one of which shares an address with the president’s Florida golf club) held an auction that traded hoards of tokens for chances to dine with the Donald himself; according to the New Yorker, the Trumps and their partners netted $320 million from transaction fees alone….
And Trump keeps pacifying the crypto industry at large, signing deregulatory legislation into law and dropping Biden-era investigations into various companies that have since worked with his crypto projects—like Binance, Crypto.com, and Coinbase….
Rosa DeLauro September 16, 2025 [The American Prospect]
The courts have decided: Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought broke the law. The American people deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent, but time and again, Russ Vought hides the truth.
During the Biden administration, I led the charge to require the public disclosure of legally binding funding decisions known as apportionments. When I drafted this requirement—and it was signed into law—it was not about which party held power. It was about showing the American people how their hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being spent in their communities.
On March 24, at Russ Vought’s command, OMB illegally removed this transparency website. At the end of July, United States District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan emphatically ruled that Vought has been illegally hiding his sabotage of investments and services for over four months. The courts continued to deny OMB’s request to keep hiding their stealing, with a panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit forcing Russ Vought to restore the website on August 15 with equally forceful criticism of his lawlessness. While OMB was slow to share the information, and they have yet to post all that is required under the law, one thing is clear: Russ Vought and his relentless desire to single-handedly control every investment in American communities have been unmasked….
The same corporate media helping Donald Trump silence dissent, wants you to believe that Jimmy Kimmel was suspended“over his Charlie Kirk comments.” That’s a lie. The joke that angered MAGA world did not include any barbs or attacks on Kirk in any way. Rather the joke was mocking Trump….
Kimmel then mocked Trump’s bizarre response to the fatal shooting on Friday—which I also played on my show given the jarring nature of it. When asked by a reporter how he was “holding up,” Trump had said, “I think very good,” before then quickly adding, “And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House.” An excited Trump then bragged that the new ballroom was “gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”
Kimmel used that reaction for the joke, saying about Trump, “He’s at the fourth stage of grief, construction.” He added to big laughs, “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Greg Sargent, September 18, 2025 [The New Republic]
Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, tells TNR that chairman Brendan Carr’s move violates both the First Amendment and the Communications Act. Democrats must extract consequences.
Richard Murphy, September 20 2025 [Funding the Future]
This is too important, and frightening, not to share:
The speaker is Tad Stoermer, an academic historian who suggests he is:
Torching lies
Teaching resistance
Explaining revolution.
He is the author of ‘A Resistance History of the United States’ (Steerforth Press, 2026). He is a
lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and a visiting scholar at the University of Southern Denmark.
Trump’s lawsuit mentions several articles published by the paper, including an editorial calling him unfit for office, and a book, “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” published by Times investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig. In the filing, Trump’s attorneys allege that the paper and the journalists “maliciously published the Book and the Articles knowing that these publications were filled with repugnant distortions and fabrications about President Trump.”
[Maxar, Reuters / The Washington Post, Sep 16, 2025]
As the Trump Administration rushes to open massive makeshift holding centers nationwide, one former official called the list of violations at Fort Bliss among the worst she’s ever seen.
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Maureen Comey, in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed today against the government….
There is a lot of factual and legal detail in the case, but it’s important because it will have an impact on Trump’s ability to fire at will in the federal bureaucracy, ignoring existing civil service protections for government employees, not just at DOJ, but likely closer to government wide. The 38-page complaint alleges the following violations of law when Comey was fired:
Violation of the United States Constitution (Article II and Separation of Powers) (Against All Defendants): Article II gives the president the ability to appoint and fire “principal officers” (like U.S. Attorneys), but as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Comey is an “inferior officer”, subject to governance by Congress, which created civil service provisions that prevent firing without due process or without cause and rendering the way Comey was fired a violation of the law.
Violation of the Administrative Procedure Act 5 U.S.C. §§ 706(1) and 706(2) (Against All Defendants): Comey’s firing violated the Administrative Procedure Act by withholding the due process she was entitled to and firing her in an arbitrary, capricious fashion that is contrary to the Constitution and goes beyond what the law permits.
Violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (Ultra Vires in Violation of Statutory Authority) (Against All Defendants): Ultra vires means acting beyond one’s legal power or authority. Comey claims that because her firing violated the law, it is ultra vires, so it has no legal force or effect, and it’s as if she was never fired…..
Because that’s a lot, and because this is a very important case, we’ll spend time tonight going through the allegations in the complaint in more detail. What’s at stake is the ability of the president to fire prosecutors, even exemplary ones, because he doesn’t like them, or their father, or the cases they’ve been working on, or simply thinks they lack personal loyalty to him, or just wants to get rid of them. That’s no way to run the Justice Department, where prosecutors have civil service protections that make it difficult to fire them absent solid cause. But the administration did an end run around those longstanding rules in Maurene Comey’s case, despite the fact that she’d been asked to be the lead prosecutor on “a major public corruption case” just the day before she was fired….
We live in an age of monsters: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Ellison family, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, the sundry billionaires who don’t own apps. This may sound like a caustic and dramatic comment coming from me. Some of them are genuine monsters: Musk, Trump, probably Thiel. In other cases, like with Zuckerberg, they are probably more or less normal and might even be okay to have lunch with. But functionally, in the role they play and power they wield in our society, they are monsters. And the function of the Trump era has been to wind them all together into a single formation, first by allurement and then by force.
This realization first started to dawn on me in the years after Citizens United, the court decision that essentially ended meaningful campaign finance law in the United States. It came in the first reactions to Citizens United or more specifically the spending it made possible. Billionaires and centi-millionaires started gaining publicity and critical reactions to the scale of their spending and the impact it had on elections. Political giving at scale by the extremely wealthy wasn’t new. It had just taken a half-century hiatus. Perhaps the difference was the internet. Whatever it was, the years after 2010 spawned the idea that the very wealthy and the extremely powerful needed to be afforded more protections, more privacy for their giving then ordinary people who might donate $50 or even $5,000 up near the candidate donation limit….
Robert Schoenberger, Sept. 15, 2025 [IndustryWeek]
After more than 70 years in its iconic building in Dearborn, Michigan, Ford Motor Co. plans to tear that facility down after 2027 when it moves into a new campus a few miles away.
“We were never going to leave Dearborn. We’ve been here for 122 years,” Chairman Bill Ford said in a video released with the announcement. Still, the move out of the iconic Detroit-area building will be a major change.
The new facility will be built about three miles away, next to Ford’s tech center and vehicle proving grounds—near the campus of the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. Once finished, the four-story structure will have about 2.1 million square feet of office and meeting space, about double the 12-story structure it replaces….
[TW: Ford moving management next to the engineers is a very hopeful sign. Probably much too late, but hopeful.]
I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying that this truly is the US’s Suez moment: Saudi Arabia just entered into a NATO-like alliance with Pakistan whereby “any attack on either country is an attack on both.”The symbolic is extraordinary: Saudi Arabia was in many ways THE poster child of US client states. If they no longer trusts American security guarantees, why should anyone else? And of course the fact this actually happened and wasn’t prevented by the U.S. is immensely telling in and of itself.This has so many other consequences that it’s almost too much to fathom:- First of all, it means that Saudi Arabia now benefits from Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence….
– This undoubtedly kills IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor), the Biden administration’s flagship grand strategy to counter China’s Belt and Road that was supposed to connect India to Europe via Saudi Arabia
– There is a monetary aspect too: this is another nail in the coffin of the petrodollar system (an agreement to price oil exclusively in USD in exchange for US protection). Saudi Arabia is now much more flexible to price oil in whatever currency it wishes
Chinese exports to the United States are down double digits since the beginning of the year.
But China’s exports overall are much higher than expected, as Chinese firms are successfully expanding into new markets.
This is glaringly true of Africa. Bilateral trade between China and Africa is rocketing higher, and doing so in surprising ways.
Chinese exports to Africa are high up in the value chain: advanced machinery, vehicles, electronics, and power generation.
But these products are also falling in price, making them more affordable then ever to Africa’s emerging middle class and business sectors.
It is also a de-dollarization story. Chinese banks make trade credit and finance widely available using pools of renminbi. African firms can far more easily access capital in RMB compared to USD, and are refinancing their dollar-denominated debts to the Chinese currency.
Christina Comben, September 11, 2025 [thecoinrepublic.com]
Central banks now hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries for the first time since 1996, prompting big questions about the health of the dollar and the future of “hard money” in the global financial system.
[Americans for Tax Fairness, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2025]
American billionaires reached a record breaking $7.6 trillion of personal wealth as of Labor Day 2025, up $4.7 trillion (or 160%) in the less than eight years since the first Trump-GOP tax law was enacted in December 2017, according to the latest billionaires report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) based on Forbes data. Most of that wealth increase (an estimated 56%, or $4.2 trillion) has never been taxed and may never be under current law. But key Democrats, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), and Rep. Donald Beyer (D-VA) are introducing a major overhaul in the tax code which would finally end that injustice by taxing billionaire wealth gains as they are made….
…Enactment of the 2017 tax law is used as the starting point to track billionaire wealth growth because it likely turbo-charged the process. The law’s centerpiece was a two-fifths cut in the corporate tax rate, reducing it from 35% to 21%. Since 93% of corporate stock is owned by the wealthiest 10%–including billionaires–corporate tax cuts are by definition tax cuts for the rich. The law also reduced the top individual tax rate, the one that applies to the great bulk of the richest Americans’ income. Meanwhile, the law failed to close any of the many loopholes enjoyed by the rich; the biggest one for billionaires is the tax-free status of wealth-growth income.
Leading economists have determined that on average, the wealthiest 400 families paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 8.2% in recent years, when the increased value of their stock is counted. That means billionaires can pay lower tax rates than middle-class workers like teachers, nurses, and firefighters. An analysis of billionaire tax data found that 26 of the wealthiest billionaires paid an effective tax rate of just 4.8% on a $500 billion increase in their collective fortune between 2013-18. ProPublica also found that billionaire Jeff Bezos paid $0 in federal income tax from 2007 through 2011.
David Dayen September 18, 2025 [The American Prospect]
We are closing in on the 20th anniversary of one of the most revealing pieces of bank analyst research in recent American history. On October 16, 2005, Citigroup released an “industry note” for investors that started with a bracing statement: “The World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest.”
Plutonomy is defined as an economy where, well, plutocrats provide the lion’s share of the economic activity and have a distortionary effect on economic statistics. One way to describe it is that if Bill Gates walked into a room with three laborers, the average wealth of all four in the room would be in the billions. But that wouldn’t tell you anything about the circumstances of the non–Bill Gates members of the sample, or how the economy feels to the “average” person in the room. “Consensus analyses that do not tease out the profound impact of the plutonomy on spending power, debt loads, savings rates (and hence current account deficits), oil price impacts … are flawed from the start,” the note explains….
The top 10 percent have been increasing their overall share of consumer spending for the past three decades, from a little over 35 percent in 1994 to 49.2 percent in the most recent quarter, a new record high according to Moody’s analyst Mark Zandi. Breaking out income earners by level of consumer spending, as Zandi did, shows that while the bottom 80 percent of earners spend at levels consistent with the Consumer Price Index, the top 20 percent spend at staggeringly higher levels. “The U.S. economy is being largely powered by the well-to-do,” he concluded….
How can we hold together the concepts of soft employment numbers, higher inflation, and climbing retail sales? You can search for reasons to explain why U.S. consumers are lying, spending with abandon even as they despise the economic picture. Or you can simply reject the average and look to the differences within the income distribution. If you do, you reveal the K-shape: Consumer spending is being driven by the top 10 or 20 percent, and unemployment, food insecurity, and gloominess are driven by everyone else. Both groups are experiencing inflation, but only the lower-income earners truly feel it. Higher-income folks are happy to spend more money on goods and services, bolstered by fat wallets and stock portfolios….
…After Trump slapped 30% tariffs on Chinese imports in May, Beijing retaliated with measures including stopping all purchases of US soybeans. Before the trade war, a quarter of the soybeans—the nation’s number one export crop—produced in the United States were exported to China. Trump’s tariffs mean American soybean growers can’t compete with countries like Brazil, the world’s leading producer and exporter of the staple crop and itself the target of a 50% US tariff.
“We depend on the Chinese market. The reason we depend so much on this market is China consumes 61% of soybeans produced worldwide,” Kentucky farmer Caleb Ragland, who is president of the American Soybean Association, toldNews Nation on Monday. “Right now, we have zero sold for this crop that’s starting to be harvested right now.” … It’s a five-alarm fire for our industry that 25% of our total sales is currently missing…”
The $893 billion defense policy bill that passed the House of Representatives last week would grant the Department of Defense unprecedented new authority to deploy private military contractors to the United States’ southern border.
A provision in the legislation, tacked on in a July amendment, for the first time gives the Defense Secretary authority to outsource the agency’s work at the border, a proposal that critics warn could prove a bonanza for the shadowy mercenary and private security firms that work with the Pentagon, often with little public transparency….
“If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say we’re going to govern those countries … You can say that about pretty much all of Africa; they’re incapable of governing themselves.” So claims Erik Prince, the billionaire entrepreneur of the modern mercenary business. Speaking on his podcast Off Leash, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide advocated for the United States to get back into the intervention business, albeit with a twist: Rather than sending American troops to enforce order abroad, the dirty work of empire should be contracted out to private firms. Prince’s provocation is not a relic of colonial thinking but rather a fact of modern politics: a neoliberal model of state violence.
Prince’s latest venture has been security contracting in weak countries, primarily Haiti and Peru. He has carved out a niche for himself by offering a market-based option for functions typically performed by sovereign states—in particular, the exercise of violence for both domestic order and operations abroad. In Haiti, Prince’s services have been retained to combat rampant gang violence near Port-au-Prince, where opportunistic non-state actors have all but taken over territories surrounding the capital city. In Peru, Prince’s company Vectus Global recently signed a contract worth $10 million a year to eliminate criminal networks that threaten the country’s gold mines. Governments too strained to monopolize violence within their borders engage Prince, who brings the organization, discipline, and technology that local security forces lack….
One of the leading mouthpieces of big business, the Wall Street Journal, gave a glimpse of this deepening crisis in an article posted Wednesday on its website with the headline, “The Two-Speed Economy Is Back as Low-Income Americans Give Up Gains.” The article is published in the newspaper’s Thursday print edition under the headline, “Divergent American Economy Gets More Divided.”
“There are two economies in the U.S. right now, and they are moving in different directions,” the commentary begins, noting that higher-income Americans “are still spending like gangbusters,” while for most workers, wage growth “has petered out.” The article continues, “Those workers are curbing their spending and in some cases are struggling to find jobs.” Unemployment is hitting African Americans and young people particularly hard, while home prices and rents are soaring.
“The divided fortunes of rich and poor in the U.S. may sound like an old story,” the Journal acknowledges, but “the gulf is widening again.” Wage growth for the bottom third of workers was the smallest in August since 2016, and these workers could spend only 0.3 percent more than a year ago. With inflation at nearly 3 percent, and prices on many essential goods rising much faster than that, this means a cut in real consumption….
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, September 18, 2025 [counterpunch.org]
[TW: You should save this to your computer, or at least book mark it, because this will stand as one of the definitive explanations of the crime ring behind Epstein, and Trump’s attempts to cover up]
…The way that JPMorgan Chase facilitated money laundering for Epstein sounds uncannily similar to how it facilitated money laundering for Ponzi kingpin Bernie Madoff. Both Epstein and Madoff used JPMorgan Chase as their primary bank according to court records. And the bank made multi-million dollar loans to both men.
FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge George Venizelos said this in a formal statement when the two felony counts were lodged against JPMorgan Chase in 2014 over its Madoff conduct:
“J.P. Morgan failed to carry out its legal obligations while Bernard Madoff built his massive house of cards. Today, J.P. Morgan finds itself criminally charged as a consequence. But it took until after the arrest of Madoff, one of the worst crooks this office has ever seen, for J.P. Morgan to alert authorities to what the world already knew. In order to avoid these types of disasters in the future—we all need to be invested in making our markets safer and more equitable. The FBI can’t do it alone. Traders, compliance officers, analysts, bankers, and executives are the gatekeepers of the financial industry. We need their help protecting our markets.”
Let that carefully sink in for a moment. JPMorgan Chase, then and now headed by media darling Jamie Dimon (as both Chairman and CEO) was simultaneously laundering money for two of the biggest criminal masterminds in U.S. history. Exactly what was it that these two Machiavellian marauders found so comforting about running their financial affairs out of JPMorgan Chase? The answer is more than likely found in a three-letter acronym—SAR, short for Suspicious Activity Report. If you were running illicit billions of dollars through the bank, and generating big profits for the bank, that pesky detail of filing those SARs in a timely fashion with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), as legally mandated, somehow gets forgotten at the bank, at least in both the Madoff and Epstein cases.
Despite enormous red flags on weird money transactions, JPMorgan Chase failed to file any Madoff-related Suspicious Activity Reports until Madoff confessed to his crimes in December 2008 after being turned in to prosecutors by his sons….
Carmen Molina Acosta, September 17, 2025 [International Consortium of Investigative Journalists]
Five years after ICIJ’s FinCEN Files investigation exposed the pivotal role the U.S. financial system plays in global dirty money flows, authorities are winding back landmark reforms pushed through in the wake of the revelations, prompting widespread concerns from transparency advocates.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — the namesake of ICIJ and BuzzFeed News’ 2020 investigation — announced last week that it expects to delete ownership information that U.S. companies submitted as part of the launch of the previously celebrated company ownership registry….
Experts told ICIJ that the move further guts the Corporate Transparency Act, a 2021 bipartisan law passed months after the publication of the FinCEN Files aimed at cracking down on anonymous shell companies that facilitate illicit finance. A key part of the legislation was the establishment of the company ownership registry, which was officially launched last year amid ongoing political and legal challenges, and which required companies operating in the U.S. to submit ownership information to the Treasury.
In March, the Treasury Department moved to exempt all U.S. businesses from the requirement, meaning only foreign-owned firms operating in the U.S. would need to comply with the reporting obligations. The potential destruction of data would be “doubling down on Treasury’s unlawful gutting of this statute,” Ian Gary, executive director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition said.
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 09-19-2025]
…Axios did a useful round-up of the broader context, which is the roll-up of media properties by oligarchs over the last few years. In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post and killed a Kamala Harris endorsement, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked his paper’s endorsement of Harris, Univision got bought by a Trump-friendly outlet, and the Baltimore Sun did as well. Apple, Google, and Meta CEOs have all moved in more Republican directions, in Meta’s case explicitly settling with Trump for millions of dollars over deplatforming allegations. And now Trump ally, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, is trying to buy CNN-owner Warner Bro. Discover, and potentially TikTok.
While this kind of political behavior is disturbing, it’s important to see that there are really two separate problems. The first is Trump’s choices, and he is seeking controls over his critics. The answer to an elected leader doing these kinds of things is ultimately elections. The public must express disapproval, and if they do not, then that is that. Elections aren’t my forte, so I’ll leave that to others.
The second problem is that the tools exist for Trump to engage in a coercive censorship regime because Bill Clinton and a Newt Gingrich-led Republican Congress helped consolidate the media with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which supercharged a wave of media and telecom consolidation kicked off by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. As More Perfect Union noted, “In 1983, 50 companies controlled 90% of the U.S. media market. That number is now down to 5.” If the ability to wield power over content exists, it will likely be purposed, and Trump isn’t the first one to do it….
Why was the 1996 law so important? The fundamental thrust of the Telecom Act was to overturn New Deal restrictions on media consolidation. That law changed strict bright line media ownership rules that prohibited acquisitions of local stations by chains, and moved them to a discretionary system where regulators could approve such acquisitions, which they did and are doing now. It also, not coincidentally, laid the foundation for broadband monopolies with its deregulation of telecom providers, and big tech, with Section 230 that disallowed a whole suite of common law rules from applying to platforms.
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
“If you have solar energy and you want to use it for an industrial process, first thing you need to do is find a way to store it,” O’Donnell said. If he could design a tool capable of storing that electricity, he explained, “we could actually create these conditions where large flows of private capital would build profitable projects that would solve the problem.”
After 15 years of work and prototyping, O’Donnell created his firebrick: the cornerstone of his new company and the defining feature of Rondo Energy’s heat battery.
The battery looks simple; it is anything but. Composed of a stack of bricks placed inside a steel container about half the size of an NBA basketball court, it functions like a rechargeable furnace. Electricity from solar panels and wind turbines flows into the device and gets converted to heat, reaching searing temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat is locked away, ready to be released hours or days later. When a factory calls for power, air is pushed through the glowing bricks, emerging as a blast of heat or steam hot enough to forge steel or fire cement. AI systems fine-tune the process, delivering precise energy on demand. Designed to be modular and easy to install, these brick batteries can drop into existing facilities, O’Donnell said, replacing fossil-fuel boilers and supplying factories with round-the-clock clean heat….
[International Business Times, September 13, 2025]
In a huge medical breakthrough, scientists in China have reportedly invented a bone glue that sets within three minutes and can heal fractures. The project, known as “Bone-02,” was unveiled to the public by researchers in China’s Zhejiang Province on September 10, according to NDTV, citing local reports.
[SF Gate, via The Big Picture, September 18, 2025]
If you commute from the East Bay into the gray heart of San Francisco, you’ll see them everywhere.
They string together nonsense words. They stare at us with dead eyes. They exalt the far right while claiming to be apolitical. And, worst of all, they bully us: As you wait to board the crowded Muni bus home after a long day at work, they brag about how they’ll eventually replace you and rob you of your livelihood.
In the year 2025, billboards advertising artificial intelligence have become inescapable, crowding the city’s skyline and sneering at us from every corner. To the average person, they’re both dystopian and indecipherable, and for cash-bloated executives behind these campaigns, that’s the point….
According to tech recruiters, executives believe that perfectly capable, intelligent people who have been laid off are “table scraps” and “damaged goods.” Mark Zuckerberg wants us to trust and develop relationships with his digital chatbots, stating that “the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends.” Meanwhile, his same company’s guidelines also previously said that it was totally “acceptable” for them “to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” Marc Benioff is practically frothing at the mouth to cut costs, declaring that now, thanks to his company’s new fleet of AI workers, “We can have less support agents, human support agents, more digital support agents. We can mix our human labor with our digital labor in a new way and create an incredible new Salesforce.” ….
What these tech oligarchs are ultimately telling us, dear friend, is that they simply don’t care about us, and when they finally pillage every last resource the Earth has to offer, they’ll happily throw back $64 olive oil shots while dancing like idiots on our graves.
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture, September 15, 2025]
More than 120 million people across the United States just experienced a near-record humid summer. See how humidity patterns are changing in your region.
Hawk Dunlap fought fires and blowouts in oil fields around the world over a 30-year career, but nothing prepared him for what he found when he finally came home to Texas. There, on the Permian Basin’s dusty expanse, Dunlap encountered towers of toxic wastewater that gushed more than 100 feet (30 meters) in the air, bursting through oil wells cemented shut decades ago. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen in Algeria, Uzbekistan or Iraq.
So was the resistance to his attempts to figure out the cause.
When Dunlap was asked by a rancher to investigate leaking wells owned by Chevron Corp., he expected state regulators to help. Instead the commission that oversees oil and gas operations in Texas directed the ranch’s concerns to its lawyers. Relations with Chevron deteriorated into an acrimonious lawsuit. And after the rancher captured drone footage of wastewater spewing high into the sky, the regulatory commission made the area a no-fly zone, citing safety concerns….
Three years after Dunlap began investigating, the wells are still leaking. The problem of too much wastewater is spreading across America’s biggest oil field, posing a pressing threat to a basin that has grown into a cornerstone of global markets and is critical to President Donald Trump’s push for energy dominance….
The RRC has long known that underground water disposal increased the risk of earthquakes. The practice was found to cause seismicity in North Texas around 2008 because the fluid put pressure on natural rock faults, leading them to slip. But the tremors in the early days of the Permian’s growth were small, and the RRC was content to take a “reactive not proactive” approach to seismic activity, according to one internal presentation.
The RRC adopted guidelines for permitting disposal wells in seismically active areas in 2019 but was forced to change tack on March 26, 2020, when a 4.9 magnitude earthquake struck near Mentone, Texas, in the heart of the Permian. It was the fifth-biggest in the state’s history and was felt 200 miles away in El Paso.
[Quanta Magazine, via The Big Picture, September 20, 2025]
Over the past 60 years, scientists have largely succeeded in building a computer model of Earth to see what the future holds. One of the most ambitious projects humankind has ever undertaken has now reached a critical moment.
I reflect frequently on the hours and days after the January 2021 insurrection, how clear it was to me and a small handful of others that House Democrats should have impeached Donald Trump on January 7, and used his remaining two weeks in office leaning on Mitch McConnell to convene a trial, remove Trump from the presidency, and disqualify him from future office.
Instead, fear and a vision of a future dominated by recriminations took hold of Democrats, and they scattered. Multiple Senate Democrats announced that they didn’t want to dwell on the attack; Nancy Pelosi adjourned the House; the moment of maximal GOP disarray passed; Trump avoided accountability.
When the impeachment trial finally did convene of February 9, after Trump had already left Washington, Senate Democrats were once again half-hearted about it….
“I want to focus as much attention right now on the Biden agenda as possible and minimize the attention on anything other than the Biden agenda,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), before the trial began—forecasting that the trial would be a box-checking exercise.…
I think it’s safe to say there is no longer even a partial symmetry between the parties on this score—particularly after Donald Trump signed his megabill cutting taxes and health care. The entire apparatus of the government is now geared in various ways toward harming and weakening progressives, liberals, leftists, Democrats, and their constituents. That has become the end in and of itself….
On Thursday, E. Jean Carroll started it: Paper Clip Protest.
“Comely Reader! I suggest we all start wearing the paper clip. Subtler than a red hat, more powerful as a CONNECTION,” she wrote, explaining they were also worn during World War II as a sign of resistance against the Nazis.
Norwegian teachers and students wore paper clips to signal their opposition to Nazi occupation. They attached them to their lapels and wore them as jewelry, a symbol of solidarity binding them together as paper clips did with papers. It was a quiet act of defiance, expressing that Norwegians remained united against Nazi rule.
Friday, when I signed on to tape the #SistersInLaw Podcast, Jill Wine Banks had a clip delicately attached to the collar of her shirt. It made me smile. In that moment, I knew E. Jean was onto something. Our defiance can and must be loud and public at this point. But the quiet symbol of solidarity on someone’s collar when you walk into a crowded room? Genius. And much better than a red hat.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
[TW: One of the best examinations of how Trumpists created a false, dangerous meme]
…Here is the Google Trends chart for “antifa”—which shows the number of times the word was searched for—showing almost no activity at all until 2017… With the exception of Rose City Antifa, a loose group of anti-racists and antifascists in Portland, Oregon started in 2007 to protest a neo-Nazi festival, it did not exist as a national concept until 2017….
On August 17th, 2017, infamous alt-right troll Microchip posted this petition to the White House. It was picked up by right-wing outlets like Breitbart and promoted heavily through the MAGA echo chamber. Note the spelling, with a capital-F, a flourish that did not survive its later permutations…
A week later, 8/24/17, Politico interviewed Microchip who made it very clear what “antifa” really is:
“It was to bring our broken right side together” after Charlottesville, he said, “and prop up antifa as a punching bag.”
“So the narrative changed from ‘I hate myself because we have neo-Nazis on our side’ to ‘I really hate antifa, let’s get along and tackle the terrorists,’” he explained.
Here are some of the Discord logs released by Microchip, along with his partner James Brower (“Dreamcatcher”) that show them in the process of turning the petition into a weaponized meme….
Despite the continuous stream of hoaxes and lies about the phantom of Antifa, a bill was introduced the House in June 2018, the Unmasking Antifa Act, which sought to penalize people for up to 15 years for wearing a mask while committing a violent act. It didn’t pass, but it validated the idea of “Antifa” as a threat and kept the term in the public consciousness.
Antifa continued to be stoked online through fake accounts through 2019 and by white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys, who used it as their rallying cry—“Fuck Antifa! Fuck Antifa!” This was punctuated by an incident in 2019 in which alt-right provocateur Andy Ngo, working for the Thiel-funded Quillette, was sprayed with silly string and hit with a milkshake by antifascist activists at a Proud Boys rally.
The designation of the amorphous group antifa as a terrorist organization allows the state to brand all dissidents as supporters of antifa and prosecute them as terrorists.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination will likely serve as the crux of a new era of political violence and repression in the United States. In the days since Kirk was shot at a speaking event at Utah Valley University, right-wing groups and figures have demanded mass censorship of all critical online speech directed at Kirk. President Donald Trump has effectively attributed the attack to the “radical left” and vowed to go after those he deems responsible. Mass doxing campaigns targeting people who contextualized Kirk’s politics or celebrated his killing has led to firings across the country….
Bishop William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Sep 18, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
“I think this is the time when preachers and those of us in pulpits that have a responsibility to challenge a nation and its morality must say to those in power, “Stop it. Stop lying.” ….
Donald Trump has demonstrated that he has the power to remove some comedians who mock him on national news networks and to punish journalists who tell the truth about him and the agenda he is enacting. But he is not the first authoritarian in US history to abuse power while he invests in propaganda to spread lies and distract attention from the way their policies harm most Americans.
We are both from North Carolina, where authoritarians manipulated the truth for generations to cling to power. Plantation owners were outraged when a democratically elected legislature, made up of Black and white citizens for the first time, imposed taxes on their extreme wealth in order to guarantee public education to everyone in the state after the Civil War. Because public education was popular, those authoritarians did not channel their anger into a political campaign to cut education. Instead, they invested in propaganda that played on racial fears to pit white people against Black neighbors. Their lies inspired lynch mobs that terrorized generations of citizens in the Jim Crow South….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
new study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics reveals that nearly half of U.S. federal judges attended crash courses in economics at the conservative-leaning Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges between 1976 and 1999 — and it changed how they behaved on the bench.
Reviewing more than a million circuit and district court rulings, the study’s researchers found that after attending the popular economics “training,” judges ruled against regulators more often and imposed more severe sentences against criminals.
This isn’t the first evidence that “law and economics” courses push judges to the right. The same authors previously found that Manne attendees were less likely to rule in favor of environmental or union regulations and gave longer prison sentences to federal defendants….
“When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”
—Richard Nixon
I recently wrote a piece, unpublished so far, that contends at length that it’s over constitutionally. The state has been transformed, by both corrupt parties, into an American kingship. I’ve been writing an ongoing series (“The Fourth American Constitution”) contending just that.
The change is now complete, the last piece in place. Yes, the corner cases need to be sorted, cases that in practice will almost never occur — for example, could the president commit rape in the nation’s defense? But the territory is already marked, defined, surveyed. Unstopped reconstruction is next.
In defense of that point, I want to go back to the ruling in Trump v. US, the one that cements what previous administrations have tended toward, that the president has near-absolute power….
[Slate:]: “Georgetown Law’s Marty Lederman promptly flagged that holding as a “profound” shift in the law, one that will be “weaponized” by “executive branch lawyers and officials for time immemorial.” He also noted that this new rule is not limited to the Justice Department, but seemingly applies to all federal agencies, many of which have their own law enforcement operations. Roberts essentially decreed that Congress may no longer bar the president from corrupting these agencies by instructing them to open fraudulent investigations and lie to the public. That is, Lederman warned, “an extraordinarily radical proposition”—a loaded gun that an unscrupulous president could easily brandish to shoot down the rule of law.” ….
The focus on ‘what to do next’ is now first in our thoughts. This will mean testing ideas, refining, revising. I’ll offer these few ideas initially:
It’s important to accept, unflinchingly, where we are. Middle class wealth and power of the 1950s and 60s — relative at least to our nation’s previous years — is gone for good. Attacked by every administration from Reagan till now, it will not come back.
National Democrats, in the aggregate, offer little protection. At best they slow the decline, at worst they concur.
The solution will come from outside regular channels, if one comes at all.
I’ll expand on (3) later. Many paths come to mind, from national dismembership due to climate change stress (this could be a good thing), to something that looks like a slow-moving civil revolt or general strike.
I’ll say for free that at least one of those things will occur — I’m just not sure which will come first, or who of us will be ready, when that time comes, to mobilize toward the next phase….
Howie Klein, September 20, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…The text says even Josiah’s later reforms cannot undo the damage. This is the warning for our moment— not to mention current-day Isarel’s— a president (and prime minister) who undermines democratic institutions and traditions so deeply that even their successors will struggle to repair them, who normalize cruelty and political violence so thoroughly that it becomes the new baseline.
Again and again, Kings repeats, “He did evil in the sight of the LORD.” Again and again, the people tolerate it until disaster hits. The authors of these books aren’t just writing history; they’re writing a sermon about political reality. Bad leadership isn’t just personal failure— it hollows out institutions, hardens hearts, and drags a whole nation into ruin. There were reformist kings, Hezekiah and Josiah, who tried to restore justice and covenant faithfulness. Renewal proven possible but fragile. Their efforts showed that even after long seasons of corruption, a leader can begin to heal the breach— but only if the people demand it, and only if they remember the cost of complacency.
The books of Kings end with Jerusalem destroyed, the Temple burned, the people in exile. The text’s moral is clear: a nation that tolerates corrupt rulers, that shrugs at injustice and idolatry, will eventually lose its freedom. The authors of the Hebrew Bible told this story so that later generations would not repeat it….
There are certainly different parties in western countries today, as there are ostensibly competing banks and mobile phone providers, and some of them have retained historic names. But as with banks and mobile phone companies, a lot of effort goes into publicity and advertising, but very little into real competition. In effect, politics in most western countries resembles a commercial cartel, where competition is strictly limited and the members of the cartel divide the market between them and fiercely resist the arrival of newcomers. This is what has produced the system I usually describe as the Party.
The result is that the established political parties have their own priorities, developed and enforced from the top down, and see no need (in that deadly phrase of 80s Labour Party militants) to “appease the electorate.” In most western countries, the concerns of the electorate are clear: standard of living, the economy, crime, uncontrolled immigration and public services. These are not the priorities of the ruling elites, and they see no reason to bestir themselves to satisfy mere voters. So in effect, the supply and demand curves now have no relationship: the axes never cross. Now of course if the market analogy were in any way accurate, you ought to see new parties appearing, catering to those parts of the political market that existing parties are not addressing. And that is what the Liberal theory of politics would suggest. But it isn’t quite like that, because almost all the new (and mostly transitory) parties that do appear are based solely on opposition to the current political system. There’s a limit to how far you can take that. And then what would actually you do if you ever had a share of power?
This is in a context where, as I’ve pointed out many times, today’s establishment politicians are not even very good at politics, or at running their own party. The British Labour Party was always something of a mess, but Mr Starmer’s version of it, whether as a government or just a political party, sets new standards for amateurishness and incompetence, combined with a vindictive approach to dissent. As a result, the Labour Party could not offer potential voters any genuine reason why they should vote for it in 2024, other than as a way of ejecting the widely-despised Tories, which is indeed what happened. That is typical of a political system where voters are encouraged to vote against parties, rather than for any positive agenda. And just as large private-sector companies now serve the interests of their managers and shareholders alone, and ignore and exploit their customers, so political parties now serve only the interests of their leaders and (in some cases) their donors, and ignore and exploit their voters.
The consequence is that ruling parties and the governments they form are actually weak, not strong. Behind the facade of bluster, the attempts to suppress dissent and to introduce ever more intrusive laws, are groups of frightened individuals out of their depth with problems they had never imagined would ruffle the feathers of their placid managerial world, lacking much public support, and lashing out indiscriminately and often randomly at what they see as threats….
We thus arrive at the central contradiction of modern politics, for all that it is seldom articulated. The current political system is widely hated and despised, its leaders are recognised to be incompetent, and the states they govern are becoming weaker and less effective all the time. They are overwhelmed by current crises, and are frightened by the depth of public resistance and opposition, which they make no attempt to understand. They are well aware of the fragility of the systems they head, and they know that a relatively small but determined push from the streets would topple them. They also know that Right-wing fantasies of mowing down demonstrators with machine-guns are just that: fantasies. But, other than insulting and threatening the electorate, they have no real strategy for staying in power, gimmicks like AI and drones notwithstanding….
…western governments hang on less because of their own strength, than because their opponents, whilst strong numerically, lack discipline; organisation and ideology. Of those, I suggest that the last is the most important, because it makes the first two possible. History tends to agree. The Liberal intellectuals of the eighteenth century did not bring about the French Revolution, but they coopted it because they had an ideology. The Bolsheviks did not overthrow the Tsar, but in Lenin’s famous phrase they “found power lying in the streets” and took it. And the Islamists in Iran were only one of the actors in the overthrow of the Shah, but their ideology gave them the organisation and discipline to take over the country. It’s striking that, in each case, a superficially strong regime turned out to be incapable of facing a real challenge when it arrived. (I still remember the consternation and disbelief in western governments when the Shah’s regime collapsed like a pack of cards.) The problem is that waiting for collapse is not enough: I continue to insist that politics is like engineering: it requires forces to act on a body get things done. And the instruction manual, if you like, has to be based on an ideology….
…The lack of ideology in today’s ruling class, or even of interest in it, produces people with no firm principles, and no beliefs that go beyond tired performative clichés. When power is the only motivating factor, and when much of that power is acquired and held only by defeating others, there is no chance of any group solidarity developing, and that is the essential reason for the fragility of our present system. No-one is going to die, or even make personal sacrifices, for the European Growth and Stability Pact, or for the right of people to use the toilets of their choice, even though they may happily persecute others. But of course even very fragile systems can endure for long periods of time until something arrives to push them over.
Henry Farrell, Sep 02, 2025 [Programmable Mutter, via The Big Picture, September 12, 2025]
… I’m fascinated by process knowledge and manufacturing because I spent a chunk of the late 1990s talking to manufacturers in Bologna and Baden-Wurttemberg for my Ph.D. dissertation.
I was carrying out research in the twilight of a long period of interest in so-called “industrial districts,” small localized regions with lots of small firms engaged in a particular sector of the economy. Paul Krugman’s Geography and Trade (maybe my favorite of his books) talks about some of the economic theory behind this form of concentrated production: economic sociologists and economic geographers had their own arguments. Economists, sociologists and geographers all emphasized the crucial importance of local diffuse knowledge about how to do things in making these economies successful. Such knowledge was in part the product of market interactions, but it wasn’t itself a commodity that could be bought and sold. It was more often tacit: a sense of how to do things, and who best to talk to, which could not easily be articulated. The sociologists were particularly interested in the informal institutions, norms and social practices that held this together. They identified different patterns of local institutional development, which the Communist party in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, and the Christian Democrats in the Veneto and Marche, had built on to foster vibrant local economies….
I spent a lot of time on workshop floors, listening to small-scale founders talking about their lives. I’ll never forget a particular conversation with a manufacturer of teabag-packing machines** about the technical ingenuity required to figure out how to reliably staple on the threads attached to some fancy tea bags, which allow you to pull the teabag out without either scalding your fingers or rummaging around for a spoon. The machinery for accomplishing this apparently simple task was quite complex and fantastical: it was a surprisingly difficult engineering problem….
A lack of appreciation for physical process knowledge helps explain why America is in trouble. Breakneck criticizes the first Trump and Biden administration’s belief that they could strangle China through export controls, riling up Chinese companies to “break free of American restrictions.” However, Dan’s criticisms go way further. It isn’t just that America focuses so much of its “entrepreneurial dynamism” on stuff that doesn’t necessarily do much good, and may plausibly do significant harm to American society: crypto, the metaverse and perhaps AI. It’s that for decades, American policy makers sat back as manufacturing moved overseas, not understanding what the long term consequences for process knowledge might be….
[TW: Regular readers will recall the number of times that Ian has written about the folly of free trade and that technological advances will more likely occur where the manufacturing is physically located. Or, As I wrote in The Obama administration as “managed democracy” (May, 2010):
…as an industrial enterprise grows and matures, its trained and skilled employees make the surrounding community a pool of technical talent that is highly conducive to the creation of other industrial enterprises that use the same or similar skills. That’s why certain towns and cities become known as centers for specific industrial products. Sheffield in England was known for its highly specialized alloy irons and steels. Delft in Holland is known world-wide for its blue pottery. The Hocking River valley in southern Ohio became known in the 1800s as a center of brick manufacture. The Connecticut River valley was known for almost a century as “Precision Valley” because it was a center of designing and making high-precision metal-working machine tools. Detroit became known for making automobiles. Today, almost every high-speed, high-volume printing press in the world comes from Heidelberg, Germany. The southern part of the San Francisco Bay area became known as Silicon Valley.
How much is it worth to have a locale or city renowned for the technical excellence of its local enterprises and workers? What value can be assigned to having a few hundred wizened old men around who can train entire generations of new, highly-skilled workers? Or who have a few different ideas than their boss, and decide to start up their own company?
Exactly these kind of links are traced out by David R. Meyer, a professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Brown University, in his 2006 book, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America. This is important because it details how the USA machine tool industry developed – and the USA machine tool industry is the foundation of the modern industrial mass production economy.
Edward Ongweso Jr. [via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
The “AI economy” is less a story of productivity or innovation, then an attempt to graft a new political-economic order—let’s call it the Silicon Valley Consensus—that is ostensibly concerned with building our stillborn God. A coalition of hyperscalers, venture capitalists, fossil fuel firms, conservatives, and reactionaries are engaged in a frenzy of overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in compute infrastructure. Their goal is not to realize AGI or radically improve life for humanity, but to reallocate capital such that it enriches themselves, transmutes their wealth into even more political power that imposes constraints on countervailing political forces, and liberates capitalism from its recent defects (e.g. democracy), consolidating benefits to its architectures regardless of the actual social utility of the technologies they pursue….
2. The primary capital source for this infrastructure buildout isn’t external debt, but internal cash flows—primarily at hyperscalers—that dominate our stock market. Their profitability is so extreme that they can put “oodles of oodles of money” towards such an ambitious project without touching risky financing options, even if revenues and profits have yet to materialize….
… But the true nature of the Western empire has been carefully concealed from us behind the glossy façade of the Western “civilization.” Today’s empire is a reincarnation of the undead British Empire, whose DNA it still carries. The more we learn about this empire, the uglier it looks. As an example, it seems that many, if not most of the famines recorded in history weren’t natural disasters nor consequences of wars but results of deliberate policy aimed at subjugating populations and forcing them to accept colonial control and slavery.
This may seem like an exaggeration, but British statesman and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli explicitly said as much himself. He explained that the objective of the British Empire was to
“Gain and hold territories that possess the largest supplies of the basic raw materials. Establish naval bases around the world to control the sea and commerce lanes. Blockade and starve into submission any nation or group of nations that opposes this empire control program.” (Knuth, E.C. “Empire of the City,” 1946, p. 57)
There’s much evidence that the Empire really did use starvation as a weapon of war against disobedient groups and nations and that they did so relatively frequently. Take the example of India: during the 120 years between 1757 and 1878 when she was under direct British rule, India experienced 31 serious famines (Mike Davis, “Late Victorian Holocausts, El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World” – London: Verso, 2002).
Even in absence of outright famines, much of India’s population lived in chronic food insecurity. While this was concealed from the British public, Britain’s ruling establishment was well aware of it.
Economic historian Robert C Allen found that, during the 19th century, famines became more frequent and more deadly as extreme poverty increased from 23% in 1810 to more than 50% in the mid-20th century. The period from 1880 to 1920, the height of Britain’s imperial power, was particularly devastating for India. By the 1910s, life expectancy collapsed to 21.9 years….
In April 1974, Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s Secretary of State and National Security Adviser sent out a classified memo to select cabinet officials. The title of the memo was, “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests,” and it was commissioned on the recommendation of John D. Rockefeller III and came to be called, more famously, NSSM 200, for National Security Study Memorandum 200.
In it, Kissinger addressed the difficulty of controlling resource rich areas of the world against the social pressures borne of growing world populations and went on to suggest the kinds of coercive measures the US should consider. He bluntly stated that food aid should be considered as “an instrument of national power,” and that the US should ration food aid to “help people who can’t or won’t control their population growth.”
The NSSM 200 made depopulation in foreign developing countries an explicit, if secret, national security priority of the United States for the first time. In that, the policy of the British Empire was simply grafted onto the US foreign policy. If anything changed between Disraeli and Kissinger, it’s the slick framing of policy goals: “rationing food” to “help people” is the sanitized version of “starving them into submission.” But the language amounted to recommending genocide, at least as defined under the UN Convention of 1948.
According to my US Political Violence Database (USPVDB), the five years from 2020 to 2024 saw seven assassinations. This is higher than the previous peak during the 1960s, although only half as large as that of the late 1860s:
….It’s important to note, that by themselves political assassination and terrorism don’t overthrow the established elites (at least, I can’t think of any examples). An assassination of the state ruler may serve as a triggering event for a revolution or an onset of civil war, but it still requires a well-organized and committed counter-elite party. The failure of Alexander Ulyanov and ultimate success of his younger brother illustrate this principle perfectly.
The significance in the rising frequency of such instability “micro-events” is that they signal that something is deeply broken within the social system in which they happen. I tried to draw attention to the rising frequency of shooting rampages back in 2008 (you can read about it in my 2012 blog post, Canaries in a Coal Mine). A canary dropping dead in a miner’s cage is not the cause of the explosion to come, but rather an advance warning.
Similarly, the increasing incidence of assassinations and terrorism tells us that we aren’t out of the woods yet, by a long stretch.
Richard Eberwein, 9/04/25 [WCPT 820 Radio, via Clean Power Roundup]
Energy bills have been steadily increasing since President Donald Trump took office in January, partially thanks to state and national Republicans ousting Biden-era clean energy policies and prioritizing nonrenewable energy sources.
According to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), residential electricity bills have increased by nearly 10% nationally since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, despite his campaign pledge to slash electric bill prices….
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law on July 4, is also expected to increase energy costs for consumers even more. A report from Climate Power published last month found that 64,000 jobs have already been lost or stalled since Trump took office, with 56% of them located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. The report also says the cuts to clean energy have reduced the total energy supply, which have contributed to the higher bills experienced by consumers….
The U.S. Department of Transportation is withdrawing or terminating $679 million in funding for 12 port and infrastructure upgrades that would support offshore wind projects, it announced Friday.
…And keep in mind that despite the concern, which may be justified, about mistreatment of Koreans doing construction work at the plant, some (we don’t know how many) were skilled workers necessary to get the equipment installed and shake the operations down. Although it is an entirely different type of production, my father was one of the most seasoned managers/executives in the paper mill industry in running startups and major expansions. They were not easy. A successful startup would take two years and burn 20% of the capital cost. An unsuccessful one would hemorrhage cash pretty much forever. And all of these startups required bringing in experts from the vendors to help with design, installation, and training….
Richard Murphy, September 13 2025 [Funding the Future]
In this video, I explain why Trump’s economic policies are a disaster — and why the UK should take note as the far-right tries to copy them….
This man is an outright disaster.
Far-right politics is an outright disaster.
We’ve always known that, but now we can see the evidence. And it’s critical that we do see a note and talk about that evidence, because the threat from the far-right is real elsewhere, including here in the UK.
The far-right has no known answer to any known problem.
Its hatred of migrants solves nothing. We are living in an interdependent world, and to pretend otherwise is just absurd.
To pretend that we can live in glorious economic isolation is just absurd.
To pretend that we can run an economy on the basis of giving tax cuts to the rich, and increasing, in effect, taxes on everybody else by imposing tariffs is absurd because the net result is a lack of spending power….
Trump’s stolen a lot of workers’ wages over the years, but this week, he has become history’s greatest thief of wages, having directed his FTC to stop enforcing its ban on noncompete “agreements,” a move that will cost American workers $400 billion over the next ten years:
