Author: Tony Wikrent Page 1 of 42

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 15, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

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

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

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

Why is Kristi Noem’s bone-chilling pledge of a “regime change” in Calif not getting media coverage?!  Trump wants to remove Democrats from office

Dean Obeidallah, June 13, 2025

But what has been largely ignored in the reporting was the bone-chilling comment that sparked Padilla to interrupt Noem during her press conference. In prepared remarks, Noem delivered a message from Trump that the military occupation of Los Angeles and beyond will not end until both Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass are removed from office.

I’m not exaggerating. In language that echoes justifications for war, Noem began her speech by talking about federal forces, the state National Guard Trump and US Marines being deployed in California. That is when she stated: “We are not going away,” adding, “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

“Liberate the city from the socialist leadership!” No longer is the Trump regime planning to have the troops remain in California to occupy parts of the city until calm can be restored. Nor until arrests are made of undocumented immigrants who have criminal records, etc.

No, the new condition for ending the military occupation is regime change. As Noem told us point blank: the troops will remain until Trump can “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor.” To Trump, if he labels an elected official a “socialist,” they should be removed from office. (And we know the MAGA base would cheer it and Fox News would defend it.)….

Backing this up was the ominous threat by Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi who Wednesday threatened even more action to take control of California. Bondi told reporters that she fully backed “bringing in the National Guard” and “bringing in the Marine…to protect our federal buildings, to protect highways, to protect the citizens.”

AG Bondi then alarmingly added, “We’re not scared to go further. We’re not frightened to do something else if we need to.”

What is go further then deploying warfighters of the US Marine corps on the streets of the United States?! The answer is keeping them there until Newsom and Bass either surrender to Trump or are removed.

I know this may sound outrageous. But again, Noem was delivering the Trump regime message that the troops are staying until the city is “liberated” from Newsom and Bass. Ignore that threat at your peril.

Judge Breyer’s Decision About Trump & The National Guard

Joyce Vance, June 13, 2025

Trump endorses arrest of Gavin Newsom 

[KTLA, via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2025]

Heather Cox Richardson, June 12, 2025

The assault on Padilla comes days after the Department of Justice under Trump indicted Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) on federal charges saying she impeded immigration officers outside a New Jersey detention center.

While Democratic senators and representatives are outraged, they are having little success getting their Republican colleagues to join them. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) suggested that Padilla had charged Noem—the videos show no such thing—and suggested the Senate should censure Padilla for “wildly inappropriate” behavior.

While much focus has been on the assault itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.

The McIver Indictment Explained

Joyce Vance, June 12, 2025

US troops make first detentions in Trump border military zones 

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

‘A complete sea change’: Trump’s immigration crackdown goes into hyperdrive 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 06-08-2025]

You’re a Bunch of Cowards!

Hamilton Nolan, June 10, 2025 [How Things Work]

…The Wall Street Journal reported on a meeting last month where Stephen Miller summoned ICE’s leadership to a meeting where he demanded that federal agents lower their standards and “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” outside of 7-11 or wherever. “‘Who here thinks they can do it?’ Miller said, asking for a show of hands.” The outcome of that demand can be seen in the ongoing terrorization of immigrants happening across the country.

Now, Stephen Miller is a little rat-faced Nazi bitch. Since his youth just about everyone around him has despised him because he has always been a miserable racist little shit whose evil heart is manifested in his detestable rodent-like visage. Knowing that, I like to imagine all those big, bad, ICE agents, manly men, so macho, shifting uncomfortably around a conference room table as they are harangued by that psychotic little bureaucrat, and then rushing out to kidnap working men from a Home Depot parking lot in order to demonstrate to their master, Stephen Bitch Ass Miller, how good they are at being America’s new gestapo.

“Oh, Mister Miller, sir! I put on 40 pounds of tactical gear and tackled a 55-year-old partially disabled day laborer! I prevented him from doing some drywall work and feeding his family, for you, sir! I yearn for your approval!”….

Funding The War on Yourselves

Josh Marshall, June 11, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]

Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will begin “winding down” FEMA after this year’s Hurricane season and, perhaps the more significant statement, that he will begin distributing disaster aid directly from the President’s office. In other words, disaster assistance will be the President’s personal gift, an assist for friends and those who display loyalty. It’s part of the broader pattern we can see across the horizon: Trump takes the policing and military powers of the United States and the national tax revenues (drawn disproportionately from the blue states) and uses it to make war on states he considers enemies.

This has always been the centerpiece of Trumpism even more than authoritarianism, a kind of fiscal warlordism. Disaster relief dollars are a relatively minor expenditure. But we see it aimed at universities, the cut off of funds generally to California and the forced deployment of National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles. The blue states essentially fund the war against themselves.

American Concentration Camps

Chris Hedges and Eunice Wong, June 10, 2025

Our offshore concentration camps, for now, are in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But don’t expect them to remain there. Once they are normalized, not only for U.S.-deported immigrants and residents, but U.S. citizens, they will migrate to the homeland. It is a very short leap from our prisons, already rife with abuse and mistreatment, to concentration camps, where those held are cut off from the outside world — “disappeared” — denied legal representation and crammed into fetid, overcrowded cells.

Prisoners in the camps in El Salvador are forced to sleep on the floor or in solitary confinement in the dark. Many suffer from tuberculosis, fungal infections, scabies, severe malnutrition and chronic digestive illnesses. The inmates, including over 3,000 children, are fed rancid food. They endure beatings. They are tortured, including by water-boarding or being forced naked into barrels of ice-cold water, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2023, the State Department described imprisonment as “life-threatening,” and that was before the Salvadoran government declared a “state of exception” in March 2022. The situation has been greatly “exacerbated,” the State Department notes, by the “addition of 72,000 detainees under the state of exception.” Some 375 people have died in the camps since the state of exception was established, part of El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs,” according to the local human rights group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario….

There’s no wrong way to protest fascism: The conversation around the invasion of LA gets it wrong

Jordan Zakarin, June 10, 2025

…Kristi Noem calls Los Angeles a “city of criminals”: “They are not city of immigrants, they are a city of criminals”….

The destruction of a few driverless taxis has received far more attention and condemnation than efforts by plainclothes federal agents to seize children from elementary schools by lying about having parental consent….

Americans have been drilled into reflexively siding with law enforcement and demanding perfection of the oppressed, so married to the sanctity of individual property rights that preservation of private wealth becomes the litmus test for righteousness, not the underlying cause at the heart of the protest….

The enforced disdain is also why Politico can run anonymous quotes from Republicans convinced that they’ve scored a political victory by unleashing the military on Americans.

“We couldn’t script this any better,” one gleeful person close to the White House tells my Playbook colleague Dasha Burns. “Democrats are again on the ‘20’ side of an 80-20 issue. … It’s the same thing that won [Trump] the election.”

In the eyes of the White House, Trump already had a clear mandate from voters for the mass deportation effort that was driving those ICE raids in LA. And aides believe the chaotic scenes that followed — masked protesters pelting police with rocks, setting fire to cars and waving Mexican flags on abandoned freeways — will only bolster public support for Trump’s hard-line approach. Indeed, every time a Dem speaks out against the president’s actions in LA, the White House is happier still.

Publishing the smug boasts of a fascistic regime celebrating is how insulated outlets like Politico and its journalists are from the peril facing everyday Americans — or at least how insulated they think they are from the application of autocracy.

The gloating Trump officials were at least in part reacting to the first set of poll numbers on the protests, which showed a plurality of the public registering disapproval of the protests. It’s little wonder why — public opinion in cases like this is shaped almost entirely by news coverage — and for reporters used to soulless reactionary political strategy, it amounted to a final judgment on the worthiness of the protests….

The Imperial Boomerang Lands in Los Angeles (Director’s Cut)

Spencer Ackerman, 10 Jun 2025

…check out this excellent Brian Merchant piece on the LA protesters summoning and burning driverless Waymo cars. In addition to all of his insightful points about “weaponizing the accountability sink” of autonomous vehicles—and see this 404 Media media piece from Jason Koebler about Waymo as a surveillance wellspring for police—it strikes me that we’re seeing a glimpse of the future of innovative urban unrest. If the LA protesters didn’t deliberately turn Waymos into flaming improvised barricades, those who come after them will. And I suspect the scolds who hate seeing property burn more than they hate seeing people kidnapped would applaud if the Hong Kong demonstrators set autonomous vehicles alight…..

Men DOGEbags at Work

DOGE Is on a Recruiting Spree 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 06-09-2025]

Strategic Political Economy

Amid Trump’s Immigration Onslaught, There Is No Sanctuary

Evelyn Quartz, June 12, 2025 [The Lever]

Amid the fear, chaos, and violence playing out on the streets, the protections promised by neoliberalism are nowhere to be found….

The Power To Punish Without The Capacity To Care

To understand why this is happening, it’s important to look at what neoliberalism did to American life. Over the past four decades, both parties helped hollow out the idea that the government should provide meaningful material goods for the public. Public housing was gutted. Health care was privatized. Social services were fragmented and offloaded to nonprofits. Immigrant defense was no exception — it was left to overwhelmed legal clinics, volunteer networks, and civil society groups running on grants and burnout.

Sanctuary laws were passed into this vacuum. Such efforts tried to draw a moral line in a system that had already been dismantled — one where the tools of enforcement remained fully funded, but the tools of protection were nowhere to be found. Now, as raids unfold, that gap is laid bare. The state has no rapid legal defense plan. The city has no coordinated response. There is no visible apparatus of care.

That’s what neoliberalism leaves behind: a government that can still surveil, police, and deport, but can no longer house, heal, or shield its people. A state that retains the power to punish, but not the capacity to care.

So when Trump reasserts that power to punish, as he’s doing now, there is nothing in place to stop him. And worse: Democratic officials, still clinging to a playbook of statements and symbolism, offer little more than moral condemnation. Instead of addressing or even acknowledging a political status quo that has not only gotten us here but that no longer commands legitimacy, Democrats are doubling down on what’s broken….

The Ten Warning Signs of The Collapse of the Knowledge System

[Honest Broker, via The Big Picture June 8, 2025]

A huge change is coming. Would you believe me if I told you that the biggest news story of our century is happening right now—but is never mentioned in the press? That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But that is often the case when a bold new worldview appears.

The big, bad bond market could derail Trump’s big, beautiful bill

[Vox, via The Big Picture June 8, 2025]

Trump wants to blow a $3 trillion hole in the budget. The bond market is saying “no way.”

Global power shift

How Xi Jinping lost control – A timeline

[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

China’s Chokehold on This Obscure Mineral Threatens the West’s Militaries

[New York Times, via The Big Picture June 14, 2025]

China produces the entire world’s supply of samarium, a rare earth metal that the United States and its allies need to rebuild inventories of fighter jets, missiles and other hardware.

Top U.S. General in Africa Paints Grim Picture of U.S. Military Failures in Africa

Nick Turse, June 8 2025 [The Intercept]]

After two decades, and many failed counterterrorism efforts, the Trump administration is considering shuttering U.S. Africa Command.

World Bank Data On India And Pakistan Shows Massive Contrast Over Poverty 

[NDTV, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

Russia Seeks ‘Asymmetrical’ Response For Strike On Its Nuclear Assets 

[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

Full Event: Lavrov Brutally Takes Down UK, Rips NATO Over Ukraine, Then Drops Iran & China Shocker 

[Hindustan Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

Secret British plans to ‘defeat entire Russian Black Fleet’ revealed in leaks 

[The Grayzone, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Israel and Iran: Where Are We Now?

Thomas Neuburger, Jun 13, 2025

Iran Claims Historic Espionage Coup Against Israel. Is It a Bluff or Is It Real? 

Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain, June 11, 2025 [Drop Site]

Oligarchy

Rituals of humiliation 

[The Anti-Empire Project, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

How does one join the dizzying heights of the elite? Not the 10%, the 2%, or the 1% of professional or business success, but the billionaire class, the House of Representatives, Governor of a major state or mayor of New York City? Is it by proving your merit in school, a bit of good luck, perhaps a grinding mindset as aspirants are taught to hope? Or by family connection and bloodline, as those doomed to fail may fear?

Certainly it’s the latter. But there is a missing ingredient that aspirants should know before they set out to try to join this genocidal Western club.

In the book Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, Italian political scientist Diego Gambetta talks about how in certain circumstances it is rational for subordinates (say, enforcers who are collecting extortion money from businesses) to display to their superiors how incompetent they are (at, for example, actually running a business). This is a display of loyalty: an incompetent subordinate can only survive at the boss’s whim, and is therefore going to be loyal. Taking some irreversible action can also show loyalty: the importance of tattoos to criminal organizations is an example. Getting a specific tattoo permanently affiliates a criminal with others in the group, a valuable display of loyalty.

The codes of the underworld help answer the question: why did the whole elite, Republicans and Democrats, Hollywood and Wall Street and Silicon Valley, go to the private island of convicted-then-assassinated child abuser Jeffrey Epstein?

Epstein’s activities were the proclivity of some, others were ensnared through the normal methods spies use, but for others it was probably understood as the equivalent of getting a tattoo: one must make oneself reputationally destroyable as a condition of getting into the elite. When this kind of thing blows up, with members accusing one another and people like Epstein or his mentor Robert Maxwell meeting with fatal accidents, it reveals the pattern in sufficient detail for researchers like Whitney Webb to document them (in the two-volume One Nation Under Blackmail). Neither sexual abuse nor blackmail are the point: the point is to undergo rituals that prove your subordination is absolute, and that you can therefore be trusted to exercise your power according to (genocidal) principles.

The greater the power sought, the greater the display of submission required….

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Capital’s Regime Change and the Neoliberal Monetary Debate

[History & Political Economy Project, via Naked Capitalism 06-09-2025]

Wealth inequality’s deep roots in human prehistory 

[Science Daily, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

Millions of student-loan borrowers are getting a ‘financial scarlet letter’ that could risk their home purchases and job prospects, Elizabeth Warren says 

[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

Trumpillnomics

RFK Jr. ousts entire CDC vaccine advisory committee

Associated Press, June 09, 2025 DK

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday removed every member of a scientific committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to use vaccines and pledged to replace them with his own picks.

American doctors are moving to Canada to escape the Trump administration

KFF Health News, June 09, 2025 [DailyKos]

Earlier this year, as President Donald Trump was beginning to reshape the American government, Michael, an emergency room doctor who was born, raised, and trained in the United States, packed up his family and got out.

Michael now works in a small-town hospital in Canada. KFF Health News and NPR granted him anonymity because of fears he might face reprisal from the Trump administration if he returns to the U.S. He said he feels some guilt that he did not stay to resist the Trump agenda but is assured in his decision to leave. Too much of America has simply grown too comfortable with violence and cruelty, he said.

“Part of being a physician is being kind to people who are in their weakest place,” Michael said. “And I feel like our country is devolving to really step on people who are weak and vulnerable.”

Michael is among a new wave of doctors who are leaving the United States to escape the Trump administration…. The Medical Council of Canada said in an email statement that the number of American doctors creating accounts on physiciansapply.ca, which is “typically the first step” to being licensed in Canada, has increased more than 750% over the past seven months compared with the same time period last year — from 71 applicants to 615.

[X-Twitter, via Heather Cox Richardson, June 11, 2025]

Justin Wolfers
@JustinWolfers
The US & Chinese trade negotiators have negotiated a handshake agreement to seek signoff  to agree that a previously-agreed agreement is still their agreed upon agreement. (That agreement is not an agreement but a framework for seeking future agreements.)

Predatory finance

Do tax havens still matter?

Richard Murphy, June 14 2025

BlackRock, Goldman Scale Up Tax Trades in $3 Trillion SMA Boom

[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture June 13, 2025]

BlackRock Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley are among firms scaling up a strategy known as tax-loss harvesting, typically offered through customized portfolios called separately managed accounts.

Yale Is Rushing to Sell Billions in Private Equity Investments

[New York Times, via The Big Picture June 13, 2025]

The university is selling multiple stakes in private equity funds as the industry struggles and President Trump targets Ivy League institutions.

Health care crisis

Private Equity, UnitedHealth Take a Huge Loss as Oregon Bans Corporate Control of Doctors 

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

‘So Much Evil Had To Happen for this Bill To Pass’ Oregon just made corporate medicine illegal, again. Here’s how it happened.

Maureen Tkacik June 13, 2025 [The American Prospect]

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture June 14, 2025]

U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs.

GitHub is Leaking Trump’s Plans to ‘Accelerate’ AI Across Government 

[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

Getty Images and Stability AI face off in British copyright trial that will test AI industry 

[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture June 13, 2025]

Chatbots are replacing Google’s traditional search, devastating traffic for some publishers.

Collapse of independent news media

Journalists and Their Shadows (w/ Patrick Lawrence) | The Chris Hedges Report

Chris Hedges, Jun 12, 2025

Patrick Lawrence and Chris Hedges chronicle the decline of mainstream media and the craft of journalism, and the dark psychological reality behind media complicity in schemes of the powerful….

Lawrence points to psychological disruptions within journalists as a result of the nature of their work as part of the reason why the press has deteriorated. “The corruptions in the press begin with the corruptions of the personalities who want to get paid, want to be promoted, and so on,” he says.

Instead of employing the Socratic process of reasoning, mainstream journalists today have agendas they must serve….

Climate and environmental crises

Kabul at risk of becoming first modern city to run out of water, report warns 

[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

Democrats’ political malpractice

Schumer’s Iran Position Is Stupid  

Bill Scher, June 6, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

Resistance

Going Out to a Protest? Here’s How Not to Get Arrested.

Laura Flynn, June 14 2025 [The Intercept]

Lawyer Isabella Salomão Nascimento on knowing your rights — and getting the cops to respect them.

How to Stay Safe Protesting ICE — and What to Expect From Cops in Your City

Akela Lacy, June 14 2025 [The Intercept]

Do police in your city use tear gas or rubber bullets? Repression tactics from Seattle to Chicago, plus how to prepare.

‘IAM Max’: Machinists Rally for Member Detained by ICE 

[Labor Notes, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

Trump Has Put a Target on SEIU, and the Labor Movement Is Fighting Back 

[In These Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

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

Some Republicans Opposed Using Troops Against Protests in 2020. Now They’re Marching in Lockstep.

Matt Sledge, June 13 2025 [The Intercept]

A long hot summer

Thomas Mills, June 11, 2025

The United States is in the midst of the biggest backlash we’ve seen in decades. Resentment against immigrants is driving the narrative today, but anger at various minority groups and those seen as supporting them is fueling an attempt at reordering American society. The animus is driven by predominantly White Christian hostility to darker-skinned people and other religions, but it includes a class element that attracts working class people of color who feel left behind in an evolving society and economy.

Liberals should be prepared to find themselves on the wrong side of most Americans, even if they believe they are on the side of the angels, on deportations. People approve of Trump’s immigration actions. They believe that most immigrants need to go back to where they came from. They believe Trump is making the country safer by deporting criminals and terrorists. They will tolerate a lot of ugly behavior from ICE and the administration if they think immigrants are getting the boot.

Joe Biden’s immigration policy was a political disaster for Democrats. He ignored the demand of a majority of citizens to get a handle on the Southern border and reduce the flow of immigrants into the country. Most people won’t make much of a distinction between those who are here legally and those who aren’t. They just want a lot of them gone. Snatching people off the street, cutting off their communication with loved ones, and detaining them in unknown locations may be cruel and inhumane, but most Americans will look away, believing ICE is doing unpleasant but necessary work to rid our country of “illegals.”

Trump understands this American zeitgeist and is baiting progressives. He wants outrage and protests. He sent ICE into places where he knew he would get a reaction. He wanted protests and riots and he got them. He’ll use them as an excuse to expand his power.

Early polls show people supporting Trump’s decision to send the National Guard to LA by large margins. They won’t make much distinction between federalizing the National Guard and sending in the Marines. They’ll just see the moves as efforts to restore peace in cities plagued by burning and looting. The images of masked men standing on burning Waymos waving Mexican flags and groups of brown-skinned men burning American flags reinforces their sense that the country is being inundated by criminals from foreign countries….

We’re in the early stages of an attempt to divide America fueled by a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, marriage equality, immigration, the negative impacts of trade deals, and the technological revolution. Trump is trying to normalize a heavy-handed response by the federal government. Right now, people are sympathetic, but their tolerance will eventually run out. If crack downs become too harsh or the unrest lasts too long, he may pay a political price. It’s probably going to be a long, hot summer.

[TW: But Les Leopold writes that deportations do not have working-class support:]

Does Trump Have White Working-Class Support for Deporting Undocumented Workers?

Les Leopold, June 11, 2025

…Does the public at large endorse these arrests? Don’t working-class people in general want these undocumented workers deported to alleviate job competition? That apparently reasonable commonsense claim turns out to be wrong. according to recent survey data.

I reviewed this data in a recent Substack, but it bears repeating because it is so important to clearly understand what working people actually support.

The Cooperative Election Study (CES), with more than 500,000 respondents, asked the following question repeatedly from 2010 to 2020.

“Are you in favor of granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes.”….

Civic republicanism

How Do You Measure Corporate Power? Count the Marines in LA 

[America’s Undoing, via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2025]

[TW: Yglesias demanding people show their “measure” of corporate power is like telling Sam Adams, Ben Franklin, and the Committees of Correspondence that their list of grievances was irrelevant unless they could somehow measure the power of the Board of Trade in London.

[But more to the point, measures of corporate power have been published for decades, and Yglesias ignoring them amounts to a bald faced lie. Corporate market domination are well known measures of corporate power used by anti-trust enforcers for decades — well known to anyone but Yglesias, that is. Similarly, many economists have argued that the skew of share of profits from labor to corporations in the national income accounts shows not just corporate power, but the emergence of an economy domination by rentier extraction. Yglesias is such a shameless whore.]

Politics Without Purpose. 

Aurelien [Trying to Understand the World, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

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

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

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

National Guard to be sent to L.A. amid clashes; Newsom calls Hegseth’s threat of Marines ‘deranged’

[Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2025]

Trump’s Rubicon moment

ZACK STANTON, 06/08/2025 [politico.com/playbook]

Trump: “If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can’t do their jobs, which everyone knows they can’t, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”

….

What Trump is doing is incredibly rare: “It is the first time since 1965 that a president has activated a state’s National Guard force without a request from that state’s governor,” NYT’s Shawn Hubler and Laurel Rosenhall report, citing Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center. “The last time was when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators in 1965, she said.”

Also worth flagging: The National Guard “has nearly non-existent law enforcement training or doctrine despite it always being talked about as a domestic force,” as Military.com’s Steve Beynon notes.

What’s the basis of the legal authority here? The Times notes that “the directive signed by Mr. Trump cites ‘10 U.S.C. 12406,’ referring to a specific provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services. Part of that provision allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if ‘there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.’” Naturally, then, language from the administration aims to underscore the threat of rebellion, danger or invasion.

The Trump Family’s Money-Making Machine

[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture June 1, 2025]

…no modern American president has positioned his family to make so much money while in the White House. Already, since the early days of his reelection campaign, he’s more than doubled his net worth to about $5.4 billion.

In that time, the Trump name has powered more than $10 billion of real estate projects, a multibillion-dollar valuation for his money-losing social-media company, more than $500 million in sales from just one of his crypto ventures and millions of dollars more from stakes in companies that offer financial services, guns and drone parts. Family members have also scored an array of corporate positions — at least seven new roles as an adviser or executive for his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., alone.

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 1, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Why Are They Trying to Kill Us?

Conor Gallagher, May 28, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]

For all the talk of how incompetent our elites are, there’s one area where they show remarkable skill and determination: relentlessly creating conditions to shorten the lifespans of the disabled, poor, and working class.

Let’s look at just a few of the many examples before examining potential reasons it’s becoming so much more brazen.

In the US, policies to hurt the working poor and disabled are nothing new, but they’ve exploded in scope in recent years. Elites have collectively memory-holed an ongoing pandemic that has thus far officially killed more than 1.2 million (although that number is likely much higher), disabled many more, and fallen disproportionately on the working class and disabled….

The US official line is now openly that such weak people simply aren’t worth the investment….

In the telling of RFK Jr. and friends, public healthcare coddles the weak, which is real soft Nazi stuff. As Derek Beres puts it:

By avoiding discussion of education, employment, social support networks, economic status and geographic location – the social determinants that public health experts agree influence health outcomes – Kennedy, in lockstep with top wellness influencers, is practicing soft eugenics.

But let’s not forget that the Biden administration was in some cases outdoing the current one….

The cuts to disability benefits will decimate quality of life, erode services, and lead to earlier deaths, but that appears to be the point. Again, though, this is nothing new. A report published last year by the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, finds that between 2011 and 2019, 1,062,334 premature deaths were recorded among individuals living outside the wealthiest 10% of areas in England mostly due to poverty and austerity measures….

What is central to all these Western countries? Neoliberalism. Is it surprising that an ideology that says markets are more important than people would completely hand over social policy to the wealthiest and embrace eugenics?….

Republican Senator to Medicaid Cuts Protesters — ‘We’re All Going to Die’

[Newsweek, May 30, 2025]

During a tense exchange with protesters at a town hall, Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa responded to concerns over potential Medicaid cuts by declaring, “Well, we are all going to die.”

YouTube video

www.youtube.com/…

GOP’s Latest Pitch for Gutting Medicaid and Food Aid? ‘Well, We All Are Going to Die’

Jake Johnson, May 30, 2025 [CommonDreams]

“We’re at the point where a U.S. senator is saying healthcare and hunger don’t matter because we all die eventually.”

Musk’s Legacy of Death vs the Rising Movement for Life

William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, May 30, 2025 [Our Moral Moment w/ Bishop William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove]

…DOGE is a scam, but its consequences are real. According to research at Boston University, more than 300,000 people have died because of the careless cuts Musk made to the USAID program, decimating US investment in fighting hunger and disease around the world….

… we know every lie has its limits in a universe that is held together by truth. No lie can live forever, just as no tyrant can abuse power without eventually facing consequences. People can be deceived. We can be distracted. We can even be self-absorbed. But when death draws near enough to touch us, people also have an innate instinct to live.

This is what we see: life is rising up in people to cry out for life.

That’s what we hear in the graduation speeches that are calling young people to stand for truth and in the judicial decisions that are making clear that Trump’s abuse of power is illegal. Life is rising up to cry for life in protests and direct actions, in legal motions and in petitions to members of Congress. At Moral Mondays in DC, which will continue this coming Monday, June 2^nd, we’ve witnessed life welling up in people who refuse to accept the unnecessary death.

How do we stop the lie? This is the question we hear most these days. It’s at the center of our prayers. This is what we know: we stop the lie by standing with the people who are most directly harmed by it….

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s Robert P. Jones, who publishes on Substack at White Too Long, “If you look at the population as a whole, only 30% of American adults cast a vote for Trump in 2024. There’s no legitimate way to read this election as a blank check for the destructive attacks on our nation’s basic values and institutions.”….

This dashboard visualizes the human impact of funding changes for aid and support organizations.

[impactcounter.com, via Our Moral Moment]

Deaths caused by Funding Discontinuation

99,639 Adult Deaths

207,911 Child Deaths

Deaths Per Hour 103

A Storm in the West: The Liberal Intellectual Paradigm Is Broken 

A. Crooke [Conference paper, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2025]

…The real action in the US is not happening in seminars at Brookings or in op-eds in the New York Times. It is happening backstage, out of sight; beyond the reach of polite society, and mostly off-script. America is undergoing a transformation more akin to what befell Rome in the age of Augustus. Which is to say, the main happening is the collapse of a paralytic élite order, and the consequent unfolding of new political projects….

Trump not violating any law

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

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

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

By Calling More Than Half the Country ‘Scum,’ Trump Is Raising a Bright Red Flag

Thom Hartmann, May 27, 2025 [Common Dreams]

When political leaders use dehumanizing language to vilify their opponents, they’re in actuality laying the groundwork for authoritarianism, repression, and violence.

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 25, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution, Part 1

GOP Budget Would Make It Even Harder to Hold Trump Administration in Contempt

Shawn Musgrave, May 24 2025 [The Intercept]

…The looming showdown over the judiciary’s power to issue contempt orders stems from a single sentence tucked into the thousand-page budget bill, which passed the House of Representatives by a single vote on Thursday.

“This is a slap in the face to the concept of separation of powers,” said a spokesman for Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.).

If enacted, the provision — found on page 544 out of 1,082 — would restrict how federal judges can hold government officials or other litigants in contempt if they defy court-issued injunctions and restraining orders. Contempt is the primary enforcement mechanism available to courts, and in cases around the country judges have weighed whether to issue contempt findings against President Donald Trump’s deputies….

Although this is technically a budget bill, items in it from that wish list include a significant restriction on “the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders,” as Dean of Berkeley Law School Erwin Chemerinsky explained in Just Security Monday. “Without the contempt power,” he writes, “judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.”

Trump not violating any law

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

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

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

Debating Trump “Ambush” of South African President With “White Genocide’ Lies

Trump’s goals were clear. I wrote yesterday that he was pushing the phony “white genocide” narrative to:

• Retaliate against South Africa for going to the ICJ regarding the actual genocide in Gaza, to get them to back off more.
• Cheapen the public discourse over “genocide” — helping turn it into just another meaningless slur.
• Make it seem like Trump is standing up for alleged oppressed white folks, to play to some white working-class voters who don’t perceive that it’s actually — again — for Israel (similar to how they repackaged Palestine protests as an immigration issue).
• Push back against BRICS to the extent it’s challenging US establishment dominance, or appears to be doing so.

He lectured him on alleged abuses in South Africa and Ramaphosa was at best doing a diplomatic defense.

Trump orders the government to stop enforcing rules he doesn’t like

Maxine Joselow, Hannah Natanson and Ian Duncan [Washington Post, via downwithtyranny.com 5-19-2025]

At the Transportation Department, enforcement of pipeline safety rules has plunged to unprecedented lows since President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Trump recently ordered Energy Department staff to stop enforcing water conservation standards for showerheads and other household appliances. And at one Labor Department division, his appointees have instructed employees to halt most work related to antidiscrimination laws.

Across the government, the Trump administration is trying a new tactic for gutting federal rules and policies that the president dislikes: simply stop enforcing them.

“The conscious effort to slow down enforcement on such a broad scale is something we have never seen in previous administrations,” said Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. “It amounts to a dramatic assertion of presidential power and authority.”

This account of the Trump administration’s efforts to scale back application of many laws is based on interviews with more than a dozen federal employees across seven agencies, as well as a review of internal documents and federal data….

In some cases, Trump has personally ordered a halt to enforcement. The president on May 9 signed a memorandum directing the Energy Department “not to enforce” what he called “useless” water conservation standards for home appliances including bathtubs, faucets, showerheads and toilets….

Heather Cox Richardson, May 20, 2025 [Letters from an American]

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for fiscal year 2026. When Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked her to define “habeas corpus,” Noem’s response indicated she has no understanding of the nation’s fundamental law.

“Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” Noem said. Hassan corrected her: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea.”

 

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Trump in TROUBLE as Amy Coney Barrett SNAPS at Supreme Court (YouTube video)

[Legal AF, May 16, 2025]

[TW: Leah Litman, Michael Popok and Alex Aronson discuss the Supreme Court hearings on Friday 5-16-2025. This is ostensibly about birthright citizenship, but perhaps the more important issue is  whether US District courts can impose injunctions nationwide. I do not recall ever before having linked to a discussion of Supreme Court hearings, but these were extraordinary in showing how (anti)Republicans and conservative are attempting to obliterate two and a half centuries of legal development and reasoning in the USA republic’s experiment in self government. Recall that the (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians repeatedly sought and obtained injunctions to stop implementation of Biden policies they disliked. But now that Democrats and liberals are stopping Trump policies with court injunctions, (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians are arguing that only the Supreme Court can impose nationwide injunctions.

[But it’s even worse: Trump’s former personal attorney, now serving as U.S. Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, actually argued that a court injunction can apply only to the particular case and the particular litigant. (This was the point in the hearings that Justice Amy Coney Barrett sputtered “Really?” with some incredulity.) In other words, according to Sauer, if you want to prevent Trump / Musk / DOGE from disposing of 12,351 workers from an agency, you would need 12,351 injunctions for each of the 12,351 agency workers to protect all of them. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor, pointedly asked Sauer, “You’re talking about the hundreds and thousands of people who weren’t part of the judgment of the court. They would all have to file individual actions?”

Litman, Popok and Aronson also discuss how (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians are pushing for laws and legal decisions that would almost totally restrict the path for class action lawsuits, the only alternative to using court injunctions to legally protect large groups of people. With this, you see the outlines of the legal assault on American law and jurisprudence that has been developed during the past half century in the seminars and conferences by the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, Mercatus Center, and the rest of the apparatus of plutocrat-funded conservatives and libertarian entities.

[As I have argued before, the “left’s” response to this assault on American law and jurisprudence has been crippled by the “left” rejecting the legitimacy of American history and institutions for being based on racism and misogyny. I firmly believe this is the primary reason the doctrines and ideas being developed by conservatives and libertarians were largely ignored for the past half century. The “left” has yet to deal with the question of why the plutocrats are expending so much to reinterpret and change American law and jurisprudence. What was there in place before the plutocratic assault that plutocrats want to obliterate, and the “left” has been ignoring?

[Especially frightening is that “Justices” Thomas and Alito appear to have accepted Sauer’s arguments.]

In Birthright Citizenship Case, Trump DOJ Asks Supreme Court Justices to Make Themselves Irrelevant

Garrett Epps, May 16, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

… Thursday’s argument had two aspects, which appeared and disappeared like the Katzenjammer Kids playing peekaboo throughout the nearly three hours of oral argument. The Court had formally assembled to hear the first: When is it okay for one federal district judge to block a government policy nationwide?

The second was: Has every Congress, every Court, and every administration for the past century and a half read the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause wrong, leaving Donald Trump, on his sole authority, to upend the rule that all babies born in the U.S., except the children of diplomatic families, are citizens at birth?

Though Sauer began his argument by boldly proclaiming the administration’s novel interpretation of the Amendment (it applied, he said, only to the children of free slaves in 1868 and has no effect on the children of immigrants today), he quickly moved to the administration’s real aim in bringing this “emergency docket” application before the Court.

In Sauer’s view, the case was about a broader issue than the permissibility of “universal injunctions” (federal district court orders that block new executive policies nationwide). Article III of the Constitution, which created the federal judiciary and gives it its powers, he argued, does not permit any federal court, at any level, to issue such injunctions.

This raises the question: What if the government loses in the district court—and then loses again in the Court of Appeals? What if it loses in the Supreme Court? What court can order it to stop engaging in behavior that Article III courts have found to violate the Constitution?

Without quite saying so, Sauer let it be known that the answer is: None.

If plaintiffs won in the Supreme Court, he graciously conceded, they could take the judgment to the bank—for themselves, that is. But Sotomayor asked him, once the Court decided the constitutional issue, would its order bind the government to stop the unconstitutional action against anyone?

Well . . . said Sauer . . . Not so much.

The result of such a case, Sauer said, would not be a Supreme Court order binding everyone else, but instead a Supreme Court precedent. And of course, plaintiffs still being injured by a government policy (for example, by being rendered stateless by an executive order) could cite that precedent in their cases. “If there was a decision that violated the precedent of the Court, then the affected plaintiffs could get a separate judgment,” he said.

Responded Sotomayor, “You’re talking about the hundreds and thousands of people who weren’t part of the judgment of the court. They would all have to file individual actions?”

Maybe not, said Sauer—if the case could satisfy “the rigorous criteria of Rule 23,” to be certified as a class action.

But if not, said Sotomayor, “you are claiming that not just the Supreme Court—that both the Supreme Court—and no lower court can stop an executive from universally, from violating those holdings by this Court.”….

If a president can simply wave away that much adverse authority—and then only grudgingly apply his losses in court—then the role of the federal courts will be, from now on, quite different from the one they have played for the past 100 years. American-style judicial review would become something like the Mexican writ of amparo, by which parties can get a judgment blocking an unconstitutional law only as to their individual cases; others in the same situation must go to court to get their own amparo. In the atomized world envisioned by the administration, judicial review might be called the Writ of Sisyphus. No matter how often a court pushes the rock up the hill, it will face the same task over and over if the government so chooses.

The Visionary of Trump 2.0: Russell Vought is advancing a radical ideological project decades in the making.

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Congressman Casten: Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law Is Causing Capital Flight Out of U.S. by Foreign Investors

Pam Martens and Russ Martens, May 5, 2025 [Wall Street on Parade]

Last Wednesday, Congressman Sean Casten, Democrat of Illinois, stated the following in an open meeting of the House Financial Services Committee:

“For the first time in my memory, foreign investors are not only fleeing U.S. equities but are fleeing U.S. Treasuries. I met with banks last week – banks under our jurisdiction – who said that the international community is putting a risk premium on investments in the United States because of regulatory risk and because they question whether the rule of law that they depend on to execute contracts in the United States will be executed as it will be in European markets where that capital is running to.

“So, if you need to tell yourself before you go to bed that you’re a deficit buster, fine, but just acknowledge you’re lying. This is not about deficit busting. This is about making rich people richer, and that’s it.”

Has Asia just taken a step away from the US dollar?

Alice Li, 7 May 2025 [South China Morning Post]

Asia’s largest economies have broken new ground by approving an emergency financing tool using the yuan and other local currencies

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 4, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

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

‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges

[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]

Judges Who Rule Against Trump Become Target of New MAGA War

Malcolm Ferguson, May 2, 2025 [The New Republic]

At least 11 federal judges and their families have been threatened and harassed since they ruled against President Trump on issues of deportations, federal funding, and his war on “wokeness.”

The judges, under anonymity, told Reuters that they had received multiple intimidating calls and emails to their homes and offices. Some have been subject to the disturbing “pizza box” method, in which antagonists will anonymously send a pizza to the home of a judge or their relatives just to show that they know where they live.

This is only compounded by the countless attacks and doxxing attempts that people like Laura Loomer and Elon Musk have made on X. When U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled against Trump’s illegal deportation of 137 men under the Alien Enemies Act in March, Loomer and Musk shared photos of his daughter, while their army of keyboard warriors called for the execution or arrest of Boasberg and the rest of his family. Loomer did the same to Judge John McConnell after he blocked Trump from freezing education grants, posting a picture of his daughter who had worked for the Education Department. Loomer’s post conveniently omitted that McConnell’s daughter left the department before Trump was even inaugurated….

You Already Knew He’s The WORST President Ever— Did You Also Know He’s The Most Blatantly Corrupt?

Howie Klein, April 26, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

…On Thursday, Drew Harwell and Jeremy Merrill reported that shady characters have poured tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s meme coin since he advertised on Wednesday that top purchasers could join him for an “intimate private dinner” next month. “The holders of 27 crypto wallets have each acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP coins, stakes worth about a million dollars each, since noon on Wednesday, when the team announced that the 220 top coin holders would be rewarded with a ‘night to remember’ on May 22 at the president’s Trump National Golf Club outside Washington. Crypto wallets are generally anonymous, making it challenging to identify who the purchasers were.”

They also advertised something so blatantly illegal that they partially removed it, no doubt at the insistence of White House lawyers: an offer of a tour of the White House for the 25 top $TRUMP coins purchasers. Now they’re just offering a tour but with no indication of what. This idea of offering direct presidential access to those who pay into a project benefiting the Trump personal bottom line would be enough to get him impeached if House Republicans weren’t so wedded to enabling his criminality. Not one House Republican has spoken out about this.

Harwell and Merrill wrote that “the biggest buyer acquired 2 million coins worth about $24 million.” That’s a substantial bribe, especially coming from a criminal in China who desperately needs a pardon from Trump. “Taken together, the 27 wallets acquired more than 8 million $TRUMP coins, worth about $100 million as of Thursday afternoon…

How Trump Accidentally Sabotaged His Own Case Against Abrego Garcia

Greg Sargent, May 3, 2025 [The New Republic]

He has now said it right out in the open—not once but twice. In two major interviews, President Donald Trump openly declared that he has the power to bring the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States. And on both occasions, Trump said straight out that he is not doing so because administration lawyers have told him he doesn’t have to—or that he shouldn’t.

This has been widely seen as an admission that Trump is defying the Supreme Court, which has directed the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Yes, it is that. But these two moments are also their own story. They offer a unique glimpse into the deep rot of bad faith infesting Trump and Stephen Miller’s broader project to expand the president’s removal powers into something extraordinarily vast and entirely unaccountable….

Men DOGEbags at Work

‘There’s Never Been a More Blatant Corporate Incursion Into the Public Sector Than DOGE’ 

[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]

Jeff Hauser is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project:

“We, in general, track corporate influence in politics, with a particular focus on the executive branch. And there has never been a more blatant corporate incursion into the public sector than DOGE, which reflects the privatization of our domestic policy, and increasingly our foreign policy as well, by people who are not even bothering to give up any of their private sector ties, and actually join the government for a few years—which we’re not fans of; we believe in career civil servants. But these people aren’t even doing that much. They’re just continuing to run, say, Tesla and SpaceX while running large swaths of the government, and never having been put before the Senate for nomination.”

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

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

‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges

[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]

Prepared to Return Abrego Garcia—Until Trump Intervened

Malcolm Ferguson, April 25, 2025 [The New Republic]

Some officials in the Trump administration tried to bring back Kilmar Abregoa Garcia just days after he was deported, but the president shut them down.

Since Abrego Garcia was unlawfully deported last month due to an administrative error, the White House has vehemently maintained that it will not try to return him to the United States. But a report in The Atlantic Friday revealed that in the days after Abrego Garcia’s deportation, some officials did in fact try to bring him home.

A lawsuit from Abrego Garcia’s family reportedly “sparked urgent conversations among attorneys at the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security,” and concern about the lack of evidence behind Trump’s claims that Abrego Garcia was part of MS-13, sources told The Atlantic.

The officials floated plans for the father of three’s return and sought ways to protect his safety while he was detained in El Salvador’s notorious megaprison, CECOT. But at the same time, backlash against the administration’s response (or lack thereof) took off, prompting the White House to change course entirely. Abrego Garcia’s case was no longer an “administrative error” but now the justified deportation of a “foreign terrorist” and MS-13 member—an evidenceless story Trump is now using to defend his unlawful deportation efforts as a whole.

“Abrego Garcia’s deportation became far more than just the case of one man; it developed into a measure of whether Donald Trump’s administration can send people—citizens or not—to foreign prisons without due process,” The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff wrote.

Trump Makes Alarming Confession on Wrongly Deported Immigrant

Malcolm Ferguson, April 25, 2025 [The New Republic]

Donald Trump is openly admitting his defiance of the Supreme Court on Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Read More