Author: Tony Wikrent Page 3 of 48

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 21, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The $79 Trillion Heist

Harold Meyerson, December 03, 2025 [The American Prospect]

…As Emma Janssen has reported in these pages, marketers are going where the money is, like bank robber Willie Sutton. First-class and business-seat travel on the airlines is booming, so much so that seating arrangements on Delta and United are being reconfigured to create more room for the affluent, while coach seats are going unfilled and “discount” airlines struggle. Revenues are up 3 percent this year at the Ritz-Carltons, the Four Seasons, and other luxury hotels, yet down by 3 percent at economy hotels. And when it comes to life’s biggest purchase—a home—the median age of first-time buyers reached 40 this year, an all-time high according to the National Association of Realtors….

Life in the nonaffluent nation is getting harder. According to a Brookings Institution analysis from last year, 43 percent of American families don’t earn enough to pay for housing, food, health care, child care, and transportation; every week, they must juggle which to pay and which not to pay. Among Black and Latino families, those figures rise to 59 percent and 66 percent, respectively….

What would America look like if the gap between worker pay and productivity hadn’t opened? A RAND Corporation study from earlier this year found that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners received about 67 percent of all taxable income in 1975. In 2019, the last year for which this data was available, they received 46.8 percent. Had that bottom 90 percent continued during the past half-century to make the same share of the national income they’d had in 1975, RAND calculates that by 2023 they would have made an additional $79 trillion. Just in the year 2023, they would have made an additional $3.9 trillion. As the size of the bottom 90 percent of the U.S. workforce is roughly 140 million people, that means that the average earner would have made about $28,000 more in 2023 than they actually did.

Where have all those missing $28,000 paychecks gone? Well, our nation was home to 1,135 billionaires this year, whose aggregate net worth in 2024 came to a cozy $5.7 trillion. That’s $1.8 trillion more than what it would take to cut 140 million $28,000 paychecks.…

[TW: Meyerson then summarizes the responsibility of Ronald Reagan for this economic devastation, enumerates the specific policy changes Reagan implemented, and seven policy changes needed to reverse this descent and begin to rebuild the US economy and restore general widely shared prosperity.]

The Housing Crisis Is A Democracy Crisis

Evelyn Quartz, Dec 16, 2025 [The Lever]

…French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, among the young nation’s first chroniclers, came to believe that Americans’ propensity to form civic associations created the lasting bonds that were the country’s real defense against tyranny. Without communal ties and shared responsibilities, Tocqueville feared individuals would fall prey to paternalistic “soft despotism,” in which top-down state administration replaces self-government.

In such an arrangement, he wrote, “Each [citizen], living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest… he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.”

In 2025, both Jefferson’s and Tocqueville’s warnings could not be more relevant. An all-powerful corporate state has robbed ordinary citizens of the ability to put down roots. Without a stable, affordable place to live, civic associations, and the bulwark they provide against tyranny, wither away. The housing crisis is thus a democracy crisis….

America’s housing stock — once supported by strong public initiatives like the New Deal housing programs — was steadily financialized with the help of policymakers. Under the rhetoric of “individual choice” and the rise of neoliberal economics, public housing programs increasingly subsidized the private market.

The clearest example of this is the federal Section 8 voucher program, launched in 1974. The program required qualifying tenants to redeem affordable-housing vouchers in the private housing market. This allowed policymakers to back away from bold investments in public housing and hand responsibility instead to private actors.

In 2008, the neoliberal outsourcing of the housing market to Wall Street imploded the global financial system. As a result, millions of Americans lost their homes and were driven deeper into financial instability, as banks and private equity firms tightened their control over American life.

President Barack Obama inherited a collapsing economy, much as Roosevelt had seven decades prior. But instead of rescuing the common citizen — a mission central to Roosevelt’s response — Obama bailed out banking executives while offering struggling homeowners technocratic private-sector solutions like the Home Affordable Modification Program, which sought to modify loans rather than provide direct relief.

As a result, private equity giants subsequently cashed in on the financial crisis by buying up hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes to rent out for profit.

Now, instead of helping more people become rooted in their communities, housing is dominated by rentier capitalism: a system in which homes are treated not as places to own, nor to participate in democratic life, but as financial assets. Today, a handful of consolidated private landlords dominate the rental market. The largest, Greystar Real Estate Partners, manages nearly a million rental units in the United States and was sued by the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year for allegedly burdening tenants with hidden junk fees…

A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance

Cory Doctorow, 18 Dec 2025 [Pluralistic]

How Capitalism Replaced America 

[Murtaza Hussain, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-2025]

Why economic policy matters for the Greens

Richard Murphy, December 15, 2025 [Funding the Future]

… This results, first, in their inability to explain the role of money, tax, borrowing, and the whole fiscal management cycle that lies at the core of macroeconomics, and second, in their failure to confront how economic power is exercised in modern economies, which confrontation is inevitably required to deliver the green transition we need….

The green transition, on which I have campaigned for a long time, will not be delivered by good intentions, ethical markets, or better pricing signals alone. It will only be delivered when political movements are willing to challenge the power of finance and markets directly, together with the flawed ideas on which their supposed power is based. And that cannot be done without understanding the role of money creation and the state’s capacity to use it for public purposes.

The problem is not that the Greens care too little about economics. It is that too many of them might accept an economic framing that treats markets as the ultimate arbiters of what is possible. Within that potential framing, government is cast as financially constrained, dependent on private capital, and permanently at risk of market punishment. As a result, green ambition could be trimmed to what markets will tolerate, not what climate science demands, and that is how radicalism is quietly neutralised, as I fear might be possible if those whom I am challenging get their way.

If you accept that the state must first persuade or appease financial markets before it can act, then the green transition is already compromised. Large-scale public investment becomes conditional. Industrial strategy becomes hesitant. Public ownership becomes politically “difficult”. And climate action is reduced to nudging private behaviour rather than reshaping the economy….

Markets do not lead transitions that undermine their own profitability. They resist them. That resistance can only be overcome by a state willing to act decisively: investing directly, owning strategically, regulating firmly, and accepting that public purpose must take precedence over private return. But that requires abandoning the idea that the state must ask permission from capital before it acts….

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 14, 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]

White House Refuses to Rule Out Summary Executions of People on Its Secret Domestic Terrorist List

Nick Turse, December 12 2025 [The Intercept]

The Trump administration ignored questions about whether it would order the killings of those on its NSPM-7 list — even while answering our other queries.

Hegseth Ousted Head of US Southern Command Who Raised Concerns About Boat Strikes

[defenddemocracy.press, 12-07-2025]

FBI Making List of American “Extremists,” Leaked Memo Reveals 

Ken Klippenstein, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2025]

SCOOP: Trump Admin Is Preparing to Revoke Visas of Critics of Elon Musk’s Twitter

Prem Thakker and Asawin Suebsaeng, Dec 11, 2025 [Zeteo]

Trump officials are considering revoking the visas of former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton and Imran Ahmed, of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

USA: New Findings Reveal Human Rights Violations at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome Detention Centers 

[Amnesty International, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2025]

Senate Report Exposes Systematic Abuse of U.S. Citizens by ICE and CBP, Directly Contradicting Noem’s Denials 

[Migrant Insider, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2025]

The Data Doesn’t Lie: How ProPublica Reports the Truth in an Era of False Claims

Stephen Engelberg, December 6, 2025 [ProPublica]

Trump pardons major drug traffickers despite his anti-drug rhetoric

[Washington Post, Dec 8, 2025]

The president has granted clemency to about 100 people accused of drug-related crimes during his time in office, a Post analysis shows.

Trump’s Pardon Racket

Stephen Holmes, Dec 9, 2025 [project-syndicate.org]

The pardon power is the only authority the US Constitution places entirely in the president’s hands, immune from legislative override or judicial review. For Alexander Hamilton, who assumed that shame would restrain abuse, Donald Trump is the nightmare scenario….

Hamilton was wrong. He did not anticipate a shameless president.

Hamilton’s case for the pardon was political, not moral. He barely mentioned mercy. The power’s core purpose was emergency peace-making: “in seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.” ….

Trump’s Ethnonational Security Strategy

Michael Burleigh, Richard Haass, Stephen Holmes, and Zaki Laïdi, Dec 9, 2025 [project-syndicate.org]

The United States’ new National Security Strategy is a tissue of populist ideology that reflects no understanding of the real challenges facing the country and views the main threat as liberal democracy itself. The result will be bad for most Americans and their European allies, but highly beneficial for financiers, tech billionaires, racists, and authoritarian powers, especially Russia and China.

Nordics, Not “Shithole Countries” — How American eugenics shaped U.S. immigration policy for decades, inspired Hitler, and paved the way for Trump, Musk and Miller.

Jim Stewartson, Dec 10, 2025 [MindWar]

Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It 

[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2025]

How Donald Trump Jr’s Fortune Jumped Six-Fold In A Year 

[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2025]

Eric Trump Has Gotten 10 Times Richer Since Dad’s Election

[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2025]

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 30, 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]

Legal Experts Accuse Hegseth of ‘War Crimes, Murder, or Both’ After New Reporting on Boat Strike Order

Julia Conley, Nov 30, 2025 [CommonDreams]

The Moment to Pick a Side Has Come [Civil Discourse]

Joyce Vance, Nov 30, 2025

…on Black Friday, the Washington Post ran with an exclusive story about the September 2, 2025, attack on a boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, the first of a series of attacks that have involved strikes on at least 23 boats to date. The Post reported that in advance of the strike, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”

That’s what the special operations commander overseeing the attack did. After the initial hit, live drone feed showed two survivors clinging to the wreckage. The commander “ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions … The two men were blown apart in the water.” The video Trump released later that day did not include the second strike.

The Post quoted Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who had advised special operations on the illegality of the order: “Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight ‘would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime.’” ….

There is a price to be paid for confirming a man as the Secretary of Defense who fails to understand the role he is being called upon to serve in, instead, relishing the title “Secretary of War.” Hegseth received a Bachelor of Arts in politics from Princeton in 2003 and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2013. He joined the Army National Guard as an infantry officer afterward. Nowhere along the road does he seem to have learned the fundamental lessons any Secretary of Defense should have known: The lesson of the Peleus trial.

In 1944, the captain of the U-boat U-852 sank the Greek steamer Peleus in the South Atlantic. There were 12 survivors, including an officer, who was given assurances they would be rescued the following day by Allied forces. But the U-852’s Kapitänleutnant Heinz Eck suddenly ordered his crew to fire on the 12 survivors and attack them with grenades when machine gun fire didn’t suffice to sink their life rafts.

Eck and four others were subsequently charged with war crimes. The charges were in connection with “the act of firing at the survivors and not the original sinking of the ship.” Eck argued “operational necessity,” claiming the survivors could have rallied and attacked the submarine. But all of the men were convicted.

It’s clear that even in wartime, an attack like the one on September 2 is a crime. If we are not at war—an issue the experts are now hotly debating and that we will track with Ryan Goodman in the morning—it’s quite simply murder….

A CIA trained killer who Trump granted asylum to killed a National Guard member — We need answers!

Dean Obeidallah, Nov 28, 2025

Disappeared to a Foreign Prison

Sarah Stillman, November 24, 2025 [The New Yorker]

…Just months earlier, one of these men had a job with UPS in Chicago. Another had lived in Houston, where he worked for his mother’s catering business, composed R. & B. music, and babysat his little brothers. Some had lived in the U.S. from an early age. Jim, a political refugee, had come to Miami from Liberia in the early nineties, when he was twenty-three, after his parents were murdered for their tribal and political affiliations during the country’s civil war. Others, including a twenty-one-year-old woman who had fled Togo fearing genital mutilation, had arrived in the U.S. recently, seeking asylum.

All of them had been taken from the United States against their will. Nearly all had been granted forms of legal relief that bar the government from deporting them to their home countries. At the heart of the protections they’d received was one of the most basic and sacrosanct concepts in both U.S. and international law: non-refoulement. This principle means that no nation should intentionally deport or expel people to a place where they are likely to face torture, persecution, death, or other grave harms….

Mica Rosenberg, Mario Ariza, McKenzie Funk, Jeff Ernsthausen and Gabriel Sandoval, November 24, 2025 [propublica.org]

Under a zero tolerance policy, the first Trump administration separated immigrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. New data suggests separations are happening all over the country, often after little more than a traffic stop.

What Pam Bondi and Lindsey Halligan did was not incompetence–It was intentional misconduct. They both must be disbarred.

Dean Obeidallah, Nov 25, 2025

The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine 

Seth Stern, November 23 2025 [The Intercept]

Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.

There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.

But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech. The case demonstrates the administration’s intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump announced in September that he was designating “Antifa” as a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t exist for domestic groups — following the killing of Charlie Kirk….

U.S. Military Documents Indicate Plans to Keep Troops in Caribbean Through 2028

Sam Biddle, Nick Turse, November 25 2025 [The Intercept]

Strategic Political Economy

The UK is cursed: how finance destroyed our economy [applies to USA also]

Richard Murphy, November 28, 2025 [Funding the Future]

For more than 45 years, the UK has suffered not one, but two economic curses: the resource curse and the finance curse. Both were chosen, primarily by Margaret Thatcher, and both inflated the pound, destroyed industry, and left Britain dependent on hot money and speculation. In this video, I explain how we got here — and what we must do to rebuild a real economy based on work, fair reward and democracy.

The hypocrisy of bankers needs to come to an end

Richard Murphy, November 27, 2025 [Funding the Future]

Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City

[moneyontheleft.org, via Public Banking Institute, Nov 26, 2025]

Public Banking Institute email:

“Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City” is a must-read for anyone who believes that our cities can—and should—be financially empowered to serve their people, not Wall Street. The essay reframes how we think about money itself, arguing that it should be treated not as a scarce private commodity but as a public tool for collective prosperity. By redefining money as “public credit,” this vision breaks from the austerity-driven mindset that has long stifled local progress and instead positions finance as a democratic force for housing, jobs, and sustainability.

At the heart of this vision is the call for public banking and civic payments infrastructure that would allow New Yorkers to access fair, transparent financial services—free from the extractive practices of private banks. A municipal public bank and “Public Venmo” system would ensure that credit flows directly into community priorities such as affordable housing, small business growth, and green energy, rather than into speculative markets. This isn’t just economic reform—it’s about returning power to the people and ensuring that city wealth circulates locally.

 

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 23, 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]

“Riots Raging”: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops

[ProPublica, via The Big Picture, November 16, 2025]

After reviewing coverage from the network and hours of social media videos that preceded Trump’s decision, ProPublica found that Fox’s portrayal of “Portland rioters” routinely instigating violence was misleading.

The Comey Hearing: This Would Be Hilarious If It Weren’t So Scandalous

Harry Litman, November 20, 2025 [The New Republic]

…I was in the northern Virginia courtroom Wednesday for the argument before Judge Michael Nachmanoff on former FBI Director James Comey’s motion to dismiss the case….

Nachmanoff pressed the government lawyer about how Halligan could have been the decision-maker when she came to the case only a few days before she sought the indictment.

It was in chasing down the implausible timeline that Nachmanoff cornered the government into conceding that the grand jury had not even reviewed the actual indictment in the case.

It was a gobsmacking, Perry Mason moment of the sort that doesn’t happen in actual hearings; except it did. The spectators emitted a kind of silent gasp while Judge Nachmanoff pursed his lips and remained silent for several seconds.

The bizarre and unprecedented chain of events happened because the grand jury declined to return the first of three charges in the government’s proposed indictment (and it approved charges two and three by reportedly very narrow margins). But instead of presenting to the grand jury a new indictment with the two approved counts—not only standard procedure but the only conceivable one—Halligan and her colleagues simply cut and pasted the original indictment, removing the first charge and renumbering the remaining two….

It’s hard to convey how consummately boneheaded it was to try to slip a revised indictment past the court rather than presenting it to the grand jury. Earlier in the week, Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick had referred to the situation as “uncharted territory.”

As this all spilled out, Nachmanoff summoned Halligan to the podium to confirm that when the second indictment was presented, the full grand jury wasn’t in the courtroom. Halligan acknowledged it, and Nachmanoff curtly dismissed her….

…Perhaps more seriously, the [Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick’s] opinion outlined two fundamental misstatements of law that Halligan made to the grand jury, each in response to juror questions. The opinion redacted the statements but described them sufficiently to reveal more breathtaking prosecutorial malpractice.

Halligan mischaracterized Comey’s Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in a way that could have suggested to jurors that the burden of proof lay with him. And she told them that if the government’s evidence appeared thin, they need not worry—additional evidence would come out at trial….

In its filing yesterday, the government did little to dispute the facts, arguing instead that if Halligan misled the jury, dismissal would be inappropriate unless the court found prejudice. That may be true in the abstract, but nothing about these errors feels harmless: The misstatements were grave, fundamental, and, given the grand jury’s already narrow votes, plainly consequential.

And on this score, another malefactor surfaces: Attorney General Pam Bondi. DOJ filings assert that Bondi reviewed the grand jury proceedings and materials and, on that basis, ratified both the indictment and Halligan’s authority. If so, she necessarily signed off on the very misstatements Judge Fitzpatrick highlighted. Her willingness to act as a shill for Halligan implicates her directly in the ethical and constitutional violations….

What Happens When The Government Loses Its Credibility: The Comey Prosecution

Joyce Vance, Nov 18, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

…The Judge called what happened here “a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding” and granted Comey’s request for access to all of the grand jury proceedings. He ordered the government to turn over those materials by 3 p.m. on Monday. Predictably, the government pushed back….

The Trump Administration’s Favorite Tool for Criminalizing Dissent

Quinta Jurecic, November 18, 2025 [The Atlantic]

Federal prosecutors have charged more than 100 people with Section 111 violations. Was their crime anything more than opposing Trump’s immigration policies?

The videos have become commonplace. Federal officers wearing masks and bulletproof vests subdue a moped driver in the middle of a busy D.C. street. A 70-year-old protester in Chicago is pushed to the ground by an armed Border Patrol agent holding a riot gun. In Los Angeles, an agent shoves away a demonstrator.

These videos capture the aggressive tactics of immigration officers under the second Trump administration. But they share something else, too. In each instance, following documented violence by federal officers toward protesters and immigrants, the Justice Department pressed charges—against the victim of that violence. Those three people, according to the DOJ, had all broken a law prohibiting “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officials….

Michael Steele’s [Malcolm Nance’s] GRAVE WARNING about Trump Will Give You CHILLS

[Your Daily Political Fix, November 18, 2025, YouTube]

1:14
…we are at the point of danger now. Uh, this administration has convinced themselves based on their own fantasies wrapped within their heads watching footage that’s five and 10 years old … they want to kill Americans that other American citizens now need to be designated as equal to a foreign terrorist group or armed vigilante gang or armed gangs in El Salvador in an effort to poison the mind of onethird of the electorate to attack and potentially kill another third of the electorate.

If that sounds familiar, that’s what Adolf Hitler did. He won with 33% of the vote. He got the other 33% to join together to try to wipe out the democratically elected 33%. We are in a very very very dangerous place right now. Well, I don’t know what else you call it when you’re sending red state, you know, troops into blue states without their permission. That feels inciting of a a civil war or whatever you want to call it. when you openly say insurrection act … and even a Trump judge says it has no relation to reality.

2:44
Well, what we’re seeing here is quite simple. It’s military occupation. And he’s sending forces from people who he thought from states that were supposed to be Trump supporting. Let me tell you
something. These guardsmen go where they’re ordered because that’s their their job for the weekend, right? So when they get mobilized and activated, they’ll go there. But with few exceptions, this the force is 40 to 45% African-American, Latino, and women. And they’re not going to go out and start shooting people. We haven’t even seen any evidence of where they actually are other than doing support. It’s ICE, the secret police, the new American Gestapo. And I will call them that professionally because what they are doing is the technical term in my manual that is used throughout the world. The terrorist recognition handbook is state terrorism where all instruments of government and law enforcement the intelligence apparatus carry out acts of terrorism in order to intimidate the entire nation into a state of fear.

White House blew past legal concerns in deadly strikes on drug boats

Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel and Alex Hortonibe, Nov 22, 2025 [Washington Post]

President Donald Trump and his top White House aides pushed for lethal strikes on Western Hemisphere drug traffickers almost as soon as they took office in January, and in the past 10 months have repeatedly steamrolled or sidestepped government lawyers who questioned whether the provocative policy was legal, according to multiple current and former officials familiar with the debates….

So much for constitutional conservatives — CBP violates federalism, civil rights, and state laws as Republicans cheer.

Thomas Mills, Nov 21, 2025 [PoliticsNC]

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece about the Border Patrol’s invasion of the state, citing their assault and abduction of an American citizen in Charlotte. I concluded the piece asking, “Where are the lawyers?” Well, one attorney replied.

John Runkle sent me a letter he had written in July addressed to Governor Josh Stein and Attorney General Jeff Jackson. In it, he reminded them that Republicans passed a law banning masks in public with few exceptions. The Customs and Border Patrol agents in the state are brazenly defying it.

John writes, “It is clear to me that ICE agents wear a mask solely to hide their identities and operate through threatening tactics. On its face our Mask Law prevents these actions.”

The Republicans who passed that law should be outraged. People from outside of North Carolina are flaunting their disregard for the state’s laws and the GOP’s deeply held conviction that masks should not be worn in public. Republicans were so committed to that belief that they overrode then-Governor Roy Cooper’s veto. Now, they need to either demand that the law be respected and enforced or admit that it was a political stunt to satisfy their base that believed COVID was a hoax.

In addition to the masks, who thought wearing military-style camo gear is a good idea? These guys aren’t in the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of Vietnam. They’re in the Home Depot parking lot. They are supposed to be carrying out police actions, not military ones….

The south rises again

Trump, Border Patrol Retreat in Failure from Chicago

Garrett Graff, November 17, 2025 [Doomsday Scenario]

In the last few days, roving Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino decamped from Chicago, where his military-style raids have terrorized that community for weeks, for Charlotte, North Carolina — a somewhat inexplicable new target (more on that below) — and a move that underscores what has to be the growing conclusion of the now six-month-old campaign of “acting president” Stephen Miller to turbocharge immigration enforcement: It’s failing. Bigly.

The Border Patrol retreated from Chicago in defeat, not victory.

Writing about the Border Patrol a decade ago, I referred to it as a “fiercely independent agency—part police force, part occupying army, part frontier cavalry,” and watching Bovino’s tactics, I’ve come to believe the analogy has even more truth in the current moment.

Bovino is basically leading a rebel cavalry, a la Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who raided and terrorized communities in Kentucky and Tennessee in the Civil War. That latter analogy holds up particularly well in one specific respect: Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. In many ways, in fact, Bovino’s shock troops have the most in common with the Klan “night rides” of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era South, where hooded Klan members on horseback — often “respectable” leaders of the White community like the local sheriff — terrorized Black families and abused their civil rights. Bovino seems focused on becoming the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Trump immigration era, complete with the blatant racism, illegal tactics, and ignominious losing place in history….

Here are five important conclusions we can better understand now, six months into the increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement efforts nationwide:

1. Trump and Bovino face diminishing half-lives.…

2. The politics aren’t working…. 

3. The data shows Trump’s lies — these aren’t the worst of the worst….

4. Most of the arrests are being rounded up in “Kavanaugh Stops.” ….

5. Operation CHARLOTTE’S WEB is horrid, ahistorical, and anti-American.…

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 16, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Elite impunity

The Corrupt Roots of America’s Elite Run Deep

David Kurtz, November 13, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]

In reviewing a portion of the 20,000-plus Jeffrey Epstein emails released yesterday, I was left astonished not so much by the chumminess he enjoyed with elites even after he’d served time for soliciting prostitution with a minor but by the messages’ flagrantness, their casual disregard, and their indifference to consequence.

It was perfectly captured by political scientist Ed Burmila: “The crisis of elite impunity that is ruining our society cannot be more clearly or convincingly demonstrated than with the fact that all of these people wrote all this stuff into an email and hit Send.”

Impunity. That’s the word I was looking for.

It is the same impunity that got us Trump. Like Epstein, Trump built a career on a transactional chumminess, mutual self-indulgence, and an alarmingly high tolerance level for misbehavior by the layers of political, business, media, and cultural elites surrounding him.

At it’s most extreme, the misbehavior manifested in both men as abusive sexual misconduct. It’s one of the oddities of this whole spectacle that the question is whether Trump — already an admitted pussy grabber, held liable as a sexual assaulter, and prone to traipsing through his pageant dressing rooms to gawk at young flesh — was also engaged in another kind of sexual misconduct, as if stacking revelations high enough will finally overcome the elite impunity that’s cosseted Trump for more than 40 years….

Liberal Elites Kicked the Door Wide Open for Trump’s Flagrant Corruption 

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, November 9 2025 [The Intercept]

…While Trumpian corruption is striking in frequency, scale, and just how routine it is starting to feel, this administration was the logical endpoint of the long-standing tradition of elite impunity. The second Trump administration is a striking monument to governmental misconduct, but the ground was broken long ago, with both parties laying the foundation. For the past half century, corporate and white-collar crime have gone largely unenforced. This was the result of both a widespread shift in views of governance (à la the Reagan Revolution) and a coordinated plan orchestrated to enable private wealth to hijack our democracy, as David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher documented in their new book “Master Plan,” building on a podcast of the same name.

Trump himself is a byproduct of the wealthy being empowered to violate the law. Seemingly his entire pre-government career was predicated on getting away with gaming bankruptcy law, committing widespread financial fraud, and racial discrimination. Now, in government, he is employing the “blitzscaling” model pioneered by firms like Uber to break the law faster than anyone can keep up with….

The Great Recession was a turning point; the extent of corporate lawbreaking in the financial sector was laid bare. And, famously, hardly anyone ever went to jail. Obama-era regulators, in many ways the acme of our last half-century of the hands-off approach to ruling-class misconduct, earned rebuke and scorn as “the chickenshit club,” afraid to square up against the powerful, if not overtly committed to serve elite interests. Since 2008, it has only become more apparent that the wealthy play by an entirely different set of rules.

Trump’s first election was, in part, built on the argument that he knew “how to play the game.” In this telling, his ability to break the rules was actually an asset because he would break them for you rather than just for the powerful. It was always a dubious pitch, but it’s understandable why — faced with the choice between someone trying to convince you the game that’s obviously been fixed is actually not rigged, and someone who tells you how they cheat and promise to help you get ahead a little bit — people would gravitate toward the latter. Part of the early MAGA mythos was built on resignation to the fact that our rule of law is fundamentally perverted to create two parallel tracks of justice: an unforgiving, punitive, carceral system for most people, and a cushy, consequence-free dinner party circuit for the ruling class.

Dethroning Trump will not be enough to restore real rule of law; the Biden administration is proof enough of that. Donald Trump was excised from the White House with historically bad public sentiment in the immediate aftermath of a failed coup. Under Biden, the Garland Justice Department tried to wind the clock back to 2016 and resume operating the way establishment politicians did in the 1990s and 2000s. It failed spectacularly, allowing bad actors like Elon Musk to grow ever more powerful while continuing to flout the law with impunity. The result was an embittered Trump who faced no real repercussions for his corruption — the worst-case scenario….

To dislodge the hold that corruption has on our government and restore the rule of law, Democrats will need to decide who they really are — and who they’ll fight for.

[TW: More accurately, Democrats will need to decide who they’ll fight against.]

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]

We now know why Trump’s DOJ prosecuted Epstein in 2019—and why he died in Trump’s custody

Dean Obeidallah, Nov 13, 2025

The new Epstein document dump tell us many things. But my takeaway is this: Jeffrey Epstein in 2018/early 2019 was increasingly telling people he knew how “dirty Donald” was, that Trump “knew about the girls” and that “I am the one able to take him down.” That means Epstein poised a huge problem to Trump’s 2020 re-election—and more.

To protect Trump, his DOJ suddenly charged Epstein in July 2019. They then denied Epstein bail—forcing him to remain in the custody of the Trump regime. And just a few weeks later, Epstein conveniently committed “suicide.” Trump’s Epstein problem—at least for the 2020 campaign—was over.

Now I will concede there is a level of speculation to this theory. That is why I’m not writing it as a statement of fact but rather one of opinion. But if you see the facts and timeline, it’s clear a full investigation needs to be conducted—either now by a Democratic state Attorney General or by House Democrats if they win the 2026 midterm….

 

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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]

Bannon Tells GOP: ‘Seize the Institutions’ of Government Now or We’re ‘Going to Prison’ After 2028

Jon Queally, Nov 07, 2025 [CommonDreams]

It’s Dick Cheney’s World, We’re Just Living In It

[Talking Points Memo 11-08-2025]

Neither side would ever admit it, but MAGA’s ongoing authoritarian takeover is the heir of one man: Dick Cheney, the former Vice President who died this week.

Trump and his movement tried to distinguish themselves by loudly abandoning the Iraq War as a legacy of the Bush administration. During one debate in 2016, Trump pointed out to Jeb Bush that 9/11 wasn’t exactly an example of his brother having kept the country safe. Before the 2024 election, Cheney called Trump the biggest individual “threat to our republic” that the country has ever seen.

Now, now. It’s a shame they couldn’t get along, after all, they had so much in common.

Starting in the late 1980s, Cheney developed and implemented the dictator-like theory of executive power in which we all now live. The roots here lie in the long-held bitterness among many on the right over President Nixon’s resignation in the aftermath of Watergate, but, as NYT reporter Charlie Savage noted, Cheney expressed the idea fully as the Iran-Contra scandal wound to a close. That was a critique of what Cheney described as a “more assertive Congress that no longer honors the traditions” of executive power, but really a vision of a president who, when invoking national security concerns, could do whatever he or she wanted with backing by the full federal government.

At one point, in 2002, Cheney told Cokie Roberts that there had been an “erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job,” citing both the War Powers Act and the Anti-Impoundment Act…..

The Trump Doctrine: If We Don’t Like Ya We’ll Kill Ya 

Mark Wauck [via Naked Capitalism11-02-2025],

‘At What Point Does This Cross a Line Into International Criminality?’ 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 11-02-2025]

Media Pontificating About Trump’s Motives for Attacking Venezuela Keep Ignoring that he Openly Admitted It Was to Take Their Oil 

[The Column, via Naked Capitalism 11-06-2025]

Trump throws himself a Great Gatsby party while people can’t even afford ketchup

Dean Obeidallah, Nov 02, 2025

Are You on Trump’s List of Domestic Terrorists? There’s No Way to Know. 

Nick Turse [via Naked Capitalism 11-06-2025]

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