Category: Uncategorized Page 1 of 101

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]

Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest

Alex Horton and David Ovalle, August 12, 2025 [Washington Post]

The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.

Siege Mentality: Trump’s DC Takeover to Crush His Own Demons — This is not a distraction from the Epstein situation, it’s a projection of it.

Jim Stewartson, Aug 11, 2025 [MindWar]

Immigration agents told a teenage US citizen: ‘You’ve got no rights.’ He secretly recorded his brutal arrest

[The Guardian, via The Big Picture August 10, 2025]

Video from Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio, 18, puts fresh scrutiny on the harsh tactics used to reach the Trump administration’s ambitious enforcement targets.

Trump: Now the Cops Can ‘Do Whatever the Hell They Want’

Harold Meyerson, August 12, 2025 [The American Prospect]

…D.C.’s police union reacted to Trump’s takeover with unconcealed glee; like many cop unions, it gives voice to those officers who see themselves as occupying hostile territory and being held back from sufficiently forceful action. The union, in an official statement it released yesterday, said it “acknowledges and supports the President’s announcement this morning to assume temporary control of the MPD in response to the escalating crime crisis in Washington, DC. The Union agrees that crime is spiraling out of control, and immediate action is necessary to restore public safety.”….

Just as the presence of troops in L.A. provoked protests, so Trump is hoping that the quality of his now enhanced D.C. policing will provoke protests even if the quantity of newly deployed troops and agents isn’t in itself up to the task. In his press conference yesterday, he all but ordered the cops to run amok. Currently, he said, “they’re not allowed to do anything. But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want.”

Masked Border Protection Agents Open Fire on Family’s Truck After Smashing Its Windows

Brad Reed, Aug 17, 2025 [CommonDreams]

A video of the incident filmed from inside the truck showed the passengers asked the agents to provide identification, which they declined to do.

An agent was then heard demanding that the father, who had been driving the truck, get out of the vehicle. Seconds later, the agent started smashing the car’s windows in an attempt to get inside the vehicle.

The father then hit the gas to try to escape, after which several shots could be heard as agents opened fire. Local news station KTLA reported that, after the father successfully fled the scene, he called local police and asked for help because “masked men” had opened fire on his truck.

“Federalizing” D.C.

Steve Vladek [via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2025]

…it seems worth putting into context both the historical relationship between the federal government and the District of Columbia and the relevant current statutes. To make a long story short, the Constitution gives the federal government “plenary” authority over the “seat of government.” But just about everything else—including the fact that the District of Columbia is the “seat of government”—is up to Congress.

And although Congress has retained, both for itself and the President, more authority over D.C. than over any other federal enclave (including, as especially relevant today, with regard to the National Guard and the Metropolitan Police Department), the critical point for present purposes is that it was Congress that created and stood up a local government in 1973. Congress may have the constitutional power to return the city to true federal control, but the President can’t do it all by himself….

Trump’s crackdown hits Washington — federalized police NOT deployed in DC’s high crime areas

ZACK STANTON, 08/17/2025 [politico.com/playbook]

For supporters of the president’s actions, crime in the district is a blaring crisis that merits an overwhelming federal response to avoid something like failed-state status. They point out that crime, while on a downward trend, is unacceptably commonplace (the district’s homicide rate is still “almost as high as New York’s at its most dangerous, in 1990,” NYT’s Maureen Dowd notes). It demands a round-the-clock response, with FBI agents patrolling the street on foot. … And yet, much of the federal response has been concentrated in some of the safest areas of the city rather than those neighborhoods most devastated by crime. More than half of the district’s homicides last year occurred across the Anacostia River in Wards 7 and 8, The Atlantic’s Michael Powell writes; as recently as Friday, they had yet to see much of a federal response, per USA Today’s Josh Meyer.

How Pretexts Work — A manufactured crisis unfolds.

Hamilton Nolan, Aug 15, 2025 [How Things Work]

Trump’s Invasion Of D.C. Started On K Street

[The Lever, August 12, 2025]

Before the president seized control of Washington, D.C.’s police, corporate lobbyists posed as local businesses to drum up panic about local crime.

Heather Cox Richardson. August 11, 2025 [Letters from an American]

The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”

Ip points to the government’s partial control over U.S. Steel that it took as a condition for Nippon Steel’s takeover, the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners that Trump has claimed the right to direct personally, the 15% of certain chip sales of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to China that will go to the administration (although who or what entity will get that money I can’t figure out), and Trump’s demand that the chief executive of Intel resign.

Ip calls this system of state capitalism “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” He notes that it is a “sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.”

Ip also notes that state capitalism is a means of political control, using the power of the state to crush political challenges. “In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade,” Ip writes. “Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.” Ip pointed out that Trump is deploying financial power and regulatory power to cow media companies, banks, law firms, and government agencies he thinks are not sufficiently supportive.

Trump Has a Bonkers New Rating System for Private Companies

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, August 15, 2025 [The New Republic]

The Trump administration has released a scorecard to rank the endeavors of some 553 companies and trade associations to advance the president’s agenda and his “big, beautiful bill.”

Organizations are ranked on the sheet as strong, moderate, or low, Axios reported Friday, with ratings built off social media posts, press releases, video testimonials, ads, White House event attendance, and other budget law–oriented efforts.

The data is being circulated among White House senior staff as a temperature gauge on how to interact with companies and open calls with K Street (a nickname for Washington’s business district)….

Congress may have the spending power, but Trump can usurp it if they won’t protect it. And they haven’t

Joyce Vance, Aug 14, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

This afternoon, a three-judge panel in the D.C. Circuit signed off on the Trump administration’s efforts to block funds for foreign assistance that have been appropriated by Congress. Despite arguments made by the plaintiffs that this violates Congress’ Article II Spending powers, the court ruled that only the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has the ability to bring Impoundment Control Act (ICA) claims. Impoundment refers to a decision by a president to delay spending or withhold funds that Congress has allocated in the budget. The GAO was not a party to this lawsuit, although it has made multiple findings that this administration has violated the ICA in other regards.

The court’s decision was 2-1, with Judges Karen Henderson and Gregory Katsas in the majority and Judge Florence Pan dissenting. As Judge Pan notes in dissent, they reframed the issues argued by the government in order to rule in its favor, so that they could “excuse the government’s forfeiture of what they perceive to be a key argument, and then rule in the President’s favor on that ground, thus departing from procedural norms that are designed to safeguard the court’s impartiality and independence.” There will likely be a motion to ask the full court to rehear the case en banc, with all active judges sitting, before the losing party takes it to the Supreme Court….

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On August 16, 2025

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 10, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On August 10, 2025

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 10, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

UNLOCKED: The Epstein/Trump/Israel Connection Unpacked (w/ Whitney Webb) (YouTube Video)

Briahna Joy Gray interviews Whitney Webb, July 30, 2025 [Bad Faith podcast]

[TW: Webb does an extraordinary job detailing the organized crime backgrounds of Trump and Epstein. Gray was left flabbergasted and visibly shaken by the information. I was also flabbergasted, but because here was someone finally discussing a few key facets of USA and British history that very, very few historians are willing to consider: the World War Two merger between organized crime and intelligence agencies begun during Operation Underworld, when the Office of Naval Intelligence recruited Joseph Lanza, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano to watch for and report any possible Axis espionage and saboteur operations in U.S. northeastern ports. Webb next outlines how organized crime “went legit” by taking over Wall Street and the “mergers and acquisitions” racket in the 1970s and 1980s. This last point is something many “influencers” have denied, some with near hysteria.

[Trump’s mentor was mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, and Webb discusses Cohn’s ties to organized crime that were also shared by Epstein’s mentor, Les Wexner. Webb also mentions the CIA / Iran-Contra involvement in the illegal narcotics trade uncovered by San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb in 1996, and some of the British “corporate raiders,” such as Sir James Michael Goldsmith, who spearheaded the criminal infiltration of Wall Street. (It is not mentioned if and how Gary Webb and Whitney Webb are related.) This may be the most explosive 90 minute show you will ever listen to in your life. It paints a clear picture of the malevolent criminally-inclined elites who have seized political and economic control of USA and the west.]

[At 59:59 BJG asks why? “why are these people who have everything still getting involved in illegal and immoral activities.”

[My answer: to understand why, you have to ignore the nostrums and ideas of liberalism, and turn to the founding philosophy of civic republicanism, which has been under attack by USA’s would be oligarchs since before the Constitution was signed and ratified. The quick answer to BJG’s question is found in the1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, by English republican John Milton: when Satan explains why he rebelled against God by saying “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

[Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. That is the mindset of an oligarch.

[The great weakness of liberalism is its moral ambivalence about the accumulation of wealth. Liberal thinkers such as John Locke defend the accumulation of great wealth under the principles of individual liberty. But as should be abundantly clear by the events of the past few decades, great wealth corrupts a society. While liberalism prefers to ignore this problem, the general socio-economic dynamic of this corruption is a central theme of civic republicanism.

In The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston, Northwestern University , 1945), Zera S. Fink, quotes from English republican political theorist Algernon Sidney, who was executed for “treason” against the crown in 1683: “Man” he wrote, “is of an aspiring nature, and apt to put too high a value on himself. They who are raised above their brethren, though but a little, desire to go farther; and if they gain the name of king, they think themselves wronged and degraded, when they are not suffered to do what they please. In these things they never want masters; and the nearer they come to a power that is not easily restrained by law, the more passionately they desire to abolish all that opposes it.” Even when a prince was virtuous and began by desiring nothing more than the power allowed him by law, he was subject to greater temptations to invade the liberty of his subjects than human nature could be expected to withstand. “The strength of his own affections,” Sydney declared, “will ever be against him. Wives, children, and servants will always join with those enemies that arise in his own breast to pervert him; if he has any weak side, any lust unsubdued, they will gain the victory. He has not searched into the nature of man, who thinks that anyone can resist when he is thus on all sides assaulted.” Monarchy, in short, by the very constitution of human nature, tended always to degenerate into tyranny. It was a defective form of government because in the most important place of all it was lacking in those adequate restraints on the defects of human nature which all the classical republicans saw as an essential of any well-contrived government.

[In The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America (New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2007), Michael J. Thompson writes, “Any political community that suffers from severe imbalances between rich and poor is in danger of losing its democratic character…” And he explicitly states that “the contemporary tolerance of economic inequality is actually the result of liberalism and liberal thought itself.” Thompson explains that the political philosophy of civic republicanism recognizes the great danger posed by concentrations of wealth and economic power.

In “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765-1900,” James L. Huston argued that the founders developed a political economy of aristocracy which identified the avaricious rich as a primary threat to the republic.

The revolutionaries’ concern over the distribution of wealth was prompted by a tenet in the broad and vague political philosophy of republicanism. In contrast to nations in which monarchs and aristocrats dominate the state, republics embodied the ideal of equality among citizens in political affairs, the equality taking the form of citizen participation in the election of officials who formulated the laws. Drawing largely on the work of seventeenth-century republican theorist James Harrington, Americans believed that if property were concentrated in the hands of a few in a republic, those few would use their wealth to control other citizens, seize political power, and warp the republic into an oligarchy. Thus to avoid descent into despotism or oligarchy, republics had to possess an equitable distribution of wealth….

[In The Laws, his last and longest dialogue, Plato wrote that “there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil.” We should not be surprised The Laws is the least studied, least known, and least quoted of Plato’s books.

[The Roman historian Plutarch traced the degeneration of the Roman republic into an oligarchic empire to the growing imbalance between rich and poor. Another Roman, the lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator, and writer, Cicero, discussed the dangers of economic inequality, but also included a warning of the peculiar psychological condition of the rich:

“When one person or a few stand out from the crowd as richer and more prosperous, then, as a result of their haughty and arrogant behavior, there arises [a government of one or a few], the cowardly and weak giving way and bowing down to the pride of wealth.”

[The work of another historian of ancient Rome, Livy, was the basis of Machiavelli’s description of how the rich of Rome corrupted the Senate. In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli described how the Romans tried to restore political balance by creating tribunes to represent the plebians to counterbalance the control of the Senate by the rich, but the unceasing resistance and plotting against the tribunes by the rich of Rome eventually brought about the end of the Roman republic.

[The lesson for Machiavelli was “Let, then, a republic be constituted where there exists, or can be brought into being, notable equality.”

[In The Spirit of Laws, Book 5. Chapter 5, ”In what Manner the Laws establish Equality in a Democracy,” Montesquieu wrote,

“Though real equality be the very soul of a democracy, it is so difficult to establish, that an extreme exactness in this respect would not be always convenient. Sufficient is it to establish a census, which shall reduce or fix the differences to a certain point: it is afterwards the business of particular laws to level, as it were, the inequalities, by the duties laid upon the rich, and by the ease afforded to the poor. It is moderate riches alone that can give or suffer this sort of compensation; for as to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury.…”

[Montesquieu thus echoed Cicero by identifying the peculiar psycho-pathology of the rich by noting “to men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury.” Does this not precisely define Trump and his vindictiveness?

[In the Christian Bible we find Matthew 6:24:

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.”

[And, more pointedly, James 5:1-6:

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence.

[And there is the famous warning in that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” This famous biblical quotation is repeated three times in the New Testament, in Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25.

[The problem of the rich dominating society and destroying it by their aggressive greed and ambition is not confined to the West. The view that the rich posed a danger to good government was also enunciated by the Chinese philosopher Confucius:

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”

[According to Confucius, in a well governed society there should be a rough level of economic equality — there should be no poverty. But when a society is no longer well governed, economic inequality arises and there are the impoverished many and the rich few, who abuse and ignore the law and social norms, resulting in misrule. The existence of the wealthy therefore are a marker of a badly governed society.

[And in his Analects, Confucius wrote

If there were an honorable way to get rich, I’d do it, even if it meant being a stooge standing around with a whip. But there isn’t an honorable way, so I just do what I like.

[Oligarchy is the mortal enemy of a republic. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is a well-known saying, but it is just as important to understand that wealth corrupts and concentrated wealth corrupts absolutely. What Gray and Webb discuss is the general corruption that has arisen by our society’s toleration of great wealth, and the social damage it has caused, including the escalating problem of elite impunity.

[The Transcendentalists — among whom were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman — were particularly hostile to liberal philosopher John Locke. The Transcendentalist view of Locke was summarized by Orestes Brownson, in The Boston Quarterly Review, in January 1839:

…Locke reduces man to the capacity of receiving sensations, and the faculty of reflecting on what passes within us. According to him we have no ideas which do not enter through the senses, or which are not formed by the operations of the mind on ideas received by means of sensation.

[Locke’s] system of philosophy… is no less fatal to political liberty than to religion and morality… This philosophy necessarily disinherits the mass. It denies to man all inherent power of attaining to truth. In religion, if religion it admits, it refers us not to what we feel and know in ourselves [such a sense of fairness and justice], but was said and done in some remote age, by some special messenger from God; it refers us to some authorized teacher, and commands us to receive our faith on his word, and to adhere to it on peril of damnation. It therefore destroys all free action of the mind, all independent thought, all progress, and all living faith. In politics it must do the same. It cannot found the state on the inherent rights of man; the most it can do, is to organize the state for the preservation of such conditions, privileges, and prescriptions, as it can historically verify….

The doctrine, that truth comes to us from abroad, cannot coexist with true liberty… The democrat is not he who believes in the people’s capacity of being taught, and therefore graciously condescends to be their instructor; but he who believes that Reason, the light which shines out from God’s throne, shines into the heart of every man, and that truth lights her torch in the inner temple of every man’s souk, whether patrician or plebian, a shepherd or a philosopher, a Croesus or a beggar. It is only on the reality of that inner light, and on the fact that it is universal, in all men, and in every man, that you can found a democracy, which shall have a firm basis, and which shall be able to survive that storms of human passions.

[Zohran Mamdani has been repeatedly attacked for saying we shouldn’t have billionaires. But he badly flubs his explanation of this view. The simple fact is that a republic cannot survive the rise of oligarchy. A republic must have very high taxes on wealth and income, to disrupt the concentration of wealth and prevent the inherent despotism of the rich from ever emerging in the first place.

[Our problem now is that a plutocratic oligarchy has already parasitically fastened itself on our society and polity, and we need to dislodge it, and restore the governing principles of civic republicanism.]

New York City vs. The Billionaires: Zohran Mamdani Won’t Back Down & Neither Will Elizabeth Warren

Howie Klein, August 06, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

A Clear Epstein Backgrounder and Where We Are Today

Thomas Neuburger, August 03, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On August 8, 2025

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 03, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On August 3, 2025

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 03, 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]

Trump’s Complaint About One Judge Is An Attack On The Entire Judiciary

Joyce Vance, July 31, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

…it should come as no surprise that judges are actively concerned. When the Judicial Conference of the United States met recently, the issue surfaced. That resulted in the Justice Department filing a complaint against District Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg. There is no way to soft-pedal this. The Trump administration wants to go to war with the federal judiciary. They’ve been moving that direction ever since the start of this administration.

A little background about the Judicial Conference….

On Monday, DOJ filed a complaint accusing Judge Boasberg of “making improper public comments about President Trump and his Administration.” CBS News was told by sources that Bondi directed her chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, to file the complaint with the Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Sri Srinivasan. The Judge’s comments were supposedly made, according to DOJ, at the March 11 Judicial Conference meeting. Those meetings are private, but DOJ apparently obtained reports, which led them to claim Judge Boasberg tried to “improperly influence” the Chief Justice and other judges, which is ludicrous, just on its face. DOJ complains that the comments reflect bias against the Trump administration and that Judge Boasberg should be censured by the court….

Beyond the impropriety of making this kind of completely unprecedented complaint with no basis for it, there are some real issues with the argument the government tries to make. For one thing, the Judge’s comments weren’t made in public, which is the predicate for DOJ’s entire complaint. They were privately made, in the supposed confidence of colleagues (no word on who leaked them or how accurate that leak was). Then, there’s the fact that the comments reflect legitimate concerns that are widely circulating among judges, lawyers, and the general public. There are more technical flaws in the legal arguments DOJ makes, invoking the Judicial Canons of Ethics, that we’ll delve into if this goes anywhere. But what it adds up to is wholly inadequate to merit further consideration by the court and certainly not something that rises to the level of warranting judicial sanctions. The fault here lies with DOJ and its slippery practices….

[TW: If a Federal judge believes the regime may ignore court rulings, in what other forum is the judge supposed to discuss this? ]

‘Banana Republic’: Experts Horrified as Trump Demands BLS Director’s Firing Over Bad Jobs Report

Brad Reed, August 01, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Trustworthy US Jobs Info Is the Latest Victim of Trump’s War on Facts

Robert Reich, Aug 02, 2025 [Inequality Media, via CommonDreams]

[TW: Ian and I have long been very critical of USA economic statistics / national income accounting. Basically, the statistics do not show the economic destruction which has occurred during the past half century of deindustrialization and financializaton. For example, statistics of raw steel production in USA show that the number of tons of steel produced has declined slightly. But adjust that number to a per capita basis, and the fact that steel production is about half what it was five decades ago becomes glaring. The same goes for housing units built, new vehicles produced, and new vehicles sold, and many other indicators of real economic activity.

[But in all the stories stirred up by Trump’s firing of the BLS director, none of this mentioned. Nor is there any mention of the many problems with national income accounting and GDP statistics that have been documented for decades now. Nor any mention of undertaking a rigorous process of evaluating and changing how USA creates its economic statistics. All this tells me is that the worst possible interpretation of Trump’s action is correct: he fired the BLS director for entirely political reasons because Trump demands that national income accounting and GDP statistics show that Trump’s policies are “Making America Great Again,” whether of not that is the actual reality.]

Campaign’s Interactive Tool Tracks How Much Trump and GOP Are Raising the Cost of Living

Julia Conley, July 31, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Trump’s Domestic Use of Military Set to Get Worse, Leaked Memo Shows

Greg Sargent, August 2, 2025 [The New Republic]

A Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by TNR signals top-level discussions about a potential escalation of the Pentagon’s domestic anti-immigration role, and lays out new details.

National Guard Ordered to Do ICE Paperwork at Immigration Facilities in 20 States

Nick Turse, July 31 2025 [The Intercept]

Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to immigration facilities further blurs the line between military and law enforcement.

ICE, Georgia Sheriff’s Office Combine Forces To Keep A Salvadoran Journalist Locked Up Indefinitely

[Tech Dirt, via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2025]

A Clear Epstein Backgrounder and Where We Are Today

Thomas Neuburger, July 31, 2025 [God’s Spies]

“The elite classes have for a long time distinguished themselves from ordinary people by their adherence to a different code of morality.”
—Darryl Cooper, paraphrasing the New York Times….

Let’s start with a recent interview of researcher Darryl Cooper by Tucker Carlson, as it’s the most complete and listenable backgrounder on Epstein’s history that I could find.

Yes, I know — both of these people can be highly politized commenters of a stripe some don’t like. If you’re among those people, feel free to skip this video.

But don’t. While Carlson gets a little “Christian” near the end — annoying to those who aren’t, or aren’t of his brand — Cooper is rigorous about sorting evidence from supposition, even likely supposition, and he stays away from dogma, even regarding “Pizzagate,” on which he has an interesting take. And Carlson, to his credit, keeps his intrusions to a minimum and his questions on point….

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On August 2, 2025

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 27, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On July 27, 2025

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 27, 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]

A Show of Force

Fintan O’Toole [The New York Review, July 24, 2025 issue]

What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time….

…the primary goal of Trump’s deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles is not the violent suppression of dissent. It is the remaking of the army itself. Trump is instructing the troops on how they must think of themselves and of the nature of the country they are pledged to defend….

…putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained for loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution….

In this light, it actually suits Trump’s purposes if his federalization of the National Guard is understood to be illegal. His deployment of troops in Los Angeles is intended to dissolve boundaries—between domestic disputes and foreign wars, between reality and performance, and above all between a law-bound democracy and arbitrary rule. Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy.

Trump Promised to Be a ‘Peacemaker’ President. He Launched Nearly as Many Airstrikes in Five Months as Biden Did in Four Years

Alex Woodward, July 17, 2025 [The Independent, via defenddemocracy.press]

Civic republicanism

Governmental Decompensation: What happens when an entire government goes into psychological collapse?

Jim Stewartson, July 22, 2025 [MIndWar]

…Trump’s ego is in a state of panic. His narcissistic supply is dwindling and he’s grasping for anything to bring him love and praise from his cult. This is causing him to decompensate which is the breakdown of psychological defenses under stress, leading to:

Loss of coherent functioning

Emotional dysregulation (rage, paranoia, despair)

Reversion to more primitive coping mechanisms (denial, projection, magical thinking)

But I think we’re seeing something new here, a uniquely 21st century phenomenon. The Project 2025 purge of the government, and the cast of kakistocratic sycophants Trump has installed, along with true ideological psychopaths like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, have fused Trump’s psychology onto the entire governmental apparatus. In Trump’s first term, he was unsuccessful in fully dismantling the system; there remained a safety zone between his psychological state and the behavior of the federal government. That is deleted now.

To coin a phrase, I think what we’re seeing is governmental decompensation.

The US federal government has lost its coherent functioning. Just this morning, with the explicit purpose of avoiding a vote on revealing the Epstein files, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson shut down Congress, and went on vacation until September. This is similar behavior to the Supreme Court of the United States throwing America to the wolves and going on vacation until October….

So what are the ramifications of governmental decompensation? What happens to a government if it remains completely fused to a malignant narcissist cult leader’s spiraling psychological state? Well, nothing good.

Collapse of Trust
The public no longer believes institutions can help them.

Militarization of the Executive
Police, intelligence, and military become extensions of the leader’s paranoia.

Normalization of Absurdity
The public is forced to nod along with delusions—or risk punishment.

Reactive Brutality
Repression increases not out of strength, but out of fear of exposure.

Fragmentation or Catastrophic Purge
Eventually, one of two things happens:

A violent purge consolidates a totalitarian regime.

Or the state collapses under the weight of its own incoherence and infighting.

[TW: Stewartson irritates some people, but he often finds and identifies a psychological indicator that others miss. Similar, I think to how most people fail to understand how power and wealth corrupts individual souls, as explained in the classics of civic republicanism.]

Clowns in a Hall of Mirrors—With Guns — Why the Media Keeps Getting the Trump Regime Catastrophically Wrong

Jim Stewartson, July 26, 2025 [MIndWar]

…Nevertheless, the media, to the extent it still functions at all, has not changed the way it thinks, and talks, about what’s going in America. They still cannot, or will not, face the facts that this is not a group of rational actors, it is a troop of evil clowns in a hall of mirrors—with guns.

We are not watching 4D chess or “Art of the Deal,” the entire US government, and now the nation along with it, are an unstable formation hastily fashioned onto the disintegrating psyche of a malignant narcissist in collapse.

Donald Trump has, through purges, propaganda, and the elevation of loyal incompetents, effectively fused his own psyche—and all its attendant pathologies—to the machinery of the U.S. government. What now governs America is not a coherent system of policy and process, but a state mirroring the ego, paranoia, cruelty, and collapse of a single man.

If you don’t grasp this foundational truth, everything you observe will be filtered through a lens that distorts rather than clarifies. You will see chaos and mistake it for strategy. You will see sadism and call it policy. You will see collapse and label it politics.

And if you report what you see through that faulty lens, you are not just misleading your audience—you are robbing them of the only framework that makes sense of this collapse. At best, you’re depriving them of clarity. At worst, you’re trafficking in disinformation that could get people killed….

Wealth series 7: The real cost of flaunting it

Richard Murphy, July 26 2025 [taxresearch.org.uk]

This video explores how the wealthy flaunt their wealth—not with numbers, but through displays of power, privilege, and consumption. From gold-plated cars to opera picnics and £50 notes burned in front of beggars, conspicuous consumption defines status in our unequal world. But what damage does that do to the rest of us—and to them?….

All of this is designed for one purpose. It is designed to make us envious. The wealthy want us to be envious of them because that gives them the dopamine hit that they crave, which creates the value in their mind as to who they are.

This is the basis of their self-worth. They’re desperate for attention, and without it, they are nothing.

But this is an enormously damaging process. The resources and talent wasted on producing this pointless luxury, which does nothing more than signal that somebody can afford to buy in, are enormous.

Everybody is being driven into a less-than-zero-sum game of status as a consequence of it, and that is always destructive. In other words, we are being told we are not good enough and can never match what they are, and we know that, and therefore divides are created, and that’s why we’re all worse off. And this harms wellbeing.

It harms our wellbeing because we are being told we’re not good enough, and it harms the wellbeing of the wealthiest as well, because actually they become paranoid about the fact that they might not be wealthy enough to keep up with their neighbours, or those whom they meet, or whatever else it might be. The harm is everywhere to mental health….

Wealth series 6: Wealthy, or worried?

Richard Murphy, July 24, 2025 [taxresearch.org.uk]

…the thing that the wealthy are most worried about is losing their wealth. There is nothing that they probably worry about more than falling down the pecking order in society.

The wealthy think they’re top of the pile.

They aren’t sure they’re worth it. In fact, they suffer very badly from impostor syndrome, which is what we suffer if we’re trying to take on a role we aren’t really sure that we should possess, and as a consequence, losing their wealth is their greatest paranoia of all….

So they use their money to protect that privilege, and that’s why they fight governments. And this matters. There is a real cost to their behaviour, not only in the undermining of regulation and everything else that goes on, and the methods that they use to fight fair taxation and all of that, but there’s also a cost to something else, and that is the cost of their hoarding, because remember, they hoard money. That’s how and why they’re wealthy. If they didn’t have hoarded money and value, then of course they couldn’t be considered to be wealthy, but as I’ve explained in other videos, most of saved money is dead money….

How Liberalism Sabotages Itself — Our intentional blindness to bad faith is a loophole fascists use to gain respectability and power.

Brian Beutler, July 25, 2025 [Off Message]

…Several exchanges from this debate have made rounds online—when Hasan gets a boy named Connor Estelle to admit he is a fascist, when another says Hasan should “get the hell out” of the country. But, to me, one of the most revealing moments lacked that kind of viral potential. It was when Hasan asked Estelle: if you hate democracy so much, why are you engaged in public debate, a cornerstone of the democratic process?

“It is the means to support an end,” Estelle responded. “The reason we have free speech now is because we want to be openly talking about our opinions so we can get the state that we want. But it doesn’t mean free speech after we win.”….

Thanks to Estelle for his honesty. His means-to-an-end-style of bad faith in discourse is endemic on the right—not just among ascendant fascists—and has been for a long time. It’s just that most conservatives will never break character; to the contrast, they take false umbrage if you question their sincerity. But here Estelle lays out the method plainly: Rightists appeal to whomever they can with whatever false commitments they intend to break, knowing that, once delivered to power, they will pull the rug.

In nonexistential instances, this can look like Trump promising to lower costs, knowing that his tariffs will increase them, and (thus) lying about the incidence of tariffs. But in the final showdown, the promise is freedom, and the ulterior motive is tyranny. When Hasan asked Estelle, What happens when your fantasy autocrat kills your family, Estelle didn’t renounce extrajudicial violence. He replied, “Well, I’m not going to be a part of the group that he kills.”

I mention this exchange for two reasons: First, because it’s important for people to know that this is how right-wing operators pursue their ends. That they view liberal freedoms as loopholes to exploit in their pursuit of power. Second, because it reveals a weakness in liberalism-as-practiced.

The liberal commitment to free speech is inviolable. But it does not follow that liberals must extend the presumption of good faith to everyone engaged in free speech. Right-wing operators in particular are groomed and trained to embrace bad-faith argument as a tactic. And yet even in the Trump era, when the bad faith is so thinly veiled, liberals remain reluctant to treat it as disqualifying. Even when their counterparties have established long track records of bad faith….

Trump Is the Most Dangerous Criminal in US History

Thom Hartmann, July 22, 2025 [Common Dreams]

…But Trump’s shady financial dealings didn’t begin or end with these public scandals. For decades, he was closely associated with New York’s organized crime families. Trump Tower itself was built using concrete provided by mob-linked companies.

Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor and attorney as I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink, was a notorious fixer and lawyer for mob figures such as Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano.

Trump’s casinos also regularly skirted the law, drawing scrutiny from federal investigators for potential money laundering linked to organized crime, and his former casino manager recently revealed to CNN that Trump and Jeffrey Epstein once even showed up together with underage girls in tow (the White House denies the story).

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On July 26, 2025

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