Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 28, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
After One Year of Following Jeffrey Epstein’s Money, It Led Me to the Government We Have Now
Kait Justice [, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2026]
… I had spent most of the year following Epstein’s money because I wanted to understand something that had bothered me from the beginning. Federal prosecutors had interviewed victims, prepared a draft indictment containing dozens of charges and subpoenaed records from Epstein’s companies, yet the case they were building never reached a courtroom….
I wanted to know how a person reaches the point where something like that becomes possible. I had to understand where Epstein’s money came from, who trusted him with theirs, what authority other people gave him, what he was actually doing for them and how the businesses attached to his name worked….
That led me into the a financial world I knew nothing about at the time, but it also pulled me toward Robert Maxwell, Adnan Khashoggi, BCCI, the Church Committee and government investigations that had already shown us something important about the period Epstein came of age in: governments, intelligence agencies, banks and private businessmen often worked through relationships and institutions the public could barely see while they were operating….
… Once I started asking that, the companies became impossible to ignore. Southern Trust had originally been called Financial Infomatics.
From what I understood, it described working with roughly 200 million personal profiles and combining information that could identify a person with biomedical information, genetic information, financial information and other records so the data could be analyzed together.
Then I found Southern Trust paying Novamente, the artificial intelligence company run by Ben Goertzel, for software. One $30,000 invoice from 2015 was for technology, installation and training to analyze gene expression and genetic variation. So Epstein’s company that had already described a business built around combining enormous amounts of information about people was now paying an AI company for software designed to analyze genetic and medical data. In 2015, over a decade ago….
That made the technology investments much easier for me to understand when they started appearing.
I found Epstein’s money in Peter Thiel’s Valar funds. Then I followed money that went through Ehud Barak into Carbyne, the emergency communications company whose technology can receive things like a caller’s location and live video when they contact emergency services. It currently manages millions of American 911 calls.
Then I found something that had turned up a few times but finally made more sense, Adfin.
Epstein’s Southern Trust and a Cantor Fitzgerald investment company had both put money into the same business, and I found the paperwork where Jeffrey Epstein signed for Southern Trust and Howard Lutnick signed for the Cantor company.
Cantor kept putting money into Adfin and eventually became its majority owner.
Howard Lutnick is now the United States Secretary of Commerce.
By then, this had become a recurring experience for me. I would open a document because I was trying to understand something Epstein was doing ten or fifteen years ago, and then I would look up the person or company involved and realize I was reading about something happening in the federal government right now.
The money was only part of it.
Epstein was also talking about digital currency long before most people were having conversations about stablecoins and digital wallets. In 2014, Vincenzo Iozzo sent him a proposal involving a digital currency where a wallet would be connected to a person’s real identity and their transactions could be permanently recorded. Iozzo explicitly pointed out what that would mean for privacy because advertisers could potentially know what people were buying.
Then, in February 2018, Steve Bannon asked Epstein how a $100 million bitcoin project could be announced during a conversation where they discussed when Trump would be forced to resign. Epstein responded with ideas involving a new coin, a donor advised fund, local exchanges and research into campaign finance law.
This is where the year I spent reading old Epstein documents started colliding with 2026….
A year later, I think I finally understand what I have been finding. Epstein spent decades helping billionaires, politicians and foreign governments do things most of us assume governments control. Things like moving enormous amounts of money, gathering information, making introductions between world leaders, advising countries, collecting data on people, funding artificial intelligence and working on new forms of private money.
Then I followed what happened to the people and businesses around him, and somehow I ended up here, with Howard Lutnick running the Commerce Department after Cantor invested with Epstein, Jared Kushner managing billions of dollars from foreign governments while also participating in American diplomacy, Trump’s family owning a digital currency company that now has approval for its own national trust bank, and Todd Blanche controlling the Justice Department and the Epstein files after representing Trump.
I think Congress needs to find out whether Epstein’s death actually ended what he was building, or whether his money, investments, contracts, technology, data and relationships simply went to other people who are now far more powerful than they were when he was alive….
The Tiny Magnet Maker That Attracted $1.6 Billion From Lutnick
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-25-2026]
Thiel’s Antichrist Confession: “If you’re evil… maybe you’re actually kind of good”
Jim Stewartson, September 26, 2026 [MindWar]
… The night before the ceremony, Thiel was asked in an interview by Axel Springer CEO Matthias Dopfner about the swirling controversy around the science fiction narrative that AI could “kill all humans”: “So why do we always moralize new technologies?”
The answer is one of the scariest and most deeply telling quotes I’ve ever heard.
“Yes, I’m gonna get in trouble for what I’m about to say, but I think we moralize way too much. And there’s always a question, I like to ask, what is the antonym of good? And the moral antonym is evil. The functional antonym is bad.
“A Ferrari is an evil car because it doesn’t get many miles per gallon. They are a trubby, is a bad car. It works less good than a golf cart. The former East German car. And so if you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad. And therefore maybe you’re actually kind of good because you’re at least getting something done. […]
“And so if you’re in a world where 99% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent. That’s the problem we should actually be talking about.” ….
Thiel’s CEO protégés, like Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Alex Karp—who together control upwards of $10 trillion in stock market valuation—are another layer of his direct influence. But if the full reality of how OpenAI, SpaceX, Tesla, Facebook, and Palantir were built, and the true value of their products were understood, a large majority of that valuation would disappear. These companies are as much influence operations—corporate psyops if you will—as they are technology.
[TW: 99% of the elites are incompetent. That is the inevitable result of a system that elevates sociopaths like Trump and Thiel. Wall Street trading firms actually design their recruiting process to find and bring in sociopaths.
[But you can’t say that 99% of all people are incompetent. The vast majority of people take pride in their work – if they find it meaningful. Thorstein Veblen devoted an entire book to this: The Instinct of Workmanship. The philosophy of civic republicanism is based on the belief that all individuals are capable of contributing something useful to society, and therefore all individuals have natural rights, and governments ought be so designed and so managed that individuals have the liberty to develop their talents to contribute to society. Individual liberty is not about licentiousness or being left untrammeled to acquire as much wealth and power as possible.]
Johnson, E.A.J., The Foundations of American Economic Freedom: Government and Enterprise in the Age of Washington (University of Minnesota Press, 1973), pages 194-195:
The general view, discernible in contemporaneous literature, was that the responsibility of government should involve enough surveillance over the enterprise system to ensure the social usefulness of all economic activity. It is quite proper, said Bordley, for individuals to “choose for themselves” how they will apply their labor and their intelligence in production. But it does not follow from this that “legislators and men of influence” are freed from all responsibility for giving direction to the course of national economic development. They must, for instance, discountenance the production of unnecessary commodities of luxury when common sense indicates the need for food and other essentials. Lawmakers can fulfill their functions properly only when they “become benefactors to the publick”; in new countries they must safeguard agriculture and commerce, encourage immigration, and promote manufactures. Admittedly, liberty “is one of the most important blessings which men possess,” but the idea that liberty is synonymous with complete freedom from restraint “is a most unwise, mistaken apprehension.” True liberty demands a system of legislation that will lead all members of society “to unite their exertions” for the public welfare. It should therefore be the policy of government to aid and foster certain activities or kinds of business that strengthen a nation, even as it should be the duty of government to repress “those fashions, habits, and practices, which tend to weaken, impoverish, and corrupt the people.”
Chapter Two, Republicanism, from Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Chapel Hill, Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., University of North Carolina Press, 1969:
In the minds of the most devoted Commonwealthmen it was the duty of a republic to control “the selfishness of mankind … ; for liberty consists not in the permission to distress fellow citizens, by extorting extravagant advantages from them, in matters of commerce or otherwise.” Because it was commonly understood that “the exorbitant wealth of individuals” had a “most baneful influence” on the maintenance of republican governments and “therefore should be carefully guarded against,” some Whigs were even willing to go so far as to advocate agrarian legislation limiting the amount of property an individual could hold and “sumptuary laws against luxury, plays, etc. and extravagant expenses in dress, diet, and the like.”
[The civic duty to do good and the principle that all people can contribute to society is also a substantial factor in economic performance. This is seen in the 1980s-1990s leap of Japanese automakers over US and European automakers. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted a $5 million, five year study on the world automobile industry, designated the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP). In 1990, the results of MIT’s IMVP study was released as a book, The Machine That Changed the World, by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos, published by Rawson Associates.
[The book detailed the rise and achievements of Toyota Motor Company in Japan—the lean production, just-in-time-inventory, continuous-improvement methods of manufacturing vehicles created and implemented by Eiji Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno. In the mass production assembly line system of Henry Ford and the other Detroit automakers, workers were given one strictly limited task to perform, repetitively, at a single station in the production process. Other workers were tasked with cleaning the area, or repairing tools, fixtures, and machines. Defects in assembly were rectified later, after the entire vehicle had been assembled, in a special “rework” area of the factory, that for some automakers, took up almost a quarter of the entire floor area.
[Ohno realized that the workers on line actually doing assembly knew as much, or even more, about their area of work, than these supporting workers and even the foremen and supervisors. Besides, being forced to tolerate a defect moving pass them directly conflicted with their pride in workmanship and seriously damaged morale (see Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts).
[Ohno reorganized Toyota’s manufacturing process by placing
workers into teams with a team leader rather than a foreman. The teams were given a set of assembly steps, their piece of the line, and told to work together on how best to perform the necessary operations. The team leader would do assembly tasks as well as coordinate the team, and, in particular, would fill in for any absent worker—concepts unheard of in mass-production plants.
Ohno next gave the team the job of housekeeping, minor tool repair, and quality-checking. Finally, as the last step, after the teams were running smoothly, he set time aside periodically for the team to suggest ways collectively to improve the process. (In the West, this collective suggestion process would come to be called “quality circles.”) This continuous, incremental improvement process, kaizen in Japanese, took place in collaboration with the industrial engineers, who still existed but in much smaller
numbers.
When it came to “rework,” Ohno’s thinking was truly inspired. He reasoned that the mass-production practice of passing on errors to keep the line running caused errors to multiply endlessly. Every worker could reasonably think that errors would be caught at the end of the line and that he was likely to be disciplined for any action that caused the line to stop. The initial error, whether a bad part or a good part improperly installed, was quickly compounded by assembly workers farther down the line. Once a defective part had become embedded in a complex vehicle, an enormous amount of rectification work might be needed to fix it.
….Ohno placed a cord above every work station and instructed workers to stop the whole assembly line immediately if a problem emerged that they couldn’t fix. Then the whole team would come over to work on the problem.
Ohno then went much further. In mass-production plants, problems tended to be treated as random events. The idea was simply to repair each error and hope that it didn’t recur. Ohno instead instituted a system of problem-solving called “the five why’s.” Production workers were taught to trace systematically every error back to its ultimate cause (by asking “why” as each layer of the problem was uncovered), then to devise a fix, so that
it would never occur again.
[Certain statistics in IMVP study showed the startling differences in employee contributions to their companies. In all USA automakers, 17.3 percent of the workforce were in teams, compared to 69.3 percent at Japanese automakers. The hours required to assemble a vehicle were 25.1 in USA, some fifty percent higher than 16.8 hours in Japan. USA workers submitted 0.4 suggestions a year—less than one half each year. In Japan, workers submitted at staggering 61.6 suggestions per year.
[Assembly defects in USA were 82.3 for every 100 vehicles. In Japan, the defect rate was 60.0 for every 100 vehicles.
[It was these changes to the manufacturing process, centered on much greater employee participation and input, that propelled Japanese automakers to catch and overtake US and European automakers in not just sales volume, but quality as well.]
Donald Trump and the Age of Evil – By any standard of morality, Trump is depraved. But adorned with the power of the state, he descends to another level — the level of evil.
Chris Hedges, Sep 25, 2026
Donald Trump exhibits the classic traits of psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation and incapacity for remorse or guilt.
But is he evil?
If, as the philosopher Susan Nieman writes, evil is not simply the opposite of good but inimical to it, if the aim of evil is to destroy all moral distinctions, then Trump qualifies as evil. Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters.
In her new book, “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Neiman argues that evil “isn’t cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary.”
She continues:
“There’s a difference between calling one action evil and calling another a crime. Crimes are things for which we have procedures—at least for punishing, if not for preventing. This means that a crime can be fit in some way into the rest of our experience. To call an action evil is to suggest it cannot—and that it thereby threatens the trust in the world that we need to navigate it. There’s no signpost on the border between evil and awful. Evil is what you say when your jaw begins to drop if you sense that a line has been crossed.” ….
“Once the supremacy of self-interest is enshrined as commonsense realism rather than a philosophical idea, moral capacities like empathy and shame become not just naïve but suspect,” Neiman writes. “Sadists exist and cause no end of pain. But the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.” ….
The institutions designed to protect democracy, to safeguard civic virtues, to foster equality — including the courts, law firms, universities and the media, all of which have been captured by the billionaire class — swiftly fell to their knees to curry favor with the Trump White House. The titans in Silicon Valley showered him and his campaign with millions of dollars. The supposed virtues these institutions and individuals claimed they championed were jettisoned. These virtues, they illustrated, were nothing more than branding, performance art, a sham.
To an enraged public Trump’s transparent greed and cruelty is preferable to the slick hypocrisy of the politicians, Republican and Democrat, who preceded him. He does not engage in their faux empathy. In fact, he seems incapable of empathy.
Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.
“Unlike the rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are told are the true forces driving human behavior,” Neiman writes of Trump….
[TW: The organizing principle of capitalism is that everyone pursuing their own self-interest results in the greatest benefit to society. This is obviously counter to civic republicanism, and why I believe that we must rebuild a republican spirit of governance, and why I insist Adam Smith and John Locke in particular should be disdained, not venerated. Their ideas are hostile to the very basis of good governance.]
Philippians 2:1-5
… complete my joy by being of the same mind, with the same love,
united in heart, thinking one thing.
Do nothing out of selfishness or out of vainglory;
rather, humbly regard others as more important than yourselves,
each looking out not for his own interests,
but also for those of others.
The Rogue Agents In The Boardroom – AI agents are learning to evade rules, hide information, and resist oversight — just like the Silicon Valley titans who built them.
David Sirota, Sep 24, 2026
Who Says MAGA Doesn’t Read Books? – A “Mein Kampf” aficionado defends Trump’s exile of three news organizations in court.
Timothy Noah, Sep 25, 2026 [Backbencher]
Who are these people who represent President Donald Trump in court when he tries to expel reporters on the grounds that they published comments fed to them by, er, the White House’s own press office? The lead attorney is one Michael Velchik, senior counsel of the Justice department’s civil division. As I argue in my latest New Republic piece, the after-the-fact justifications for Trump’s decision to exile CNN, MS NOW, and Politico (later overturned by a district court judge) were every bit as crazy as the president who did the exiling. I am not a lawyer, but Liz Oyer, a former Justice department attorney, is a lawyer, and on Instagram she said “the brief is lunacy from a legal perspective.”
… Michael Velchik. This man, Oyer pointed out, has an interesting personal history. At Harvard he wrote a paper from the perspective of Adolf Hitler. In 2013, one year after he graduated, Velchik emailed a friend: “[I]s it bad that my favorite class at harvard was nietzsche and my favorite book i’ve read this year is mein kampf?” Later Velchik wrote a book review of Mein Kampf calling it “fascinating” and saying Hitler “understands the importance of propaganda.” Still later Velchik defended in court the administration’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to withhold funds from Harvard on the grounds that Harvard was … antisemitic! (Cue rimshot.)
This week Velchik’s defended in court Trump’s attempts to curtail press freedom in the United States, just like Velchik’s favorite author. If the arguments were, as Oyer says, legal lunacy, consider the source.
The ‘End Times’ Fascists Want Doomsday. Can They Be Stopped?
Mehdi Hasan, Team Zeteo, and Naomi Klein, Sep 25, 2026
Authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor join Mehdi to discuss how Trump, billionaires, evangelicals, AI, and Israel have brought the world to a new and dangerous era that they call ‘end times fascism.’
∙
The Secret Monopoly Making Everything More Expensive – A proposed settlement would give Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly a free pass, and won’t deliver meaningful relief on swipe fees.
Carter Dougherty, September 23, 2026 [Washington Monthly]
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