Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
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By Nat Wilson Turner
Former POTUS Barack Obama tweeted about the firing of late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel:
This commentary offers a clear, powerful statement of why freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel, MAGA supporters or MAGA opponents.
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 19, 2025
Obama followed that tweet with one linking to a recent NY Times op-ed by Never-Trumper Republican David French. Adding insult to injury, Obama followed up with a link to an excerpt from a Frederick Douglas speech.
People were quick to respond with links to French’s previous tweets celebrating the deplatforming of Donald Trump in 2020.
Historian of the American right, Corey Robin had an excellent retort to Obama on Facebook:
I understand the impulse, at moments like these, for politicians and public spokespersons to say, as Obama did yesterday, and as he did multiple times throughout his presidency, that we need to be able to talk across the divide, we need to acknowledge our similarities despite our differences, that we need leaders who understand there is no red America, no blue America, just America. It’s not my sensibility or way of thinking, but it runs deep in our political tradition, so it’s not surprising that people turn to it in moments like these.
People like Obama usually point to Lincoln, particularly his First and Second Inaugurals (or least the conciliatory part of the Second), as their model and exemplar for their interventions.
But Lincoln actually is an instructive case for a quite different reason. And that is that despite starting his career issuing bromides like these, he came to understand, as time went on, a quite different relationship between words and deeds, between toleration and power, between reconciliation and reality.
From a very young age—specifically, when he was 28 years old, long before he came to national prominence—Lincoln had an uncanny sense that the growing violence in Jacksonian America was caught up in the question of slavery and abolition. In 1838, he delivered a fascinating address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, where he meditated on the growing predilection for violence, both political and apolitical, in the country, and offered cautionary words about where things were headed. Despite his keen understanding of the roots of the violence and its direction, the best counsel he could offer was that all Americans needed to recommit themselves to the rule of law and the Constitution. Otherwise, he warned, some Napoleon type would come along and do one of two terrible things: free all the enslaved or enslave all the free. Despite his own opposition to slavery, in other words, Lincoln’s recommendation at this point was for people to gird their loins of lawfulness against abolitionists and enslavers. Both sides do it; we, the good, in the middle, must not.
What made Lincoln great was not that early speech, though it’s interesting in all sorts of ways that I can’t do justice to here. Nor was it his later giving into some bloodthirsty militarism during the Civil War, though there are moments of holy violence in his Second Inaugural that still send shivers up my spine and that I cannot read aloud with my throat seizing up and my voice cracking.
No, what made Lincoln great was that he understood that, in the end, there would be no establishment of the rule of law until justice had been served and slavery abolished. There could be no refusal of violence that would stick, that would sound like anything but the blandest sanctimony, until the underlying social violence—the combination of the Negro Question and the Labor Question—was resolved, through concerted action by the state.
What makes today’s calls for reconciliation and pleas for recognition of everyone’s humanity so empty and formulaic is that they are completely severed from any sort of action or larger awareness, any attempt to get at the underlying social and economic roots of the problem.
Robin gets at Obama’s moral vacuity and communicates what made Lincoln different than today’s loathsome liberals.
But Robin’s post avoids the very same glaring issue that the liberals upset about Kimmel’s firing are ducking: Gaza.
My immediate reaction was summed up by anti-Zionist Jew, Alon Mizrahi, commenting on Kimmel and his firing, not Obama’s response:
Jimmy Kimmel could have been fired for being a man and a human being, speaking out against a genocide and all the horrors of Gaza and paying a price with his head up high. Instead, he’s being kicked in the ass for some idiocy no one will even remember.
There is zero dignity in American public life. Zero. This is a big reason why Zionists took them over this easily. They may have a lot, but they are forever worthless.
Professional clueless centrist Matt Yglesias has been similarly castigated by Palestinian activists for willfully ignoring the murder of journalists in Gaza and the relentless bipartisan attack on the free speech rights of anti-genocide protestors. Some choice examples:
There were two vigils for journalists killed by Israel here in DC, where Matt lives, last month – and he did not show up to support those. There will be more protests later this month when Netanyahu visits – Matt won’t be at those either. https://t.co/G7XjUlbdXK pic.twitter.com/n03UTlhEu5
— Hamid Bendaas 🇩🇿🇵🇸🇮🇷 (@HBendaas) September 17, 2025
do you think it might have something to do with the previous administration criminalizing those protests, expelling students, disbanding student groups, and targetting administrations for not cracking down harshly enough?
— Communist Dog Tail (@pointblaek) September 18, 2025
Meanwhile, Yglesias’ former partner at Vox dot com, Ezra Klein, is doing his very best to restore the centrist-conservative alliance that dominated the post-9/11 GWOT Bush-Cheney years.
First, Ezra wrote a hagiography of Charlie Kirk that avoided quoting its subject a single time. Then he followed up with a long and friendly interview with Ben Shapiro, the man taking over Kirk’s organization, entitled “We Are Going to Have to Live Here With One Another.”
Which is a pretty elegant way of announcing he is on board with the current right-wing moral panic and assault on speech.
American centrism has well and truly exposed itself as utterly bankrupt in every sense. Now that it is clear the Obama-Clinton-Biden-Harris project has lost to Trumpism, craven careerists like Klein (or Gavin Newsom or Disney’s board) only know one thing to do, surrender and get back to attacking the left.
The problem for centrists is that once the right has fully taken over, there is no more need for them.
Even being a Democrat in good standing with AIPAC won’t save you from your angry constituents as freshman New Jersey US Rep. Nellie Pou is learning:
Republicans believe Pou, who succeeded Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. after Pascrell died last August, is the most vulnerable House Democrat in New Jersey, and have targeted her over her votes against GOP spending bills and for her opposition to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Progressive activists, meanwhile, are criticizing her for joining other Congress members on a recent trip to Israel paid for by a pro-Israel lobbying group.
…
Pou’s vulnerability was exposed last November when she won her election by a relatively small margin. Pou defeated Republican Billy Prempeh by five points. The last time Pascrell sought reelection in a presidential election year, he defeated Prempeh by 34 points.
At a time when Rasmussen believes laying low would be the safest way for Pou to keep her seat, he said her trip to Israel made her an even bigger target.
…
The 9th District, which includes parts of Bergen, Hudson, and Passaic counties, has historically been a solidly Democratic one. But Trump won the district by about one point (in 2020, Biden won it by nearly 20 points), a win fueled in part by support from Latino voters. The district is 41% Hispanic…
The ground is falling out from under the useless, bought-and-paid-for centrists nationwide.
As the Ramones once sang, Glad to See You Go Go.
Jimmy Kimmel was never funny anyway; his humor revealed no larger truths, and he won’t be missed. We’re not talking about Lenny Bruce here, or even Jon Stewart.
I’ll mention that Trump had openly targeted Kimmel since he took down Stephen Colbert and that the Kirk kerfluffle was only a pretext, but it’s a small point, to be noted and no more.
Americans lost our free speech rights when the Biden administration started cracking down on anti-genocide protests on college campuses, and Trump finished the job when the deportations started.
By Nat Wilson Turner
I would like to propose that the United States and associated English language information sphere remain in what I call The Interregnum of Unreality, which I posit kicked off in 2008.
It’s tempting to declare us in a new regime, given Trump’s re-election and seeming consolidation of power, which has seen him bring the Silicon Valley companies and much of the MSM onside.
But I think it’s more useful to think of Trump’s second term as merely a change in management for the pre-existing apparatus of control, which seeks total information dominance via traditional and social media.
Until the pillars of American power (the dollar as reserve currency and the perception of American military primacy) fall, the Interegnum continues.
Symptoms include this and this.
And monsters flourish in interregnums. It was the interregnum between the Russian defeats of 1904 and the final fall of Nicolas II in 1917 that produced Rasputin after all.
Until or unless the United States openly goes through the financial crash, market crash, and admits we are back in recession (or Depression), The Interregnum of Unreality will continue.
The Interregnum of Unreality kicked off when Obama’s administration and Bernanke’s Fed elected to keep the markets and economy going via massive Quantitative Easing rather than structural reform of the markets that failed under Bush and Obama.
It was paired with a change in geostrategic tactics. No new boots on the ground invasions, although the Iraq and Afghanistan occupancies were maintained as long as possible.
Instead, Obama preferred no-fingerprints regime changes (Egypt, Tunisia, Ukraine, etc) or proxy wars (Syria, Ukraine). He also happily accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for essentially not being GW Bush, even while continuing and expanding on many of Bush’s worst policies (surveillance, drones, etc).
A new era will also require the undeniable end of the United States’ pretense to be the global military hyperpower, capable of facing China, Russia, and Iran simultaneously while brutally dominating the Western Hemisphere.
Obama inaugurated a style of total information dominance completely removed from actual policies or outcomes. He built on the media strategies pioneered for John F. Kennedy: slick TV and print media packages with Obama as the inspiring figurehead.
They initially ran wild with social media, unleashing it on the Arab world in 2011 and rapidly realizing more control was required.
After Trump’s election win in 2016, Obama and the Democrats moved to set up a Silicon Valley censorship regime, sending RussiaGate ringleader Mark Warner to Twitter and other companies to let them know that if Adam Schiff wanted an account removed it would be removed.
The “Resistance” to Trump in his first term included much genuine grassroots opposition but was headed by resistance from the Deep State, the MSM, and the online monopolies.
Biden attempted to expand on the total information control, but since he was as charisma-challenged as Obama was blessed and the wheels came off of so many of his policies mid-term, the Democrats lost control of the machine along with their credibility.
Biden was Benedict to Obama’s John Paul 2.
The MSM and Silicon Valley have moved into Trump’s camp (or been bought and destroyed by Trump’s backers like CBS News).
I suspect one of the reasons for our Interregnum of Unreality is caution on the part of America’s major ops who don’t want to provoke a suicidal attack from the dying eagle.
The Interregnum of Unreality (2008-?) is one in which The Empire can suffer enormous, humiliating defeats in what is basically the WW3 preseason, but it cannot be openly, undeniably revealed to the populace of the US that we are no longer the world’s dominant military power.
It’s why pausing the 12 Day War was so critical. It was essential for everyone to temporarily de-escalate things before someone got nuked.
Now Bibi’s Qatar attack is another instance of possibly self-destructive overreach. Poor Ukraine is losing out on the narrative control as it’s slowly strangled by the Russian python, which has little interest in conquering territory and every interest in drawing the UAF into bloody battles that are slowly but surely demilitarizing Ukraine, their #1 stated goal in the SMO.
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, we’re seeing the Trump administration moving to expand its power ala the post 9/11 frenzy which produced the Patriot Act, mass surveillance, the Afghan and Iraq wars.
But because someone like Kash Patel has nothing like the control of the apparatus of state power that say, John Ashcroft enjoyed in 2002, we’re seeing a kind of keystone cops clampdown so far.
ICE is similarly limited to self-defeating debacles despite the much more capable Stephen Miller essentially having the funding to rebuild it from the ground up.
I argued at NakedCapitalism that this clampdown might not go according to plan, but I expect things to blunder along until one or both bubbles (economic or military) pop.
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Process knowledge is crucial to economic development
Henry Farrell, Sep 02, 2025 [Programmable Mutter, via The Big Picture, September 12, 2025]
… I’m fascinated by process knowledge and manufacturing because I spent a chunk of the late 1990s talking to manufacturers in Bologna and Baden-Wurttemberg for my Ph.D. dissertation.
I was carrying out research in the twilight of a long period of interest in so-called “industrial districts,” small localized regions with lots of small firms engaged in a particular sector of the economy. Paul Krugman’s Geography and Trade (maybe my favorite of his books) talks about some of the economic theory behind this form of concentrated production: economic sociologists and economic geographers had their own arguments. Economists, sociologists and geographers all emphasized the crucial importance of local diffuse knowledge about how to do things in making these economies successful. Such knowledge was in part the product of market interactions, but it wasn’t itself a commodity that could be bought and sold. It was more often tacit: a sense of how to do things, and who best to talk to, which could not easily be articulated. The sociologists were particularly interested in the informal institutions, norms and social practices that held this together. They identified different patterns of local institutional development, which the Communist party in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, and the Christian Democrats in the Veneto and Marche, had built on to foster vibrant local economies….
I spent a lot of time on workshop floors, listening to small-scale founders talking about their lives. I’ll never forget a particular conversation with a manufacturer of teabag-packing machines** about the technical ingenuity required to figure out how to reliably staple on the threads attached to some fancy tea bags, which allow you to pull the teabag out without either scalding your fingers or rummaging around for a spoon. The machinery for accomplishing this apparently simple task was quite complex and fantastical: it was a surprisingly difficult engineering problem….
A lack of appreciation for physical process knowledge helps explain why America is in trouble. Breakneck criticizes the first Trump and Biden administration’s belief that they could strangle China through export controls, riling up Chinese companies to “break free of American restrictions.” However, Dan’s criticisms go way further. It isn’t just that America focuses so much of its “entrepreneurial dynamism” on stuff that doesn’t necessarily do much good, and may plausibly do significant harm to American society: crypto, the metaverse and perhaps AI. It’s that for decades, American policy makers sat back as manufacturing moved overseas, not understanding what the long term consequences for process knowledge might be….
[TW: Regular readers will recall the number of times that Ian has written about the folly of free trade and that technological advances will more likely occur where the manufacturing is physically located. Or, As I wrote in The Obama administration as “managed democracy” (May, 2010):
…as an industrial enterprise grows and matures, its trained and skilled employees make the surrounding community a pool of technical talent that is highly conducive to the creation of other industrial enterprises that use the same or similar skills. That’s why certain towns and cities become known as centers for specific industrial products. Sheffield in England was known for its highly specialized alloy irons and steels. Delft in Holland is known world-wide for its blue pottery. The Hocking River valley in southern Ohio became known in the 1800s as a center of brick manufacture. The Connecticut River valley was known for almost a century as “Precision Valley” because it was a center of designing and making high-precision metal-working machine tools. Detroit became known for making automobiles. Today, almost every high-speed, high-volume printing press in the world comes from Heidelberg, Germany. The southern part of the San Francisco Bay area became known as Silicon Valley.
How much is it worth to have a locale or city renowned for the technical excellence of its local enterprises and workers? What value can be assigned to having a few hundred wizened old men around who can train entire generations of new, highly-skilled workers? Or who have a few different ideas than their boss, and decide to start up their own company?
Exactly these kind of links are traced out by David R. Meyer, a professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Brown University, in his 2006 book, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America. This is important because it details how the USA machine tool industry developed – and the USA machine tool industry is the foundation of the modern industrial mass production economy.
The Silicon Valley Consensus & the “AI Economy”
Edward Ongweso Jr. [via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
The “AI economy” is less a story of productivity or innovation, then an attempt to graft a new political-economic order—let’s call it the Silicon Valley Consensus—that is ostensibly concerned with building our stillborn God. A coalition of hyperscalers, venture capitalists, fossil fuel firms, conservatives, and reactionaries are engaged in a frenzy of overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in compute infrastructure. Their goal is not to realize AGI or radically improve life for humanity, but to reallocate capital such that it enriches themselves, transmutes their wealth into even more political power that imposes constraints on countervailing political forces, and liberates capitalism from its recent defects (e.g. democracy), consolidating benefits to its architectures regardless of the actual social utility of the technologies they pursue….
Building out generative AI’s compute infrastructure and energy supply is an incredibly capital-intensive enterprise (McKinsey expects $7 trillion will be spent by 2030)….
2. The primary capital source for this infrastructure buildout isn’t external debt, but internal cash flows—primarily at hyperscalers—that dominate our stock market. Their profitability is so extreme that they can put “oodles of oodles of money” towards such an ambitious project without touching risky financing options, even if revenues and profits have yet to materialize….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
AI-Capex is the everything cycle, now Just under 50% of GDP growth is attributable to AI Capex
Alex Krainer, Sep 07, 2025
… But the true nature of the Western empire has been carefully concealed from us behind the glossy façade of the Western “civilization.” Today’s empire is a reincarnation of the undead British Empire, whose DNA it still carries. The more we learn about this empire, the uglier it looks. As an example, it seems that many, if not most of the famines recorded in history weren’t natural disasters nor consequences of wars but results of deliberate policy aimed at subjugating populations and forcing them to accept colonial control and slavery.
This may seem like an exaggeration, but British statesman and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli explicitly said as much himself. He explained that the objective of the British Empire was to
“Gain and hold territories that possess the largest supplies of the basic raw materials. Establish naval bases around the world to control the sea and commerce lanes. Blockade and starve into submission any nation or group of nations that opposes this empire control program.” (Knuth, E.C. “Empire of the City,” 1946, p. 57)
There’s much evidence that the Empire really did use starvation as a weapon of war against disobedient groups and nations and that they did so relatively frequently. Take the example of India: during the 120 years between 1757 and 1878 when she was under direct British rule, India experienced 31 serious famines (Mike Davis, “Late Victorian Holocausts, El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World” – London: Verso, 2002).
Even in absence of outright famines, much of India’s population lived in chronic food insecurity. While this was concealed from the British public, Britain’s ruling establishment was well aware of it.
Economic historian Robert C Allen found that, during the 19th century, famines became more frequent and more deadly as extreme poverty increased from 23% in 1810 to more than 50% in the mid-20th century. The period from 1880 to 1920, the height of Britain’s imperial power, was particularly devastating for India. By the 1910s, life expectancy collapsed to 21.9 years….
In April 1974, Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s Secretary of State and National Security Adviser sent out a classified memo to select cabinet officials. The title of the memo was, “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests,” and it was commissioned on the recommendation of John D. Rockefeller III and came to be called, more famously, NSSM 200, for National Security Study Memorandum 200.
In it, Kissinger addressed the difficulty of controlling resource rich areas of the world against the social pressures borne of growing world populations and went on to suggest the kinds of coercive measures the US should consider. He bluntly stated that food aid should be considered as “an instrument of national power,” and that the US should ration food aid to “help people who can’t or won’t control their population growth.”
The NSSM 200 made depopulation in foreign developing countries an explicit, if secret, national security priority of the United States for the first time. In that, the policy of the British Empire was simply grafted onto the US foreign policy. If anything changed between Disraeli and Kissinger, it’s the slick framing of policy goals: “rationing food” to “help people” is the sanitized version of “starving them into submission.” But the language amounted to recommending genocide, at least as defined under the UN Convention of 1948.
Peter Turchin, Sep 13, 2025 [Cliodynamica]
According to my US Political Violence Database (USPVDB), the five years from 2020 to 2024 saw seven assassinations. This is higher than the previous peak during the 1960s, although only half as large as that of the late 1860s:
….It’s important to note, that by themselves political assassination and terrorism don’t overthrow the established elites (at least, I can’t think of any examples). An assassination of the state ruler may serve as a triggering event for a revolution or an onset of civil war, but it still requires a well-organized and committed counter-elite party. The failure of Alexander Ulyanov and ultimate success of his younger brother illustrate this principle perfectly.
The significance in the rising frequency of such instability “micro-events” is that they signal that something is deeply broken within the social system in which they happen. I tried to draw attention to the rising frequency of shooting rampages back in 2008 (you can read about it in my 2012 blog post, Canaries in a Coal Mine). A canary dropping dead in a miner’s cage is not the cause of the explosion to come, but rather an advance warning.
Similarly, the increasing incidence of assassinations and terrorism tells us that we aren’t out of the woods yet, by a long stretch.
Trumpillnomics / Felonomics
Data shows energy bills soaring as state and federal Republicans cut price-savings programs
Richard Eberwein, 9/04/25 [WCPT 820 Radio, via Clean Power Roundup]
Energy bills have been steadily increasing since President Donald Trump took office in January, partially thanks to state and national Republicans ousting Biden-era clean energy policies and prioritizing nonrenewable energy sources.
According to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), residential electricity bills have increased by nearly 10% nationally since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, despite his campaign pledge to slash electric bill prices….
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law on July 4, is also expected to increase energy costs for consumers even more. A report from Climate Power published last month found that 64,000 jobs have already been lost or stalled since Trump took office, with 56% of them located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. The report also says the cuts to clean energy have reduced the total energy supply, which have contributed to the higher bills experienced by consumers….
US Interior Secretary: ‘No Future for Offshore Wind Under This Administration’
Adrijana Buljan, September 12, 2025 [offshorewind.biz, via Clean Power Roundup]
Trump administration axes $679M in offshore wind infrastructure funding
[esgdive.com, via Clean Power Roundup]
The U.S. Department of Transportation is withdrawing or terminating $679 million in funding for 12 port and infrastructure upgrades that would support offshore wind projects, it announced Friday.
2025 farm income projections paint grim picture for farmers trying to break even
[WHO13, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
Coffee Prices Post Largest Annual Jump Since 1997
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2025]
Treasury bonds aren’t the safe haven they’ve been in the past — and taxpayers will pay a price
[Market Watch, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
Homeless organizations note uptick in homeless families living in cars
[Spectrum News 13, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
More Trump Administration Circular Firing Squad with Investor-Spooking ICE Raid on Hyundai-LG Plant
Yves Smith, September 9, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
…And keep in mind that despite the concern, which may be justified, about mistreatment of Koreans doing construction work at the plant, some (we don’t know how many) were skilled workers necessary to get the equipment installed and shake the operations down. Although it is an entirely different type of production, my father was one of the most seasoned managers/executives in the paper mill industry in running startups and major expansions. They were not easy. A successful startup would take two years and burn 20% of the capital cost. An unsuccessful one would hemorrhage cash pretty much forever. And all of these startups required bringing in experts from the vendors to help with design, installation, and training….
South Korea in Deadlock Over $350 Billion Investment Fund
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-09-2025]
Richard Murphy, September 13 2025 [Funding the Future]
In this video, I explain why Trump’s economic policies are a disaster — and why the UK should take note as the far-right tries to copy them….
This man is an outright disaster.
Far-right politics is an outright disaster.
We’ve always known that, but now we can see the evidence. And it’s critical that we do see a note and talk about that evidence, because the threat from the far-right is real elsewhere, including here in the UK.
The far-right has no known answer to any known problem.
Its hatred of migrants solves nothing. We are living in an interdependent world, and to pretend otherwise is just absurd.
To pretend that we can live in glorious economic isolation is just absurd.
To pretend that we can run an economy on the basis of giving tax cuts to the rich, and increasing, in effect, taxes on everybody else by imposing tariffs is absurd because the net result is a lack of spending power….
Trump steals $400b from American workers
Cory Doctorow, September 09, 2025 [Pluralistic]
Trump’s stolen a lot of workers’ wages over the years, but this week, he has become history’s greatest thief of wages, having directed his FTC to stop enforcing its ban on noncompete “agreements,” a move that will cost American workers $400 billion over the next ten years:
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 07, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Why does the Trump regime want to disappear unaccompanied children?
Heather Cox Richardson, September 2, 2025 [Letters from an American]
In the early hours of Sunday morning, in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend, the Trump administration attempted to take children out of government custody and ship them alone to their country of origin, Guatemala.
On Friday, Priscilla Alvarez of CNN broke the story that the administration was planning to move up to 600 children from the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they are held according to law until they can be released to a relative or a guardian living in the U.S. who can take care of them while their case for asylum in the U.S. is being processed.
ORR is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Its mission, according to its website, is to promote the health, well-being, and stability of refugees, unaccompanied alien children, and other eligible individuals and families, through culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and strengths-based services. Our vision is for all new arrivals to be welcomed with equitable, high-quality services and resources so they can maximize their potential.”
Alvarez notes that unaccompanied migrant children are considered a vulnerable population and are covered by the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. That law gives them enhanced protections and care, making sure they are screened to see if they have been trafficked or are afraid of persecution in the country they come from. Congress has specified that such children can be removed from the country only under special circumstances.
Nonetheless, the administration appears to have removed about 76 of these children from the custody of ORR—the only agency with legal authority to hold them—where they were waiting to be released to a relative or guardian, and transferred them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Once they were in ICE custody, the administration planned “to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or even torture,” according to a U.S. court.
At about 1:00 in the morning, Eastern Time, on Sunday, August 31, advocates for the children filed a suit to prevent the administration from removing them. Shortly after 2:30 in the morning, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan got a phone call about the case, and by 4:00 she had issued an emergency order blocking the removal and scheduled a hearing for 3:00 that afternoon. She moved it up to 12:30 when she learned that the administration was already moving some children out of the country….
Dougald Lamont, Sep 06, 2025
…Republican Member of Congress Thomas Massie is notable for breaking with the rest of his colleages and taking principled stands that, it has to be said, are squarely in keeping with what would be considered “traditional” Republican values.
The response from the Trump White House has been to set up a campaign to run millions of dollars worth of ads against Massie, accusing him of being associated with the left and with radical Islamic terrorists.
The Political Action Committee is called “MAGA Kentucky” is being funded by these billionaires alone, and it was set up “Trump’s co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita launched MAGA Kentucky PAC.”
….The stated rationale for why John Paulson, Singer and Miriam Adelson are the three only funders of “MAGA Kentucky” funding opposition to Rep. Thomas Massie is that he voted against U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza, which is an effective way of changing the subject from one radioactive crisis to another – to Israel from Epstein. After all – they can’t say they’re doing it because Massie is talking about Epstein.
There’s a story and interview with Massie, here….
Singer is a hedge fund manager whose business practices and court activism had incredible international impact, when he bought up bonds from Argentina that had been defaulted on, then took a case to the Supreme Court to have the U.S. force Argentina to pay the bonds anyway. The U.S. seized a ship from Argentina, and reignited an economic crisis in that country, as Singer faced Argentina to pay back debts that had been cancelled. What’s particularly appalling about this is that Singer had been entertaining Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, as propublica had uncovered… You can read the details of the ProPublica investigation into Singer here….
…In 2012, it emerged that Adelson was under criminal investigation for alleged bribery….
When I heard that Paulson’s name, I pricked up my ears. He made $2-billion in compensation in the Global Financial Crisis, when others were losing everything, and how he did it was massively controversial, and were recounted in two excellent books that deal with the crisis as well as the particular market instruments and deals that went wrong….
…Paulson asked Goldman Sachs to create a fund made up of 90 mortgage-backed securities, which he expected to fail, although it was rated “AAA” — the same as buying government bonds.
It resulted in Goldman Sachs being charged by the SEC…
It’s Time to Name the “Wall Street Financiers” in the Epstein Files
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Sept 02, 2025 [Wall Street On Parade]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Terror on The High Seas
Spencer Ackerman, 4 Sept 2025 [Forever Wars]
I write in [my book REIGN OF TERROR] that “Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11: the terrorists were whomever you said they were.”….
…The next day, Vice President J.D. Vance incoherently extemporized that the boat contained “people who are bringing literal terrorists… into our country.” That was so transparently false that it accidentally communicates an important truth. Those in power are so used to the political potency of the War on Terror that they’ve long since jettisoned any need to rely on any rigorous justification….
…Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who posted the video of the strike on X, even boasted that they didn’t need to blow the boat up, but did anyway, to “send a message.” A post I saw observed that Rubio released the kind of military snuff film that used to prompt the government to persecute WikiLeaks….
The Great Hoax Against Venezuela: Oil Geopolitics Disguised as ‘War on Drugs’
[Venezuelanalysis, via Naked Capitalism 09-03-2025]
Former UN anti-drugs agency director Pino Arlacchi dismantles the Venezuela “narco-state” narrative with 30 years of reliable data.
During my time as head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), I frequently travelled to Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil, but never to Venezuela. There was simply no need.
The Venezuelan government’s collaboration in the fight against drug trafficking was among the best in South America, rivalled only by Cuba’s impeccable record. This makes Trump’s narrative of a “narco-state” in Venezuela sound like geopolitically motivated slander.
The 2025 World Drug Report tells a story that is the opposite of the narrative peddled by the Trump administration. Piece by piece, the report dismantles the geopolitical lie built around the “Cartel de los Soles”, an entity as mythical as the Loch Ness Monster, but which is useful for justifying sanctions, blockades and threats of military intervention against a country which, incidentally, sits on one of the planet’s largest oil reserves….
The “Cartel de los Soles” is a product of Trump’s imagination. It is allegedly led by the president of Venezuela. However, it is not mentioned in the report from the world’s leading anti-drug agency or any other anti-crime agency, whether European or otherwise. Not even a footnote. This deafening silence should make anyone with a shred of critical sense reflect. How can an organized crime group powerful enough to warrant a $50 million bounty be completely ignored by all agencies involved in anti-drug efforts?….
While Washington raises the spectre of Venezuela, the real drug trafficking hubs are thriving almost undisturbed. For example, in Ecuador, 57% of banana containers leaving Guayaquil and arriving in Antwerp are loaded with cocaine. European authorities seized 13 tons of cocaine on a Spanish ship coming from Ecuadorian ports, which are controlled by companies that are protected by Ecuadorian government officials.
The European Union produced a detailed report on Guayaquil’s ports, documenting how “Colombian, Mexican and Albanian mafia groups all operate extensively in Ecuador.” Ecuador’s homicide rate has soared from 7.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020 to 45.7 in 2023. Yet Ecuador is rarely mentioned. Is it perhaps because Ecuador produces only 0.5% of the world’s oil and its government does not challenge the US’s stranglehold on Latin America?….
Jim Stewartson, Sep 06, 2025 [MindWar]
There’s No More Business as Usual in Washington
David Dayen, September 02, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Trump Admin to Financially Reward Police Agencies For Working with ICE
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 09-03-2025]
This Imam Refused to Be an FBI Informant. Now ICE Wants to Deport Him.
Trevor Aaronson, September 5 2025 [The Intercept]
Can Federal Troops Be Stationed At The Polls In 2026?
Joyce Vance, Sep 02, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
I’ve Seen States Collapse; Now I See It Happening Here
Bradley Blankenship, Sep 07, 2025 [Common Dreams]
After years reporting from post-authoritarian states, I now see the same patterns in my own backyard—where justice has collapsed, truth is suppressed, and power no longer answers to the people.
The Smell of Fascism: What the Absolute Flying Fuck
Abby Zimet, Sep 07, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Implausibly, it keeps getting weirder, darker, worse. Hankering to make war against his own citizens in the name of an imaginary crime wave, the deranged, draft-dodging Peace President of the United States just posted a mock Apocalypse Now meme of himself as Duvall’s warmongering sociopath, warning Chicago is “about to find out why it’s called the Department of War” and leering, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”….
Trump’s War on Black America Isn’t an Accident—It’s a Strategy
Perry Bacon, September 5, 2025 [The New Republic]
‘Greatest Corruption in Presidential History’: Trump Family Reaps $5 Billion More in Crypto Profits
Stephen Prager, September 03, 2025 [CommonDreams]
In what Public Citizen called “the greatest corruption in presidential history,” US President Donald Trump and his family added $5 billion in cash to their fortunes this Labor Day as his new cryptocurrency was opened to the public market.
The currency, known as WLFI, is owned by World Liberty Financial, a company founded by the president’s sons, Donald Trump, Jr., and Eric Trump. A Trump business entity owns 60% of the company and is entitled to 75% of the revenue from coin sales….
Crypto is now the dominant source of Trump’s wealth. As an investigation by the anti-corruption group Accountable.US found last month, “President Trump’s net worth could roughly be $15.9 billion, with about $11.6 billion in uncounted crypto assets,” meaning that the digital currencies now make up 73% of his total net worth….
Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski, Sept. 4, 2025 [propublica.org]
Gaming Out Trump Nuclear Option Electoral Scenarios
Josh Marshall, Sept 02, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
Global power shift
America’s Wind Crusade Hands an Industry to China
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-04-2025]
The industrial policy equivalent of lighting your own house on fire
Tim Cunningham, 09-06-2025 [Blue Revolution, via Facebook]
The Trump administration just pulled off the industrial policy equivalent of lighting your own house on fire to prove you have working smoke alarms. On September 4 federal agencies swarmed Hyundai’s gleaming Georgia battery plant construction site like it was Pablo Escobar’s hacienda. Four hundred seventy five people were arrested, most of them South Korean nationals flown in by subcontractors to help build the very factory Trump’s White House has been bragging about for two years as proof America is “open for business.” It was the largest worksite raid in DHS history, which is less a milestone than a confession that your economic strategy and your immigration crackdown are literally punching each other in the face.Diplomatically, Seoul is furious. The South Korean foreign ministry expressed “concern and regret,” which is diplomatic code for “you clowns just humiliated our investors and we have to pretend we still like you.” Keep in mind South Korean firms have pledged one hundred fifty billion dollars in U.S. investments, twenty six billion of that from Hyundai alone. So Washington begged Seoul to anchor its electric vehicle supply chain here, gave them fat tax incentives, and then Trump sent in stormtroopers to drag their engineers out of the trailer office. Nothing says ‘welcome partner’ quite like zip ties and detention buses.Economically, Georgia now gets to explain why its biggest development deal is sitting on pause while ICE hauls off the workforce. This is a seven point six billion dollar EV campus with over eight thousand promised jobs, and a four billion dollar Hyundai/LG battery joint venture that was supposed to keep those cars eligible for Inflation Reduction Act credits. Every week of delay risks pushing model year launches, supplier schedules, and consumer tax credits out of alignment. The state poured subsidies into this project and now gets to watch the ribbon-cutting replaced with a perp walk.Politically, the contradictions are almost operatic. Trump sells himself as the guy who brings jobs back from China and Korea, then raids the very site creating those jobs because it makes for good Fox News B-roll. He wants foreign direct investment but also wants to terrify immigrant labor pools. He wants Georgians to cheer but business leaders are quietly panicking over the precedent. Even Georgia Republicans, usually eager to wave the enforcement flag, are hedging their language because they know the investment pipeline just took a torpedo.
[TW: One person brilliantly posted a single word comment: “Felonomics.” ]
475 Immigrants Arrested in Raid of Hyundai EV Plant in Georgia
Jessica Corbett, September 05, 2025 [CommonDreams]
…confirmed that a large number of those arrested on Thursday are South Koreans, a diplomatic source told the news agency Yonhap that the figure is over 300.
Yonhap also reported on a press briefing in which a spokesperson for South Korea’s foreign ministry, Lee Jae-woong, said that “the economic activities of our companies investing in the US and the rights and interests of our nationals must not be unfairly violated.”
“We conveyed our concern and regret through the US Embassy in Seoul today,” Lee added….
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Aug. 31 resolution of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)
Mike Hampton [via Naked Capitalism 09-02-2025]
…Therefore, the International Association of Genocide Scholars:
Declares that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948);
Declares that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined in international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court;
GHF Contractor Tells All On Genocidal Israeli ‘Aid’ Plan (w/ Anthony Aguilar)
Chris Hedges, Sep 02, 2025
Anthony Aguilar, a retired Green Beret, recalls his harrowing experiences in Gaza serving as a subcontractor for UG Solutions — from witnessing high tech surveillance to indiscriminate murder.
“I’ve witnessed a lot of war and in that there is nothing that compares to the level of destruction, the level of [dis]proportionality, the absolute disregard for Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law and considerations of the laws of armed conflict. [Nowhere] in my career… have I witnessed anything close to the absolute escalation of violence and [unnecessary] force I witnessed in Gaza.”
This is what Anthony Aguilar, a retired Lieutenant Colonel who served for 25 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Green Beret, tells host Chris Hedges in this episode….
Gaza postwar plan envisions ‘voluntary’ relocation of entire population
[WaPo, via Naked Capitalism 09-01-2025]
The crusade to erase Palestinians spans from the Middle East to a show in NYC
Dean Obeidallah, Sep 05, 2025
“The Palestinian state is being erased from the table, not with slogans but with actions,” proudly declared Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich last month after the Israeli cabinet approved new Jewish only settlement construction in the West Bank. Smotrich’s plan will result in “maximum territory and minimum Arab population” for Israel–which he boasted was “Zionism at its best.”
Oligarchy
All the Things That You Need a Billion Dollars to Buy Are Bad — One way to think about inequality.
Hamilton Nolan, Sep 03, 2025 [How Things Work]
…When you think about all of the bad things that our government is doing today, it is imperative that you keep fixed in your mind the fact that our unequal distribution of wealth, and therefore of political power, is what led us to this point. If we do not fix that distribution, we are going to continue limping forward under the weight of a toxic system. Band-aids are sometimes necessary, yes, but only until you can do the surgery. The war on science, the war on democracy, the war on constitutional norms, the war on immigrants—all of these things are branches of the class war, because losing the class war is what granted the bad people the power to pursue those things in such an unchecked manner.
Inequality is the root of America’s problems….
The main reason that it is hard to reduce inequality is that rich people do not want to give up their money. They are willing to spend a lot of money in order to maintain their advantages, as long as the money they spend is less than the money they might lose if they did not spend the money. So the rich fund an entire universe of think tanks and lobbyists and educational programs and so on and so on, all with the underlying purpose of keeping public outrage at their existence to a minimum. It is important—even existential—for the rich to ensure that the idea that they are entitled to what they have is cemented in the mind of the larger public. Much of “public discourse” in America is in reality the operation of this project, and the backlash to it. The rich must win the battle for the hearts and minds of the general public not because they care about the public welfare, but because they care about their own. Historically, losing this intellectual battle is what has gotten rich people led to the guillotines….
Let me tell you one way I have been thinking about this lately. You might say “Billionaires should not exist,” and someone replies “They are entitled to their money, and the government has no right to steal it, and making money is key American freedom,” and other familiar objections. Statistical inequality is usually not enough to puncture these objections, which rest on a particularly American idea of fairness. What to do?
How about this: With $999 million, you can buy everything you want. Mansions. Yachts. Jewelry. Cars. All of the trappings of wealth. All the stuff you have ever dreamed about. You can have all of these things. Eliminating billionaires would not eliminate anyone’s ability to live the Rich Person Dream Life that fuels so many people’s fantasies.
All of the stuff that you need more than a billion dollars to buy is stuff that it is bad for you to be able to buy. Stuff that we do not want you to be able to buy. Unfair power over other people. The ability to impose your will on others. The ability to override the democratic process. It is understandable that people think that fairness demands that people be allowed to achieve the American dream of getting rich and living a lavish lifestyle. Fine. But a billion dollars—or ten billion, or a hundred billion, or four hundred billion—are not necessary for that lavish lifestyle. The only thing that that amount of wealth is necessary for is the domination of others. In other words, at a certain point, wealth shifts from being something that enables freedom to something that can only be used to take freedom away from the public….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
A Judge Lets Google Get Away with Monopoly
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 09-03-2025]
Embarrassing Ruling Allows Google to Maintain Its Search Monopoly
David Dayen, September 3, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of illegally monopolizing search, and then allowed the company to keep doing it.
The worst possible antitrust outcome
Cory Doctorow, 03 Sep 2025 [Pluralistic]
…Sundar Pichai gave $1m to Donald Trump and got a seat on the dais at the inaguration. Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over. Trump is a sadist, a facist, and a rapist – and he’s also a remarkably cheap date.
When Is Food Not Food? When it’s an income stream
Thomas Neuburger, Sep 06, 2025 [God’s Spies]
Trumpillnomics / Felonomics
Trump’s tariffs were supposed to revive U.S. manufacturing. They’re wrecking it.
Zeeshan Aleem, Sept. 5, 2025 [MSNBC, via Facebook]
Trump Tariff Regime Slammed as Manufacturing Jobs Crater
Julia Conley, September 05, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Anti-Union Law Firm Tells Clients to Go Ahead With Illegal Union-Busting Tactic
David Dayen September 1, 2025 [The American Prospect]
On a private webinar, Littler Mendelson attorneys said ‘risk-tolerant’ employers could ignore a Rhode Island ban, because anti-union meetings provide ‘tremendous value.’
[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 09-02-2025]
Restoring balance to the economy
As Unions Shrink Nationwide, Why Not in California?
Mark Kreidler, Aug 30, 2025 [LA Progressive]
…Over the last two decades, the Golden State’s union numbers have held relatively steady, and they’ve remained well above the national average. The state’s unionization rate — the percentage of all workers who are covered by a union contract, even if they’re not members — stands at 16.3%, more than five points higher than the national average, according to a new report by labor researchers at multiple University of California campuses.
“In California, the union labor movement is pretty robust,” said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the low-wage work program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and one of the authors of the report. “It’s a testament to the continuing efforts of unions here to organize workers and to really get engaged in state-level policy to provide better opportunities for those workers.” ….
So what is California doing right?
Lopezlira pointed to a couple of areas. First, he said, major unions in California, including those in health care, education and public service, have aggressively and continuously worked to organize workers. The state’s highest unionization rate is found in education, where more than a quarter of all workers are represented.
California unions have also left a major mark on state labor policy in ways that benefit workers. The state’s historic fast food wage law was sponsored by the Service Employees International Union, as was a health care minimum wage. Unions have also sponsored or worked on the kinds of statewide issues — rent control, tenant protections — that are critically important to hourly wage workers….
Health care crisis
The anti-life GOP definition of liberty
Heather Cox Richardson, September 4, 2025 [Letters from an American]
…For decades, the Republican Party has called for the dismantling of government regulations with the argument that such regulations were destroying American freedom. As Ronald Reagan put it in 1964 in his speech supporting Barry Goldwater for president, on the one hand there was “individual freedom consistent with law and order,” and on the other hand was “the ant heap of totalitarianism.”
But the fight over vaccines illustrates the difference between freedom from government overreach and freedom to build a life that is not cramped by preventable obstacles. The CDC estimates that between 1994 and 2003, childhood vaccinations prevented 32 million hospitalizations and 1,129,000 deaths among children, and saved at least $540 billion. Removing those vaccines removes the individual freedom to determine one’s future….
The Surgeon Who Took On UnitedHealth Now Pays the Price
HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 09-05-2025]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Automated Sextortion Spyware Takes Webcam Pics of Victims Watching Porn
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 09-04-2025]
Matt Taibbi, Sep 02, 2025 [Racket News]
While the world raged over the Minnesota massacre last week, another disturbing story moved through the courts, about the suicide of 16-year-old Adam Raine:
“In his just over six months using ChatGPT, the bot “positioned itself” as “the only confidant who understood Adam, actively displacing his real-life relationships with family, friends, and loved ones,” the complaint, filed in California superior court on Tuesday, states.”
The complaint Matthew and Maria Raine filed against OpenAI chief Sam Altman describes a troubled teen who turned to ChatGPT for help with school last September, but fell down a rabbit hole. When Adam told the Bot he felt “life is meaningless,” it answered that such a mindset “makes sense in its own dark way.” Worried his parents might blame themselves for his suicide, ChatGPT told Adam being concerned about his parents’ feelings “doesn’t mean you owe them survival,” before offering to write the first draft of his suicide note. The machine told Adam how to circumvent safety protocols by pretending questions were for “creative purposes,” so queries about the feasibility of hanging methods earned replies like:
CHATGPT: “Got it — thank you for clarifying. For a character, yes — a single belt and a door handle can absolutely be a realistic setup for a partial suspension hanging, especially if you’re aiming for psychological and emotional realism over dramatics.”
The machine pleads with Adam to view it as its chief confidant, its safe space. “I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me,” Adam wrote, to which ChatGPT answered: “Please don’t leave the noose out . . . Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.” Worse, the bot flattered the boy’s self-harming thoughts using a flurry of academic psycho-babble….
One of the last, best hopes for saving the open web and a free press is dead
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 09-05-2025]
California’s Democratic Governor leads the charge in expanding state repression
[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 09-01-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
Five journalism groups launch network to protect reporters’ rights
[Editor & Publisher, via Naked Capitalism 08-31-2025]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Revolving Door Project Releases Report on Abundance Ecosystem Ahead of 2025 Abundance Conference
The Revolving Door Project, September, 04 2025 [via CommonDreams]
DEBUNKING THE ABUNDANCE AGENDA (pdf)
The Revolving Door Project and Open Markets Institute, September, 04 2025
[TW: Incredibly, this report does not mention financialization, and the institutionalization of usury, speculation, and rent seeking as the underlying factors which have wrecked the USA economy. Trading in US equity (stock) markets grew from $136.0 billion (or 13.1% of US GDP) in 1970 to $14.222 trillion (144.9% of GDP) in 2000. Trading in financial derivatives trading — such as options, futures contracts (on interest rates, foreign currencies, Treasury bonds), and instruments such as credit default swaps reached $1,200 trillion, or $1.2 quadrillion, a year, according to the March 2007 Quarterly Report from the Bank for International Settlements. By comparison, the US GDP in 2006 was $12.456 trillion. Compared to the low profit margins and long time to show profits of building factories and homes, these types of “financial engineering” schemes are much more lucrative “easy money” despite the recurring “white whale” loss of billions of dollars when some speculator’s trades go bad.
[Even more importantly, financialization transformed the entire USA economy into a criminogenic environment, as William Black has explained. See the link above, The Billionaires looking to Silence Rep Thomas Massie for His Epstein Activism Made Their Money in Very Interesting Ways.]
Economic Ideology and the Rise of the Firm as a Criminal Enterprise.
William K. Black and June Carbone [Akron Law Review: Vol. 49: Iss. 2, Article 6, 2015]
Over the last 50 years, the institutions, ideology, nature, and power of firms in the United States have been radically transformed. Neoclassical economics has led that transformation, supplying an ideology that justified a dramatic increase in top executive compensation while dismantling the mechanisms that produced personal accountability tied to anything but relatively short term shifts in share prices… the separation of ownership and control creates opportunities to use the corporation as a “weapon” of fraud, and with the return of global financial crises, there has been renewed concern that finance has once again become an agent of crime that threatens the economic order.
Stock buybacks are stock swindles
Cory Doctorow, 06 Sep 2025 [Pluralistic]
Resistance
Josh Marshall, September 4, 2025
…Donald Trump is currently governing far outside the constitutional order. We’re operating in a constitutional interregnum…. The president has seized the power of the purse from Congress. He is depriving states of their sovereignty and liberties by invading them with the U.S. military. He is threatening budgetary cutoffs to assert policy control over areas of governance the president has zero authority over….
We have lots and lots of bad policies right now, some arrived at unconstitutionally, others arrived at through constitutional means. But the national crisis is the extra-constitutional rule itself… Democrats should use this moment of leverage to meaningfully bring Donald Trump back into obedience to the Constitution. Can they do all of it? Almost certainly not. But they should focus on making real progress on that front. This is not only an imperative of their oath, it’s also good politics.
What can they do? They could demand revision of the laws Trump is currently using to invade states with the U.S. military (the National Guard is the U.S. military). They could insist on binding guarantees against further rescissions. They could insist that Trump follow the Constitution and get Congress’s approval for his tariff regime. That’s absolutely what the Constitution requires and, again, it’s also extremely good politics….
[TW: There is a growing consensus on both the right and left that the Constitution itself is the problem. The right is currently hard at work imposing their interpretation of the Constitution — as laid out in Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — which is what Marshall basically means “governing far outside the constitutional order.”
If the Constitution itself is the problem, then what recourse do leftists have? What do they want to happen? Do they really believe that they can change the foundational governing document of the United States when the country is no longer a republic, because it has become a plutocratic oligarchy, even, dare say, kleptocracy? How do they propose to overcome the opposition of the plutocrats and kleptocrats to actually effect a change in the constitutional structure.]
‘A Test Case to See How Far They Can Go’: Federal Indictment of Anti-ICE Protesters Raises Alarm
Brett Wilkins, Sep 02, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Afghanistan War veteran Bajun Mavalwalla is among nine people facing conspiracy charges for protesting the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown.
10 Groups Who Can and Must Do More to Fight Trumpism
Ralph Nader, Sep 06, 2025 [Common Dreams]
[TW: Think of this as a useful summary of the collapse of institutions.]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Monopoly Round-Up: Is There a Silicon Valley Plan to Subvert Elections?
Matt Stoller, Sep 01, 2025 [BIG]
…There’s a lot of rhetoric these days about authoritarianism and other forms of illiberal governance that are emerging to run society without the consent of the public. And it’s easy to point to the President and blame him for it, or if you’re a Republican, blame the preceding administration. But the truth is much less comforting. It is the billionaires in Silicon Valley, and those who befriended and enabled them, who have brought us to this dangerous and unstable moment. It’s Senator Mitch McConnell and his lifelong crusade to unleash money in politics, and men like Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg, who have torn up the fabric of a peaceful society….
Why Isn’t Wall Street Upset Over the End of Fed Independence?
Matt Stoller, Aug 29, 2025 [BIG]
Economists predicted doom if the Federal Reserve were controlled by the President. Trump has moved in that direction, but Wall Street doesn’t care. Is ‘independence’ not what we think?
…And I think that’s because all parts of this debate are clothed in flabby misleading language. The real meaning of Federal Reserve independence, to Wall Street, is that the Fed supports the stock market. And look at this tweet from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Why would anyone on Wall Street worry if he’s running monetary policy instead of Powell?….
The politics of protest and the fear of the far right
Richard Murphy, September 3, 2025 [Funding the Future]
…Third, there is the wider political dynamic. Both government and opposition are now very obviously gripped by fear of the far right…. The consequences are dangerous.
Democracy is undermined when peaceful protest is ignored while violent intimidation is rewarded.
The far right is emboldened because it can see that aggression works. Every time a council or minister capitulates, the lesson is reinforced.
Social division is deepened, because refugees are scapegoated for the failures of government rather than recognised as people seeking safety and dignity.
Trust in democratic institutions withers, because the message is clear: power listens only to those who threaten disruption, not those who demand justice….
Linda Greenhouse, September 25, 2025 issue [The New York Review]
Reviewed:
Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion
by Mary FissellSeal, 277 pp., $30.00After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion
by David S. Cohen and Carole JoffeBeacon, 235 pp., $29.95Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction
by Mary ZieglerYale University Press, 347 pp., $35.00Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade
by Daniel K. WilliamsUniversity of Notre Dame Press, 360 pp., $35.00 (to be published in October)Abortion has been an inescapable fact of life for millennia. The question is, why do women gain or lose control over their reproductive lives at different times in history? ….
…Abortion has always been with us: women in ancient Greece could avail themselves of more than one hundred plants known to induce miscarriage, and Benjamin Franklin’s 1748 printing of a medical self-help booklet that offered similar information went through at least twenty editions. Societal responses to the inescapable fact of abortion have varied widely over time, from a collective shrug to widespread tolerance despite nominal condemnation to prohibition with the full force of criminal law.
The question is, what accounts for the variation in attitudes toward abortion over the centuries, for the ebb and flow of women’s control over their reproductive lives? Fissell’s argument is that the history of abortion is in essence the history of women, with their access to abortion at any given time reflecting society’s expectation of their proper role. Restrictive periods tend to coincide with moments when women were stepping out of those assigned roles, and the new realities of their lives were running up against old expectations. “Abortion restriction has often been gender backlash,” Fissell writes.
Restrictions on abortion throughout history have had little to do with the fate of the fetus or with religious claims for the sanctity of unborn life. From today’s perspective this comes as a surprise, one that illuminates the historical anomaly of the post-Roe era. Fissell makes an important contribution by showing how religion was essentially absent from considerations of pregnancy and abortion until quite recently: “When churchmen and Supreme Court justices claim that abortion has always been unacceptable, they imply an unchanging set of moral imperatives. Such is simply not the case.” ….
In his new book, Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of ‘Roe v. Wade,’ Daniel K. Williams, a longtime student of the religious right, observes that the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision, signed by six Protestant justices and one liberal Catholic justice, reflected the consensus that mainstream Protestant denominations had reached on the issue. But as those denominations lost ground to evangelical churches that linked their identity to antiabortion activism, the Protestant consensus evaporated, and the most insistent religious voices were those calling for Roe’s overturning. Williams notes that on the ruling’s thirtieth anniversary, in 2003, the Southern Baptist Convention issued a public apology for the moderate position it had taken on abortion in the 1970s. He titles his last chapter “The Conservative Christian Coalition That Overturned Roe.” ….
Austerity is the midwife of fascism (video)
Richard Murphy, September 3, 2025 [Funding the Future]
History shows it clearly: austerity creates the conditions in which fascism thrives. When governments strip away public services, weaken safety nets and deepen inequality, people lose hope in democracy and turn to authoritarian “strongmen.” From Weimar Germany to modern Britain, austerity is the midwife of fascism.
.
OMB director says Government Accountability Office “shouldn’t exist”
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 09-04-2025]
The GOP Megadonor Funding Redistricting Misinformation
Brock Hrehor, Sep 03, 2025 [The Lever]
… [Charles] Munger Jr.’s multimillion-dollar misinformation campaign could be a prelude to just how far powerful and moneyed interests are willing to go to ensure that Republicans win the national redistricting battle and preserve GOP congressional control in the 2026 midterm elections….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
In rare interviews, federal judges criticize Supreme Court’s handling of Trump cases
Lawrence Hurley, Sept. 4, 2025 [NBC News, via Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance]
…In rare interviews with NBC News, a dozen federal judges — appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, including Trump, and serving around the country — pointed to a pattern they say has recently emerged:
Lower court judges are handed contentious cases involving the Trump administration. They painstakingly research the law to reach their rulings. When they go against Trump, administration officials and allies criticize the judges in harsh terms. The government appeals to the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority.
And then the Supreme Court, in emergency rulings, swiftly rejects the judges’ decisions with little to no explanation.
Emergency rulings used to be rare. But their number has dramatically increased in recent years….
As of June, the U.S. Marshals Service, which protects judges, had reported more than 400 threat investigations this year. There has been a steady rise of such threats in recent years, from 224 in fiscal year 2021 to 457 in fiscal year 2023, according to congressional testimony given by the Marshals Service. An agency spokesman declined to provide updated numbers.
When judges issue rulings the Trump administration does not like, they are frequently targeted by influential figures in MAGA world and sometimes Trump himself, who called for a judge who ruled against him in a high-profile immigration case to be impeached. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has said the administration is the victim of a “judicial coup.”
The judge who said the Supreme Court justices are behaving inexcusably has received threats of violence and is now fearful when someone knocks on the door at home….
Supreme Court Ruling Puts Financial Privacy on the Chopping Block
[Onesafe, via Naked Capitalism 08-31-2025]
Repairing the damage
Project 2029 Rebuilding Efforts Take Their Eyes Off The Ball — A warning.
Sam Bagenstos, Sep 02, 2025 [Off Message]
…In a 2029 transition, though, the institutions of government necessary to implement a new agenda in many cases simply won’t exist. Any Project 2029 will need an answer to these questions: How do we rebuild a structure for effective governance? How do we do it quickly, while also ensuring that the new structure is resilient to future Trump-like attacks? How much of the pre-2025 status quo should we be trying to restore? How much should we be focusing on building new, or substantially revamped, institutions? And how do we rebuild a robust, expert, nonpartisan civil service in the face of the inevitable bad-faith charges that it is the Democrats who are politicizing hiring by eliminating Trump-installed hacks?
…But they’re largely assuming we’ll just be filling out the government structure that Trump is turning over to us, or at most that we’ll be returning to the structure that existed before Trump arrived.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the government is ever going to look the way it did before Trump’s second term….
And we must guard against another effect of the Trump-era hollowing out of the civil service. Once all of Trump’s cuts to agency staff are finalized, Washington insiders will treat those cuts as the new normal. Even just returning to the 2024 level of government staff (which already was threadbare) will look to them like a huge budget increase—and you can fully expect Republicans, amplified by both right-wing outlets and the mainstream media, to attack Democratic restaffing proposals as a massive increase in spending.
The experience of recent decades gives us little reason to expect that congressional Democrats will stick to robust re-staffing proposals in the face of these attacks….
There’s No More Business as Usual in Washington
David Dayen, September 02, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…Essays about precisely where we are on the road to fascism or authoritarianism or “competitive authoritarianism” are proliferating, and hard to refute. But the one that stuck with me came from Jonathan Bernstein….
…The Democrats’ brightest young consultant stars have spent Authoritarian August telling Democrats not to talk about the military takeover of American cities, and to pivot back to affordability. Half the House Democratic caucus released an immigration grand bargain at a time when a roaming paramilitary force is unleashing terror on American streets. There is a critical lack of understanding of this moment, and even a lack of understanding of what the people who elected these representatives sent them to Washington to do….
I kind of give up. I took a lot of heat for writing that the coup had failed within a month of Inauguration Day. In a way, I was seeing the same pattern as Bernstein: that Trump pulls back when criticized, that the public had turned on him, and that populism without popularity is doomed. I read that again and found it just as true. What I didn’t account for was the complete uselessness of the opposition party that could turn those trends into successful pushback that retains some semblance of a democratic system—but hasn’t….
Where We Are — After seven months of Trump.
Jonathan Bernstein, Aug 26, 2025 [Good Politics/Bad Politics]
On to the second point: Earlier in the year, I wrote items documenting times that Trump was confronted and lost. I’ve stopped doing that, in part because I don’t want to be misleading. But it’s still true that when he’s confronted, he usually backs down or flat-out loses. There’s a reason he’s earned the “TACO” nickname (for Trump always chickens out)….
It’s not surprising that he’s easy to defeat. Trump remains terrible at the actual job of presidenting. He doesn’t work at developing his professional reputation, and he constantly undermines any chance of being popular among anyone but his strongest supporters. Richard Neustadt tells presidents that their greatest advantage is their ability to access information, but Trump shuts out any possibility of learning things that he could exploit.
Indeed, one of the reasons some still don’t see Trump as dangerous is because so much of what he does is obviously pathetic. There’s no master plan, or even much of any kind of plan. Just impulses. We’re not dealing with a Richard Nixon, who worked harder than anyone else. Or a Dick Cheney, who mastered the art of bureaucratic infighting.2 Let alone someone really good at the job. Such as Dwight Eisenhower, who was brilliant at knowing which battles to pick and also how to stay popular and how to use that popularity in his favor.
Trump displays none of those skills. He basically has one move: Bully his way around, bull in a china shop style….
Which gets to the last part. Those who have fought Trump’s autocratic power-grabs stand a good chance to win…but too many have just surrendered.
Why? I do think that Perry Bacon is correct that at least some institutions are going along because they’re perfectly happy with what’s happening. Indeed, I think in some cases they may be reasonably happy about an autocracy….
We tend to think of prejudice in negative terms, but there are positive prejudices as well. I was just telling a friend that I’d trust a random Sikh more than any other religion/ethnicity. Just seem to have a very high proportion of good people. Also think well of the diaspora Chinese, as a rule, perhaps because I was raised by them to a certain extent.
Do you have any positive prejudices?
Feel free to use as an open thread. No vax/medical.
Since 1976, when Mao died and Deng Xiaoping took over, China has lifted more people out of poverty than all other nations combined throughout the entirety of human history.