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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 20, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
ICE Is Planning Mass Extraordinary Renditions
Spencer Ackerman, 14 Jul 2025 [FOREVER WARS]
AT THE START of this newsletter nearly four years ago, I wrote about how what is widely presumed to be the largest part of the post-9/11 CIA torture program has simply vanished from the historical record. That’s the part where the CIA didn’t do its own torture, but instead sent people it kidnapped off the streets to countries like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria or Moammar Qaddafi’s Libya, where their security apparats would do the dirty work….
Many of us who track the War on Terror have spent literal decades warning that without accountability for these atrocities, they will recur and intensify. It’s one of the main points of REIGN OF TERROR. And now, extraordinary rendition, albeit without the name, is under contemplation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with a crucial assist by the Supreme Court. More than a decade after the CIA got away with it, ICE will perform mass extraordinary renditions at scale….
‘Horror Story’: Flight Logs Reveal Dozens Disappeared on El Salvador Deportation Trips
Julia Conley, July 17, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trump administration hands over Medicaid recipients’ personal data, including addresses, to ICE
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 07-18-2025]
82 Year Old Green Card Holder Disappeared And Deported By ICE
KeithDB, July 19, 2025 [DailKos]
…Luis Leon is an 82 year legal immigrant (green card holder) who has lived in the United States for nearly 40 years. He doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket on his record. He has cleaner record than most of us.
His one “mistake” was losing his wallet with his green card in it. Doing the right thing, he made an appointment with the nearest immigration office to have it replaced. On June 20th he arrived at the immigration office as scheduled. Instead ICE officials led the 82 year old away in handcuffs with no explanation.
With that Luis Leon was disappeared by the Trump Regime. His family could not find out anything about him, to include where he had been taken. His name did not appear on the database of ICE detainees. Calls by his family to prisons, immigration officials, even hospitals got no answers.
But Luis Leon was in ICE custody. ICE first disappeared him to a detention center in Minnesota and then shipped him off to Guatemala with no due process, and no notice to his family. 82 years old and suffering from a variety of ailments, including diabetes and a heart condition, Leon ended up in a Guatemalan hospital which is who contacted the family….
ICE memo outlines plan to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2025]
ICE LAWYERS ARE HIDING THEIR NAMES IN IMMIGRATION COURT
Debbie Nathan, July 15 2025 [The Intercept]
What We Need to Learn from Idi Amin — The dictator of Uganda had a “mass deportation program” too
Jim Stewartson, July 20, 2025 [MindWar]
“I’m giving Uganda back to ethnic Ugandans.”
—Idi Amin, August 1972
This precise message has been echoed throughout history by racist demagogues.
“Germany is not the land of refuge for criminals and Jews from all over the world. Germany is for the Germans.”
—Joseph Goebbels, “Der Angriff,” 1933
“America is for Americans, and Americans only.”
—Stephen Miller, Madison Square Garden 2024
Meet the Disaster Capitalists Behind Alligator Alcatraz
Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect.
Trump says he’s considering revoking Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship, reigniting decades-long feud
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2025]
O’Donnell wrote on Instagram, “you want to revoke my citizenship? go ahead and try, king joffrey with a tangerine spray tan.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Dean Obeidallah, July 12, 2025
“We need to be aware, as a country, how quickly this can get much, much worse.”
That is the warning from Andrea Pitzer–an expert on concentration camps who wrote the 2017 book, “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps”-on where we find ourselves today under the Trump regime….
Pitzer explained that in writing her book documenting the history of concentration camps, she found that when the leaders go down the path of dehumanizing a group of people as a political tool – be it Jews in Nazi Germany or migrants today with Trump—we must understand it doesn’t end there. It continues down a road that can lead to mass detentions or even genocide.
What is deeply disturbingly is just how fast Trump has—and continues to move—in his embrace of this age-old playbook. Pitzer noted that in just the first few months into his term, “We were already seeing people being kidnapped off the streets by agents who are masked.” Now we are at the next step in the fascist playbook with the “Alligator Alcatraz” camp that opened in Florida.
Pitzer stated point blank that “Alligator Alcatraz” is a “concentration camp.”
…Trump’s DOJ is now criminally investigating two of Trump’s critics, former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey. In addition, Trump in April signed an executive orders directing his DOJ to find crimes to punish two former aides, Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official who criticized Trump, and Christopher Krebs, a top cybersecurity official who refused after the 2020 election to back up Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
And on Saturday morning, Trump threatened to strip U.S. born Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship, writing on Truth Social: “Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.” From a legal point of view, there is no current provision to strip a U.S. born citizen of their citizenship….
Jonathan M. Katz, July 08, 2025 [The Racket]
Trump has promised 10,000 new ICE agents. That would bring the total to 30,000 — approximately one (generally masked) agent for every 11,000 people in this country. The pressure of such a massive hiring spree, combined with ICE’s plummeting reputation among the general public, pretty much guarantees a mix of corruption and the hiring of, to borrow a phrase, the worst of the worst to fill out the expanded force.
At the same time, Trump and his team trumpeted the opening of “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new state-funded but federally protected immigrant detention camp on an abandoned airstrip in the Florida Everglades that is expected to house at least 5,000 detainees at a time. Overseen by Gov. Ron DeSantis (who, like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is a former Guantánamo Bay prison guard), it is being billed as a model for a nationwide network, funded by compliant state governments and the new mammoth federal bill.
The first detainees today reported intolerable conditions including overcrowding, a lack of bathing water, maggot-infested food, blinding 24-hour lights, a lack of medicine, and a lack of mosquito control in a virus-rich swamp. “They’re not respecting our human rights,” one detainee told CBS News. “We’re like rats in an experiment.”….
So, to summarize: An authoritarian president, accountable to no court and with a cowed legislature in his pocket, now has all the legal and monetary tools he needs to build out both a massive federal secret police force answerable only to him, and an equally massive archipelago of Gitmo-style concentration camps4 at home and abroad in which to house and process their captives.
Trump loves ICE. Its Workforce Has Never Been So Miserable
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture July 11, 2025]
Joyce Vance, July 11, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
Today was legal ping-pong. Your head had to zing back and forth to keep up with everything that was happening as we went from courts to the Trump administration’s actions to breaking news from investigative reporting. We’ll go through what it all means, so we can stay on top of the most important developments.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Welcome to the Age of Disappearance: America’s new era of secret police
Hamilton Nolan, July 02, 2025 [How Things Work]
…an avalanche of new funding for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and anti-immigration measures is, in fact, coming. This is going to spill well past the bounds of what any sane person would consider to be “immigration enforcement.” It is going to create a lavishly funded, unaccountable, quasi-secret police force that will transform our nation for the worse. Very soon.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the terrifying scale of this new funding. This bill contains enough money to build a new system of immigration detention centers far bigger than the entire federal prison system. The American Immigration Council says that it will be enough to facilitate the “daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.” It will let ICE hire more field agents than the FBI. Its $170 billion in funding for Stephen Miller’s rabid campaign to purge America of brown people is comparable to the total annual funding for the United States Army.
Donald Trump envisions himself as an all-powerful leader whose will is equal to law. He is bent on revenge against his political enemies. He has installed extreme loyalists in the Justice Department, the FBI, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and all other security departments. The courts have declined to meaningfully restrain his abuses of these departments. This budget will give him the final piece of the puzzle that he needs to achieve his fever dream: a nationwide army of masked, unaccountable armed agents empowered to snatch anyone they like off the streets, and the physical infrastructure to imprison or deport those people at will. Thousands of men with guns, unrestrained by judges or local police, who do not answer to Congress, who point guns at the press, who arrest whoever they want, for reasons they do not share, and do whatever they wish with those people. The implications of this are going to make America a much darker place….
…ICE has already arrested a number of Democratic elected officials, including mayors and members of Congress and a judge. In this environment, it is a trivial matter for Trump and his loyalists to concoct reasons to arrest almost anyone. People can be arrested if they are immigrants, if they look like they might be immigrants, if they illegally harbored or assisted immigrants, or if they somehow impeded ICE’s quest to arrest immigrants. The mission can and will be scaled up from “deport immigrants” to “punish those who want to stand in the way of our mission.”….
16 Thoughts On The Republican Budget Atrocity
Brian Beutler, July 03, 2025 [Off Message]
- Quite apart from the economics, this secret police force and the prison network that will be built for it, is the most repugnant and frightening aspect of the bill; Medicaid can be funded again, food stamps can be funded again, clean energy can be funded, taxes can be increased progressively. But an immigrant prison network, overseen by Trump-loyal paramilitaries, with no resources for due process, will be very hard to dislodge, and could easily be turned against the citizenry. This is Stephen Miller’s wet dream and it will stain the whole country….
Trump falsely questions Zohran Mamdani’s citizenship, threatens to arrest him over ICE operations
[ABC, via Naked Capitalism 07-02-2025]
Trump’s Threat to Deport Mamdani Isn’t a Joke
Ken Klippensteinm, July 3, 2025
Last month, according to an internal memo, the Justice Department ordered its attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings” — the process by which naturalized Americans can be stripped of their citizenship — not for fraud or criminality, but “against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security.”
Strategic Political Economy
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 29, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Remembering Bill Moyers: A Colossus of Journalism and Public Service
Jonathan Alter, June 28, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
‘We Have Lost a Giant’: Broadcast Legend Bill Moyers Dies at 91
Jessica Corbett, June 26, 2025 [CommonDreams]
[Free Press, June 26 2025, via CommonDreams]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Amy Coney Barrett and the Supreme Court Give Birth to a Disaster
Garrett Epps, June 27, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
…Three federal district courts concluded that the birthright citizenship order is almost certainly unconstitutional and barred the executive branch from enforcing it pending a final decision. The issue seemed headed to the Supreme Court, where it would be decided in the normal course of American law.
The administration, however, did an end run around that process. It filed an application with the Supreme Court that denied any interest in the issue of the order’s constitutionality. Instead, it said, it wanted the Court to look at whether district courts can tell the president he can’t do something he wants to do—to issue “universal injunctions” barring the government from, for example, stripping citizenship from any baby until the constitutionality of the order can be settled. The two things, the government suggested, have nothing to do with each other….
The Supreme Court Just Gave Trump Three Victories in One Ruling
Matt Ford, June 27, 2025 [The New Republic]
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday in Trump v. CASA is a disastrous moment for the American constitutional order. In a 6–3 decision, the court’s conservative justices curbed the judiciary’s power to prevent the executive branch from carrying out blatantly unconstitutional policies and orders.
The court effectively granted Trump three major victories in one stroke. First, the ruling severely narrowed federal judges’ power to temporarily halt the Trump administration’s actions in general, freeing the president from a major constraint on his policy agenda.
In response to lawsuits, lower courts had often issued what are known as “nationwide injunctions,” which blocked the executive branch from enacting a new policy while litigation continued in court. Those injunctions typically applied beyond the plaintiffs in a particular case. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the court, held that courts had acted unlawfully by granting relief to anyone beyond the plaintiffs themselves….
The Real Judicial Coup: How the Supreme Court Just Redefined Presidential Authority
Mike Brock, June 27, 2025 [Notes From The Circus]
…Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, has created what amounts to a doctrine of presumptive executive constitutionality. The Court ruled that when a president issues an order that appears to violate the Constitution, courts must assume the president is correct until proven wrong—not once, but individually, circuit by circuit, plaintiff by plaintiff.
Let’s be absolutely clear about what this means: the Supreme Court has ruled that birthright citizenship—guaranteed by the plain text of the 14th Amendment—can be suspended nationwide based solely on a president’s claim of authority, and anyone who wants their constitutional rights restored must file individual lawsuits seeking individual relief.
This isn’t judicial restraint. This is a fundamental rewriting of how constitutional rights work in America….
This represents a systematic advantage for executive power over constitutional constraint through procedural manipulation. It’s not that rights disappear—it’s that protecting them becomes exponentially more difficult and expensive….
“No Right Is Safe”: SCOTUS Bars Judges From Reining in Trump
Shawn Musgrave, June 27 2025 [The Intercept]
The Supreme Court halted courts from issuing national injunctions, forcing “judges to shrug and turn their backs to intermittent lawlessness.”
By Limiting Nationwide Injunctions, Supreme Court Declares ‘Open Season on All Our Rights’
Jessica Corbett, June 27, 2025 [CommonDreams]
In a ruling that stems from the president’s birthright citizenship order, the “conservative supermajority just took away lower courts’ single most powerful tool for reining in the Trump administration’s lawless excesses.”
It’s Not Just a Constitutional Crisis in the Trump Era. It’s Constitutional Failure
Jack Rakove, June 27, 2025
[TW: Rakove is a leading scholar of the creation of the American republic. His 1996 book Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution dismantled many of the claims of the Constitutional originalism of conservatives, and was awarded the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for History.]
…Our ongoing constitutional crisis began with the presidential election last November 5. Reelecting an individual culpable for January 6 who has twice made a mockery of the presidential oath of office is itself a constitutional crisis. Nothing in his past or current behavior suggests that Trump has ever felt fidelity to his constitutional duties.
Once a constitutional crisis becomes an endemic condition, the term no longer usefully describes our collapsing system. Instead, we live in an era of constitutional failure when the relevant institutions cannot fulfill their responsibilities….
…When audiences at constituent meetings repeatedly shout, “Do your jobs,” they have a better grasp of Congress’s responsibility than their feckless representatives….
In the face of this congressional passivity, what path of constitutional repair is left open? Unsurprisingly, the best answer remains the courts. Although it has taken time to respond to the turmoil Trump has unleashed, the judiciary’s actions have been encouraging. Remarkably, the difference between Republican and Democratic-appointed judges has been slight, suggesting that judicial independence enshrined in Article III may be fulfilled amid this grave situation.
Yet, with the current Supreme Court, one cannot be too confident. Why? Its responses to the two 2024 critical election cases remain deeply troubling to anyone who takes the injunctions of the Constitution seriously. The Court handled one case with striking expedition. But it manifestly stalled the other with a run-out-the-clock set of procedural delays that deprived voters of findings they were entitled to possess before November 5. The decisions in Trump v. Anderson (which involved the application of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to Trump’s eligibility to appear on the Colorado primary ballot) and Trump v. U.S. (the presidential immunity case) should sit atop any hit list of constitutional failures….
…The second condition seems more surprising. It is the stunning inadequacy of the majority’s understanding of constitutional history and core concepts of American constitutionalism….
In our fractious polity, fresh insults to constitutional norms and settled practices of governance occur daily. That is why the phrase constitutional crisis no longer describes our situation. The Constitution has failed, and we no longer know which institution will rescue it.
Sotomayor joined by Jackson, Kagan on fiery birthright citizenship dissent
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 06-28-2025]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Trump’s ICE Agents Are Arresting US Citizens. GOP Budget Would Hire 10,000 More.
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2025]
Justin Glawe, June 27, 2025 [Public Notice]
Militarized LA: troops here to stay as Trump doubles down on deployments
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2025]
Justice Dept. whistleblower details senior officials’ efforts to stonewall judges, ignore decisions
[CBS News, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
How To Talk To Your Senators About Emil Bove
Joyce Vance, June 25, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
Meet the D.C. Bigwigs Literally Profiting Off Trump’s Deportations
[The Bulwark, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2025]
Strategic Political Economy
Solving America’s Chip Manufacturing Crisis
Kenneth Flamm and William B. Bonvillian
American Affairs Volume IX, Number 2 (Summer 2025): 41–68.
[TW: Flamm documented the origins of the U.S. computer industry in his 1998 book, Creating the Computer: government, industry, and high technology, published by the Brookings Institution and available in full online. This book should be required reading for all courses of study in economics and American history because it devastates the myth of “entrepreneurial free enterprise” by showing how it was carefully created and targeted U.S. government programs and funding which allowed the risky new technologies required for computers to reach commercial success and create an entire, new industry. This new article is long and brimming with technical industrial information very few people have mastered, making it an extremely important and informative read. ]
…Economies of scale are the fundamental economic force reshaping industrial structure in leading-edge chip fabrication. For context, note that at the peak of its market power in the global computer processor (CPU) market in the third quarter of 2014, Intel alone produced a record 100 million x86 processors (x86 is Intel’s famous foundational architecture and instruction set for computer processors), implying an annual Intel production rate of somewhere between 300 and 400 million processors….
Intel’s current problems are in part linked to the relentless increase in fabrication equipment costs at every new technology node as well as to the increasing volume of production needed to reach minimum efficient scale at the new nodes. In 2014, Intel’s dominant market position gave it massive volume that was produced at multiple Intel fabs (using the “copy exactly” strategy Intel invented in the 1980s). But by 2023, Intel’s annual x86 processor volumes appear to have dropped 30–50 percent, to 190–230 million sold annually….
…in the early 2000s, Intel began to stray from the vision of its legendary early leaders Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove, who focused on fielding the most technically advanced, complex, and capable products on the market.… The connection to Intel’s current woes is that the first decade of the twenty-first century was a distracting one for Intel management. The firm’s resources and managerial attention were diverted into sales and marketing initiatives aimed at defending an entrenched position of market power. The company had lost its singular focus on technical innovation that had been its hallmark under Noyce, Moore, and Grove’s early vision for Intel….
Intel Foundry is not really a case of “too big to fail”; it is a case of “too intertwined with national security to fail.” There are no other U.S. company alternatives to Intel Foundry: the capital costs of entering advanced chip manufacturing, R&D, and production are staggering, the technology challenges and risks are massive, and all of Intel’s former U.S. competitors have by now exited advanced chipmaking. The national security imperative requires that the U.S. government backstop Intel Foundry,…
In addition to the task of supporting Intel Foundry’s commercial success, there is a longer-term financing task.58 The chips Act is a stopgap measure. It assures some production in the United States of the pending generation of advanced chip processes, but not the following generations of chips.59 It was a onetime law with the authorization running out, as noted, in 2027; and the funding for new fab construction is already committed. The U.S. semiconductor challenge is a long-term one, and CHIPS was an important but decidedly short-term fix….
…Because the federal government refused to engage in a subsidy competition to finance the massive costs of new semiconductor fabs, no new leading-edge logic fabs had been built in the United States for over a decade, and no new leading-edge memory fabs for roughly two decades, before the chips Act.80 Congress passed the chips Act in recognition of this major security vulnerability.
But the chips Act is only authorized for five years, expiring in 2027, and it is not at all clear that it will be renewed….
Congress Is Pushing for a Medicaid Work Requirement. Here’s What Happened When Georgia Tried It.
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2025]
…Georgia, the only state with a Medicaid work mandate, started experimenting with the requirement on July 1, 2023. As the Medicaid program’s two-year anniversary approaches, Georgia has enrolled just a fraction of those eligible, a result health policy researchers largely attribute to bureaucratic hurdles in the state’s work verification system. As of May 2025, approximately 7,500 of the nearly 250,000 eligible Georgians were enrolled, even though state statistics show 64% of that group is working.