Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 24, 2025

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 24, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Neoliberalism is not a viable option

Richard Murphy, August 22  2025 [Funding the Future]

… a fascinating blog post by someone called Blair Fix.

He analysed fascism in what seems like an entirely original way, showing that its roots are, in effect, in mediaeval theocracy, because the language used by those of fascist persuasion is remarkably similar to that found in some 17th, and maybe 18th, century political mediaeval theocratic thought, after which periods the language of the enlightenment displaced that of the theocrats, although the latter is now on the rise again….

In his analysis of fascist writing, Blair Fix identified three common threats. One was the significant overuse of violent symbolism. Words like annihilation, bloodshed, conquer, extermination and fighting were substantially overused when compared to the body of normal writing of the periods when fascist or similar ideas were written.

The second was a significant quantity of emotion-laden judgment, typified by the use of words like betrayed, cowardice, enemies, hatred, humiliation, slander and treason.

Third, he found there was a significant use of what appear to be quasi-religious, e.g. references to the Almighty, blessings, providence and the eternal….

The Deep Roots of Fascist Thought

[Economics from the top down, via Funding the Future 08-22-2025]

…In this essay, I’ll use word frequency to track the spread of fascist ideology. The journey starts with a trip to 1930s Europe, where we’ll encounter the works of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler (translated into English). The rantings of these two villains will serve as our corpus of fascist text. From this text, we’ll extract the ‘jargon’ of fascism — the words that Mussolini and Hitler use frequently and overuse relative to mainstream English. With this jargon, we’ll then track the popularity of fascist thinking in written language….

…In hindsight, the delusions of 2010 seem rather quaint. So was it then that neo-fascism first took root? Turning to our linguistic data, the answer is no. The seeds of today’s neo-fascism were planted decades earlier, in the 1980s. Figure 3 shows the trend….

…the fall of the Soviet Union left capitalism alone — free to be plagued by its own excesses. What would follow was a period of free-market cravenness which made the rich richer and left the poor to fend for themselves. Unsurprisingly, amidst the humiliation of this class war, dark ideas brewed. But for years, folks in the mainstream didn’t listen. Even when Trump won the presidency, elites dismissed it as an accident — a brief departure from the norm. It was not. Trump, it seems, is riding a wide wave of fascist discontent. We ignore it at our own peril….

…reflect on the common roots of injustice, which I think are fairly simple. They stem from the belief in innate inequality. Pick any horrific act, and you will find it easier to perform if you declare the victim a lesser human. Likewise, if you view the victim as your equal, the same act feels appalling. So it is the belief in human inequality which motivates injustice. And it is this shared belief in inequality which unifies the various forms of far-right politics. (This is Corey Robin’s thesis, explored in his book The Reactionary Mind.)2….

Figure 4: The deep roots of fascist thought in English writing. When we trace Mussolini and Hitler’s fascist jargon back in time, we find that ‘fascism’ seems to be overwhelmingly an ideology of the past. The frequency of fascist jargon was highest in 18th-century English writing and then declined continuously until the early 20th century. [Sources and methods]….

…Then I’ve tracked the frequency of these words over four centuries of German publishing. The results are unambiguous. In German books, the high point of fascist thought came in the 1600s, three centuries before Hitler seized power….

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]3

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

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

Trump’s FBI Raid of John Bolton’s Home Looks Like a “Five-Alarm Fire”

Greg Sargent, August 22, 2025 [The New Republic]

  • Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon explicitly declared the other day that ICE officers will indeed be employed during the 2026 midterm elections in large numbers to monitor voting booths, again floating undocumented voters as the bullshit pretext to justify it. Bannon is not in a position to compel this, of course, but it’s clear the MAGA movement now sees Trump’s militarization of cities as a precursor to the use of law enforcement and/or the military to intimidate voters in large numbers, or foment a crisis atmosphere designed to help the GOP, or both.
  • Last but not least, as we reported, a recent internal Department of Homeland Security memo outlines the hopes of senior DHS officials for substantially escalated military involvement in domestic law enforcement going forward. It even declares that military operations like the one in L.A. may be needed “for years to come.”

Trump Says Chicago ‘Probably Next’ for National Guard Invasion

Brett Wilkins, August 23, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Military lawyers to handle civilian crimes in DC 

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]

Trump administration to begin continuous police-state surveillance of 55 million US visa holders 

[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 08-22-2025]

Trump’s “Truth” About Voting

Joyce Vance, Aug 18 2025 [Civil Discourse]

…Trump elaborated on the post Monday afternoon, saying the quiet part out loud: “If you [end] mail in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected,” he said in the Oval Office. Trump mumbles a bit as he’s making the comment, but the context is plain….

  • Trump claims that “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” That’s not true. Countries including Canada, the United KingdomGermanyAustralia, and Switzerland use mail in ballots, and there is no more suggestion of fraud there than there is here….
  • Trump claims he will sign an executive order to this effect (he hasn’t yet) because “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY.” That’s another wild and false claim. Congress sets the date and the time for national elections, but all other matters are reserved to the states, and each state runs its own elections with its own rules. If that wasn’t clear to Trump previously, it should be now. In June, a judge blocked the part of Trump’s March executive order that sought to stop states from counting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but arrived afterward. The judge emphasized that presidents can’t impose their views about how to conduct elections on the states….

Trump Demands: Ditch Vote-By-Mail. Republicans Shouldn’t

Bill Scher, August 19, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

Donald Trump declared on his social media network that he is “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and that he will do it unilaterally. He continued:

“WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

‘Psychological warfare’: Internal data shows true nature of Alligator Alcatraz 

[Miami Herald, via Naked Capitalism 08-21-2025]

Why are you so massively “obsessed” with Slavery?

Frank Vyan Walton, August 19, 2025 [DailyKos]

Trump: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future…”

“Slavery was very, very, very bad, and I hope that view continues to be reflected in our national museums,” said deputy opinion editor James Hohmann at the Washington Post….

Legal analyst and Substacker Aaron Parnas questioned Trump’s demand that museums talk about “the Future.”

“Also, why would museums talk about the future?” Parnas questioned….

Professor of human rights law Steve Peers mocked, “MAKE SLAVERY GREAT AGAIN!”

Power at any cost: It’s Trump Capitulation Disorder.

Thomas Mills, Aug 22, 2025 [PoliticsNC]

The FBI is raiding John Bolton’s house this morning. Bolton served as Trump’s National Security Advisor during his first term and as Ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush. Since the end of Trump’s term, Bolton has been a steady and harsh critic of Trump, calling him unfit to be president.

Alarm bells should be ringing, but, if they are, Republicans won’t hear them or won’t heed them. The people who once decried government agents as “jack-booted thugs,” now shrug when federal troops are deployed to US cities or the president uses the FBI to go after his political enemies, of whom John Bolton is one.

Republicans call Democrats’ fear of Trump’s authoritarian actions and impulses “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” In reality, their acceptance of behavior they once derided is Trump Capitulation Disorder….

Strategic Political Economy

How Trump Is Undoing 80 Years of American Greatness

Garrett M. Graff [New York Times, via The Big Picture August 17, 2025]

What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together….

Organizations like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war. They were joined by the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (founded in 1958); and the National Institutes of Health, which became a major grant-maker after the war — not to mention a host of other agencies like NASA and the Department of Energy….

[TW: Graff is strictly correct in focusing on the Manhattan Project, but he misses the larger picture, which was the creation of a communal “team” of government, universities, and private institutions, organized by the national government to create and perfect the technologies needed to win World War Two. These included much more than the atomic bomb, such as radar, proximity fuses, the aerodynamics of laminar flow, penicillin, packaged foods, and more.

[Especially glaring is Graff’s omission of Vannevar Bush, the dean of Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who Roosevelt put in charge of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). At the end of the war, Bush wrote a report that firmly established the principle that science was a public good which required adequate sustained funding by the federal government:

Science the Endless Frontier — A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945  

(United States Government Printing Office, Washington: 1945

[Writing in response to a request from President Roosevelt for an outline of what to do after the war, Bush argued that basic scientific research was essential for long-term technological progress and economic growth, and had to be supported even in the absence of any identifiable immediate commercial application or profitability. He called for the creation of an independent, federally funded agency to support basic research and talent development in universities and industry. Bush’s report directly influenced Congress’ creation of the National Science Foundation in 1950. Bush’s model of the NSF is credited with promoting and steering the development of the computer, microchips and electronic miniaturization, the Internet, medical devices and procedures, and much more.

[In July 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published an essay by Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,”

Of what lasting benefit has been man’s use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought into existence? First, they have increased his control of his material environment. They have improved his food, his clothing, his shelter; they have increased his security and released him partly from the bondage of bare existence. They have given him increased knowledge of his own biological processes so that he has had a progressive freedom from disease and an increased span of life. They are illuminating the interactions of his physiological and psychological functions, giving the promise of an improved mental health.

Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial….

Erin Malone, June 16, 2002, Foreseeing the Future: The legacy of Vannevar Bush

In 1945 a seminal article appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Titled, “As We May Think,” the article’s author, Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), proposed a new mechanical machine to help scholars and decision makers make sense of the growing mountains of information being published in to the world. This article presaged the idea of the Internet and the World Wide Web and was directly influential on the fathers of the hypertext and the Internet as we know it today. Ted Nelson, who coined the term “hypertext” in 1967, describes Bush’s article as describing the principles of it….

George P. Landow, author of Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology says of Bush, “Bush’s idea of the memex, to which he occasionally turned his attention for three decades, directly influenced Ted Nelson, Douglas Englebart Andreis Van Dam and other pioneers in computer hypertext. […] In “As We May Think” and “Memex Revisited” Bush proposed the notion of blocks of text joined by links and he also introduced the terms links, linkages, trails and web to describe his conception of textuality. Bush’s description of the memex contains several other seminal, even radical, conceptions of textuality.”

 

Open Thread

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

What Is Society For & What Makes A Society Good? (Laws of Heaven)

Before I give my answers, I’d appreciate if you, the reader, would consider these three questions yourself. In the West:

  1. What is society for? What is it set up to do?
  2. What should society be for?
  3. What makes a society or group good?

Some years ago I considered the issue of who is let in to Heaven.

Good people, only.

That seemed pretty awful to me. No one wants to go to a hell and I don’t want even bad people to suffer.

But then I asked myself the question, “what makes a society or group good?” I thought back on my own experiences and I came to a simple conclusion: it’s always the people which make a group, of any size, good or bad.

Bad people. Bad group. It is really that simple. Leaders have an outsize influence, but leaders require buy-in from society, at least from the coercive elements and often from much more than that. (See my politics series for more on that.)

People who are cruel, power-hungry, greed, selfish or otherwise have nasty vices or personalities make a group hell. People who are kind, generous, humble and so on make a group good.

Again, it’s that simple.

So the conclusion I came to is that if heavens exist, they don’t let in bad people (or very few) because if they did, they soon wouldn’t be heavens. Bad people go to places with other bad people, and that’s what makes such places hell.

Now let’s move back to the first of our questions. What are our Western societies for. I think it’s close to inarguable that under neoliberal ideology, they exist to make sure that those with power and money retain their power and money and increase it. That premise predicts almost all the actions our societies have taken since around 1979 or so.

If you’re rich and powerful, you run the society and you run it for your own good.

This brings us to our second question. What should a society be for? This is a prescriptive question, there is no “correct” answer. The Pharoah, or Barack Obama or Elon Musk are going to give different questions than you or I, odds are (their true answer, not the one they tell suckers) and so is the Pope, let alone Torquemada. Mennonites have their answer, and so on.

My answer is a simple one. A society, or any group, should make its members happy, good, and if they are happy and good, it should make them strong. It should do that, as much as is possible, for as many of its members as possible and any society which doesn’t is a bad society.

Certainly it is impossible to create a lasting good society if the primary virtues of the society are greed and selfishness, as they generally are under capitalism and as they specifically are under neoliberalism. (New Deal capitalism did not exalt greed and selfishness.)

This is the start of a new series, “The Laws of Heaven”, where we’ll discuss the laws, principles and methods of creating good societies and groups. There is no current possibility of these principles being followed, but knowing what they are is important and opens up the possibility of a better future.

I hope you’ll join me in this exploration.

 

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China is a Rich Society. No Western Country Is.

Chinese and American flags flying together

Saw this recently, from the University of Chicago:


The commentary is a bit of an exaggeration. But not too much.

Now if this was just one data point, it wouldn’t matter, but the bottom line is that funding for universities, including university research, in being massively cut in America and the UK, with issues in most Western countries. It’s not just about the humanities, science is getting hit hard, as is engineering.

As best I can tell, China has opened about 1,700 new universities and colleges in the past 25 years. Those that existed have expanded enrollment. It’s very reminiscent of the post war period in America. And the best of universities are excellent.

Americans are ostensibly rich, yes, but the society is not. A lot of the apparent wealth is false: if it costs one fifth as much to get dental or health care or one tenth as much to buy a good pair of earphones; if it costs one-third as much to buy an electric car, well, all of the extra cost in America goes to GDP, and Americans have higher incomes, but who’s actually richer?

And when you look at Chinese cities and provinces they are building infrastructure massively. The cities are beautifully lit up at night. There is a huge space program, even as the American space program is cut, and cut and cut. There are dozens of EV companies and in general there is competition in most of the cutting edge parts of the society. Coffee is cheaper (which is why Starbucks is getting shellacked in China). Everything is cheaper, there’s more of it and the government and private actors spend money on huge new projects, on research and on infrastructure.

China is a rich society, because they can do things. America’s last real gasp as a rich society was the Apollo program, ever since then, it’s been in retreat. Europe, well, Europe had a good time in the post war period, but since then, despite some success in the 90s and early 2000’s, it’s been in retreat and it has recently chosen the path of de-industrialization and xenophobic isolationism, which is not going to serve it. University cuts in the UK, in particular, have been savage, but Europe, even taken as a whole is behind China, the US, Japan and South Korea in research and technological advancement.

 

 

The Chinese have built massive high speed rail, lead in civilians drones, in robotics and are competitive in AI, which is 20x cheaper to run (more importantly, it uses FAR less energy than American AI, which draws more energy than entire countries.) They are ahead in most material sciences, catching up in civilian aviation (soon they will be ahead), have vastly more shipbuilding capacity, are ahead in missile technology, will soon eat SpaceX’s lunch  in launch costs (no, I will not be wrong about this.)

China does thing. The government is rich. Corporations are not spending all their money in stock buybacks and acquisitions, but are actually competing and trying to create new and better products than their competitors.

The best parallel is probably not post-war America, but pre-WWI America. China has taken the lead from America, there is zero chance of America catching up absent a large meteor hitting China, but they don’t actually spend much on their military. I was shocked to find out that the Chinese military has about 2.2 million soldiers out of a population of 1.4 billion. All of this with a sincere effort to provide a decent standard of living to everyone and a genuine attack on inequality. (Chinese inequality is very high, but it is concentrated in the top 10%, not the top .01%, which is being attacked by the government.)

China is a civilian society, with a civilian economy. It is in a vastly expansive phase, one which could last as much as sixty to eighty years, assuming environmental or international issues don’t derail it. (They will.)

China is where the future is. If you are younger, learn Mandarin. It will be as essential as English was for the past hundred and twenty years.

Hope for the future now rests in China. You may not like that, but it’s just a fact. They’re the country that can actually do things, and whether our problems are fixed, or mitigated (more likely) is up to them, just as for a long time it was up to the US (which failed almost completely, play “I see no evil, I hear no evil” every since 1980.

I don’t know if I for one welcome our Chinese overlords, but it doesn’t matter. They’re here. The West has already lost the race and is retreating into a poorer, more backwards second world situation, similar to the late USSR and Warsaw Pact.

It will end as well for the US and NATO as it did for the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.

***

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Trump’s Budget & The NATO 5% Of GDP Requirement Have The Same Effect

Despite all the flakiness and back and forth Trump’s actions have a unified purpose. Like the Democrats, but even more so, they disproportionately benefit the rich. (We’ll leave aside the pandemic response, which is complicated and an emergency.)

This table is older, and based on the House version of Trump’s budget and tariffs, but should be substantially correct:

Tariffs effect the rich less, because they spend less of their income on goods. The biggest companies often get exceptions to the tariffs as well. Currently that includes Apple, Coca-Cola, Stellantis and GM.

We are also seeing signs of “Greedflation”, using the tariffs as an excuse to raise prices faster than costs. This was huge during the pandemic,and it will be huge this time. Overall the really reach will benefit from tariffs, not be hurt by them. Trump talked a good game about making sure companies wouldn’t use tariffs as an excuse to raise prices, but that’s all it was, talk. For tariffs to improve the lives of the working and middle class, they would have to translate into well paid jobs, and there is no effective mechanism for that in America.

Let us turn then to the “NATO nations must spend 5% of GDP on their military.” That’s a lot, and it means that either taxes must be raised (they won’t be except for consumption taxes on the poor) or other priorities must be slashed. So the poor and middle class in those countries will get it in the neck.

Now, if that 5% was spent on domestically produced weapons and on hiring more soldiers and support staff, at least it would get back into recirculation. Indeed, there’ll be some of it, but most countries have agreed to buy Americans weapons and equipment.

And who will that benefit the most? The American rich.

In some cases buying American is so foolish it boggles the mind. Canada’s only real active military threat is America, and American weapon systems these days are mostly online and can’t be used if America doesn’t want them to be, even leaving aside the possibility of simply bricking them with an update.

But in general, increased military spending was an opportunity for industrial policy and to cut the aprons to the US, and actual statesmen would smile at Trump, make the promises and use the 5% in ways that would benefit their own country. Instead most of the benefits will flow to America.

As for the idea that America is a reliable security partner, well, they couped Ukraine, built its army up massively, encouraged it not make peace when easy and favorable terms were offered and is now cutting a deal with Russia after extorting mineral concessions from Ukraine.

Never ally with America if there is any other option.

But the core point here is simply that the “does it make the rich even richer” metric, which works for American politicians as a group, is even more predictive of Trump. Oh sure, he’ll throw the hoi polloi some social policy red meat, and yes, some of the moderately rich are being hurt by his policies, but the real rich, they’ll mostly make out like bandits.

Until China eats their lunch, which they are and will.

Right now America’s policies appear to be “loot the satrapies and form a non-Chinese bloc which is smaller, weaker and poorer than the China bloc.”

Smells like the USSR to me, except the USSR started out very strong and with higher economic growth than the West. America is trying the strategy as its in terminal decline.

 

***

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 17, 2025

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 17, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

 

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

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

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

The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.

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

Jim Stewartson, Aug 11, 2025 [MindWar]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Reed, Aug 17, 2025 [CommonDreams]

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

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

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

“Federalizing” D.C. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Pretexts Work — A manufactured crisis unfolds.

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

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

[The Lever, August 12, 2025]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Has a Bonkers New Rating System for Private Companies

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

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

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

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

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

Joyce Vance, Aug 14, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

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

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

Open Thread

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Politicians V.S. Serial Killers: Introducing The Serial Killer Count

One of the themes of this blog is that, with some exceptions, the people who are most dangerous are politicians. Since rich people own politicians, indirectly, they are included.

We’ve been, as a society, obsessed with serial killers for some time. They are seen, by many, as the ultimate evil. The average serial killer is responsible for about six deaths.

The Iraq war killed about half a million people (we don’t really know, since we didn’t count, but the post-fact estimates are credible.) That means George W. Bush, as the primary driver of the Iraq War, was the equivalent of over eighty-three thousand serial killers.

If we want to spread out the blame, US and UK politician who were for the war were the equivalent of over 83,000 serial killers.

The high end estimate of active serial killers in America is 2,000 active killers.

Recently I did a bit of research into the effect of Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” bill, in which he cut access to Welfare significantly. Interestingly, it’s really impossible to tell how many people the bill killed or made homeless (which is a delayed death sentence).

We don’t count.

But I’m guessing Bill’s serial killer number is pretty high. Let’s ignore how many Americans he killed. Iraq sanctions killed somewhere between 200K to a million people, with Madeleine Albright famously saying that if 500K children had been killed, it was worth it.

Even 200K suggests a serial killer count of over 33,000.

Obama’s policies deliberately helped banks steal (foreclose) American homes (steal is the correct terminology, they used documents with fake information and signatures.)  Once again, we don’t really know how many people had their homes taken, but 750K were included in a single class action suit, so that’s the lower bound estimate. I wonder how many of those became homeless or died as a result? Again, we don’t know, but it’s bound to be a lot of people. There’s no possibility that it doesn’t massively increase Obama’s “serial killer count.”

Yesterday we discussed prosecuting those who have enabled the Gaza genocide. Of course there’s plenty of blame to go around, but assuming a death count of half a million, which is going to be a low end estimate, we’ve got a serial killer count of over 83K.

Don’t worry about serial killers. They kill hardly anyone.

Politicians, at the behest of their owners, on the other hand, now they have bloody, bloody hands.

 

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