Ian Welsh

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

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

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

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

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

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

Joyce Vance, July 31, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

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

A little background about the Judicial Conference….

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

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

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

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

Brad Reed, August 01, 2025 [CommonDreams]

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

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

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

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

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

Julia Conley, July 31, 2025 [CommonDreams]

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

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

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

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

Nick Turse, July 31 2025 [The Intercept]

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

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

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

A Clear Epstein Backgrounder and Where We Are Today

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

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

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

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

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

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On August 2, 2025

Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Don’t Make Buddies With The Christian Right

By Ian Welsh

On August 1, 2025

Comments

This piece from Amfang is worth highlighting.

The Iranian Revolution was supposed to be a victory for the people. In 1979, millions rose up and toppled the Shah, a U.S.-backed monarch who ruled through secret police, torture, and oil profits. It was a mass revolt. Workers shut down industries. Students marched in the streets. Religious leaders called for resistance. Marxist guerrillas fought in the hills. For a brief moment, everyone stood on the same side. But not everyone had the same goal. The revolution was real, but it was not finished. And what came next should haunt us.

The left was there. It helped lead the struggle. The Tudeh Party, the Fedayeen, secular radicals and Marxists all believed that Khomeini was an ally. He hated the Shah. He spoke against imperialism. He had the people behind him. The left told itself it could ride the wave of religious rage and steer it toward socialism. But Khomeini had his own plans. The clerics moved quickly. They created militias. They took control of the narrative. They positioned themselves as the true voice of the people. And when the dust settled, they turned their guns inward. The revolution devoured the very people who sparked it.

Political parties were banned. Leftist organizers were hunted, jailed, and killed. The Tudeh Party, which had cheered Khomeini just months before, was declared treasonous. Its leaders were executed. Its rank and file disappeared.

Remember that the Christian right thinks that everyone who ever participated in an abortion is a murderer. Remember that eliminationist rhetoric is dirt common. Remember that the Nazis didn’t kill Jews or Roma first, they mass murdered the left first, then liquidated ethnicities they didn’t approve of.

The Social Gospel was fundamental to both FDR and Theodore Roosevelt’s power, but that movement is dead. There is no powerful Christian movement in America that the left can cut a deal with. Even the Roman Catholic Church, while it has substantial overlaps on anti-war and social justice issues, must be considered dangerous. Remember that the Supreme Court Justices who are validating Trump’s over-reach and dismantling the Constitution are almost all Catholic. In American Catholicism social justice is important, but it is secondary to social warfare concerns.

The left and the right (the real left, Democrats are not left wing in any meaningful way) are fundamentally in opposition. The Christian right and the left overlap in “we hate the current system” and practically nothing else. And religious fanatics are “fundamentally” OK with mass murder of those they see as against their religion’s principles.

Don’t play patty cake or make alliance with the religious right. They want you dead.

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Oddly, Canada Has More Leverage In A Trade Deal Than Anyone Except Maybe China

By Ian Welsh

On July 31, 2025

Comments

Trump:

Wow! Canada has just announced that it is backing statehood for Palestine. That will make it very hard for us to make a Trade Deal with them. Oh’ Canada!!!

The current plan is 35% tariffs on everything not covered by the USMCA trade deal.

But here’s the thing: Canada buys more US exports than any other country in the world. In fact, ex-oil, we have a trade deficit with the US.

Canada is the only country other than China that has significantly counter-tariffed the US. One reason why is that Carney wants to build back Canadian industry and to reduce Canadian vulnerability to the American political fits. Since the US is where Canada get its goods, counter-tariffs act as subsidies for manufacturing.

While I tend to think Canada should be making up with China, it’s possible that Prime Minister Carney is keeping the trade relationship sour there to help Canadian manufacturing. After all, Chinese goods are even cheaper than American ones and Canada definitely can’t compete. (No one actually can, more on that later.)

I do find it funny, that Canada, which Americans think of as a “wimp” nation is one of only two countries counter-attacking Trump hard. I mentioned in the past that the idea that Canadian politeness meant weakness was wrong. It’s also very American to think that someone being polite or apologizing when it’s appropriate means they’re a wimp. Very American.

Meanwhile Canadian tourist visits to the US are way down, and US state Governors are squealing, as is Las Vegas.

You tell Canadians you have contempt for them and that you want to take over their country, and strangely enough, they don’t like it.

Maybe China and Canada can bond over their shared enemy. America.

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Yes, Human Population Needs To Be Lower, Not All Ways Of Doing That Aren’t Good

By Ian Welsh

On July 30, 2025

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You wouldn’t believe some of the stupidity that I don’t let thru into comments. (Well, perhaps you would.) A recent bit suggested that I shouldn’t object to Gaza genocide because after all, I think human population should be lower, and this is lowering it!

After a bout of derisive laughter, I thought about it a bit and figured we need a bit of exploration of the overall issue. The original moron won’t understand, but others will.

Let’s lay it out simply. In population overshoot, a species winds up at numbers higher than what the environment can support long term. It’s not hard to understand this. If you need a breeding population of 1,000 deer to sustainably feed one wolf pack, and there are two packs, the wolves can eat into the 1,000 deer. They breed less, and enter a population death spiral and when there aren’t enough left to feed two packs, the wolves die in droves, or leave.

We, Musk’s fantasies aside, cannot leave, not in any time span that will be useful in the current crisis. Space might have helped a lot, not for colonization, but for resources, but after the moon landing America decided to starve the space program and the Soviets were entering their decline. Serious space exploration and any chance of space exploitation entered an over forty year hiatus and has only recovered in the last decade. Jingoism aside if space is truly exploited, it will be done by the Chinese, not by America or Europe.

If we were not in overshoot, the environment would not be degrading so severely: massive loss of insects, mammals, acidifying oceans, climate change, rain water that isn’t safe to drink, etc, etc… We’re eating into the carrying capacity of the Earth, producing more than the Earth can sustainably produce, and damaging the Earth in ways which will take ages to fix. Some of them, like loss of biodiversity, are not fixable on any human lifespan.

So, since we can’t leave, and since we can’t get enough resources from space to matter, and since we’re destroying environment that makes our survival possible along with drawing down resources at a ferocious rate, we’re in overshoot.

So, our population is going to go down one way or the other. Now if you read the media or spend time reading political or economic social media you’ve heard a ton about the replacement rate crisis. Virtually every country’s birth rate is lower than is required to keep up the population.

This graphic from Pew makes the point:

This is good. China having a population over 1.4 billion people is TOO MANY PEOPLE.

The transition will be difficult, because a smaller number of young people will have to support a larger number of old people. This is the actual use case for robots and “AI”, to care for people as they get older and make up the age gap. In a sane society, there would be no worry about “losing jobs” to AI because we wouldn’t distribute resources to people based on jobs. We would be happy to work less, to let people who want to not work at all to do other things, and to reduce hours and share jobs that still need to be done by humans. And if a human wanted to do a job that is mostly roboticized, unless they completely sucked, that’d be fine because the economy exists to serve humans, if you’re sane, not the other way around.

Both China and Japan have been moving hard to “gerontorobotics” (not sure if that’s a word yet.) They know there won’t be enough care workers, so they’re moving to robots which can help people live who are still mostly OK but just old, and they’re also working on robots that can help invalids and semi-invalids, including getting them into and out of bed, helping them bathe and use the washroom and so on.

Now, to go back to the original moron, all efforts to reverse the birth rate decrease are stupid at this point. The BEST way to lose population is to simply have people age out. Among major countries the only one which might reasonably make a case that it isn’t overpopulated is Russia. Among middle countries, perhaps Canada, though as a Canadian I don’t want more people. I like wilderness, this is fine.

Population needs to be decreased, yes, that does not mean we need to start mass murdering. Further, if we did want to eliminate any group of people it would be the top .1%, because they produce vastly more pollution and use up vastly more resources than others. (Not saying we should, but if eliminationism is your goal, radically reducing elites is where you would start if your motivation was actually to help the world.)

Get out of the way, and let reproduction rates keep falling. If we fall to two billion or so and they’re still too low, then feel free to panic. Right now, it’s a good thing.

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Real Time Iraq War Death Estimates Were Wildly Off

By Ian Welsh

On July 29, 2025

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During the Iraq War, we were fed very low death estimates:

The Iraq War Death count had an upper estimate of 43,000 by the end of 2006.
The Iraqi Ministry of health and the US armed forces (really the same thing) said about 20,000 by the end of 2005.

But when the Lancet did a population study in 2006 they came up with about 655,000, and in 2013 PLOS revised that number down to 461,000.

Either way the Iraq War Death count was about ten times too small. The official count was at least twenty times too small.

The Gaza Health Ministry’s death count is simply not credible, especially as it has risen more slowly over time, which is the opposite of what one would expect as water and food, medical services and supplies and shelter have all become radically rarer as the genocide has continued. It is surely an undercount. The indirect to direct-deaths ratio is also likely to be higher than in previous wars. The US deliberately hit a lot civilian infrastructure in Iraq and dismantled the economic supply networks which had kept Iraqis fed, but it wasn’t going all out to kill civilians or trying to demolish every building in Iraq.

We are also now into the early stages of a famine, and the amount of aid that Israel is letting in is pathetically small, plus in most cases to get it Palestinians have to risk being shot, and all accounts are that a few hundred Gazans do indeed get shot every day trying to get a few scraps food.

The last official death toll number from the Gaza Ministry of Health was 59,866. Multiply that by ten, and you have a death toll of 600K, and that’s a conservative estimate, and is before the worst of the famine hit.

This is genocide. It is entirely deliberate and being done with the aid of most of the Western world. We now know that our leaders, had they been Germans in the 30s and 40s, would have gone along with the Holocaust and in many cases, enthusiastically participated. We also know that most of our journalists would have provided cover, along with most of our pundits. (Yglesias is a good example as is almost everyone at the New York Times, BBC, Washington Post and so on.) Britain, Germany and America in particular have gone after anti-genocide activists hard.

Out entire elite class is not just OK with genocide, they’re onside and actively helping it.

If you think they wouldn’t do it to you, you’re in lalaland. They’ve proved they are OK with mass murder, and even if you’re white, don’t think it would save you. Look at Trump’s massive health care and food cuts, or Labour’s Starmer taking away aid from disabled people and cutting off heating for old folks, not to mention both being completely callous towards the exploding number of homeless people. In America far more homes are empty than there are homeless people, yet all the vast majority of politicians do is criminalize homelessness more and more.

You aren’t even the dirt beneath your elites’ fingertips. The only reason you aren’t Soylent Green yet is they haven’t been able to figure out how to make it pay. But your deaths mean nothing to them if they have any reason to kill you, no matter how slight. Your suffering isn’t a consideration either. They’ve spent 50 years systematically reducing pensions, health care and increasing poverty so they could make themselves richer.

You’re just sheep. They’ll sheer you as long as they can, and when they have any reason to, they’ll slaughter you.

And not only won’t they lose any sleep over hurting and eventually killing you, they’ll feel good about doing so.

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Europe Affirms Its Vassalage In Trade Deal With the US

By Ian Welsh

On July 28, 2025

Comments

This is a complete capitulation:

15% tariffs on EU goods, 0% on US goods
EU to buy 750 billion dollars in LNG over the next 3 years (US LNG is more expensive than alternatives)
600 billion EU investment in the US
50% tariff on steel and aluminum to the US stays in place
A commitment to purchase huge amounts of US armaments

Japan has similarly capitulated, after previously standing firm.

Pathetic.

Ironically this leaves Canada as one of the only holdouts among America’s vassals. China, of course, has told the US to take a long flying leap off a short pier.

As I have noted before, the US has been cannibalizing its allies as it declines. This was true under Biden. Trump is only super-charging it. This cannibalization won’t change the trajectory, the US is DONE, but other countries accepting it means they will go down with the US

The EU was always in a hard place: it does export much more to the US than vice-versa. But it did have options, it just refused to take them. Cheaper energy from Russia is available, even during the war, Putin has been clear about that and it would mean much slower de-industrialization. Germany’s loss of industry has been, in particular, driven by high energy prices since the Ukraine war and the destruction of Nord Stream. German businesses which shut down in Germany have often moved to the US for the cheaper oil prices.

The way to strike back against the US was to hit America services: internet companies and break various copyright and patent laws. Hit the tax havens and take the money. (Ireland will squeal, but so what). This is where America really makes its money and it’s completely vulnerable. Meanwhile cut a deal with China, they’re the rising power.

The same is true for Japan, as it happens.

As Trump has shown, no deal is final. When politics change in Europe (and they will) this deal can be repudiated as the garbage it is. If that doesn’t happen soon, Europe’s decline will be much faster than it has to be.

What’s particularly interesting to me is the psychology of this. European elites are just so used to being vassals, and so completely without any pride (though they have plenty of vanity) that they are unable to stand up to America no matter what the humiliation. Russia was able to withstand far worse than what the US was doing, and even flourish, but Europeans can think of no way out but to capitulate. (To be sure, Russia had certain advantages the EU doesn’t have, but the reverse is true as well. The real issue is a lack of imagination and guts.)

Europe needs to get rid of its elite class, entirely, and find new leadership. Unfortunately it seems likely that they’re going to choose the idiot right, who will simply overcharge decline. After those morons fail, they may finally turn to decent leaders, but by then it will be too late to “save the garden” in most nations.

This capitulation has closed off one option: the third bloc. What could have happened is Europe, Canada, Mexico, Japan and other affected nations forming a unified trade bloc of their own, and taking unified steps against America. Such a coalition would have won the ensuing trade war and could have cannibalized the US rather than the other way around.

It is a pity, but unlike many historical vassals who resent their status, our current leadership seems to enjoy being house slaves. So all of this will be done the hard and ugly way.

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

By Tony Wikrent

On July 27, 2025

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

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

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

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

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

A Show of Force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civic republicanism

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

Jim Stewartson, July 22, 2025 [MIndWar]

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

Loss of coherent functioning

Emotional dysregulation (rage, paranoia, despair)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A violent purge consolidates a totalitarian regime.

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

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

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

Jim Stewartson, July 26, 2025 [MIndWar]

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

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

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

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

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

Wealth series 7: The real cost of flaunting it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wealth series 6: Wealthy, or worried?

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

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

The wealthy think they’re top of the pile.

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

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

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

Brian Beutler, July 25, 2025 [Off Message]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Is the Most Dangerous Criminal in US History

Thom Hartmann, July 22, 2025 [Common Dreams]

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

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

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