Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 21, 2025
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]
A killing at sea marks America’s descent into lawless power
[Defense One, via The Big Picture, September 14, 2025]
The peremptory strike on a speedboat is a warning to all who serve. Remember your oath.
The War on Terror Template For The Post-Charlie Kirk Crackdown
Spencer Ackerman, 15 Sept 2025 [forever-wars.com]
…Long before the Kirk slaying, a similarly designed effort sought to reclassify nonprofits within the liberal fundraising infrastructure, as well as the left-wing institutions that support Palestine, as domestic terrorists. That failed, but that was before there was a shooting of a conservative celebrity to exploit. This is their Saddam Hussein-era Iraq, and they really want to invade. One of the things they want most of all, as they wanted after Oklahoma City and as they wanted after 9/11, is to define their enemies as terrorists so their violence can only be seen as counter-terrorism. Counterterrorist violence enjoys legitimacy by default.…
After Pat Robertson died in 2023, I wrote this, about Robertson’s fantastical attributions of blame for 9/11:
“It’s irrelevant that they offered no material explanation for how gays and liberals were the real culprits for 9/11. What mattered instead was the signal they sent, that there didn’t need to be a material explanation for the attacks—there just needed to be a pre-existing enemy, here at home, whose works bore a culpability for the 9/11 atrocity that was realer than the truth. Not only was there no need to reassess, as Sontag suggested, America’s military and economic relationship with oppressive Arab and Muslim governments, Robertson and company saw in the War on Terror a new front for a culture war, which for them meant a religious war.”
…In 2025 as in 2001, the goal remains wielding permanent political, economic and social power. In the intervening years of the War on Terror, its normalized violence became ever more available as an option for those dreaming of such enduring dominance….
Sanctified: Martyring Charlie Kirk — How the Trump regime is turning a murder into permanent power
Jim Stewartson, Sep 16, 2025 [MindWar]
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the U.S. federal government is openly engaging in an unconstitutional criminal conspiracy to persecute, dismantle and disenfranchise its political opposition with the clear goal of making future elections a foregone conclusion….
Here are the five pillars of the Trump regime’s new doctrine:
- Sanctify Charlie Kirk as a martyr. Kirk’s murder was a perfect flashpoint for the Trump regime to turn its narrative of white, Christian, male persecution into a war cry against Democrats. Kirk is no longer a racist, misogynist podcaster; he is a slain Christian crusader. (“See you in Valhalla”)
- DARVO Kirk’s murder. Within hours, Trump blamed Kirk’s murder on the “radical left” with no evidence. This is the abuser’s favorite tactic—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender. Never admit you were wrong. Always blame your own victims. This has not relented in this case in spite of facts that contradict the narrative.
- Expand the enemy to Democrats. While Trump initially blamed the “radical left” and many of the initial actions are aimed at scapegoats like “Antifa” and transgender people, the rhetoric is far more broadly aimed at “Democrats,” “the left” and liberals.
- Convert outrage to quasi-legal machinery. While continuously applying rhetoric designed to dehumanize political enemies as “violent terrorists,” the regime promises to abuse powers such as RICO, conspiracy, and insurrection against increasingly broad categories of people.
- Use emergency powers to complete a de facto coup. The regime will weaponize unrest caused by its own violence and oppression to unconstitutionally seize more power through declaring emergencies, expand the militarization of blue cities, and ensure that mid-term elections are either meaningless or “postponed.”
Each part of this plan has been either openly promised, or heavily implied in public statements by Trump or his closest advisors in the last few days. There has been no deviation from their pre-determined narrative….
Neo-COINTELPRO
COunter-INTELligence-PROgram (COINTELPRO) was J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign against his political targets….
The Trump regime has a different approach. It displays its anti-democratic goals proudly and makes no illusions about what it wants or how it intends to get it. While it took decades of investigations to uncover the damage Hoover had done, one of the most alarming things about the Trump regime is that its neo-COINTELPRO is not clandestine, it is overt. There is no apparent concern about future consequences….
DOJ Scrubbed Study Showing Right-Wing Violent Attacks Outpace All Other Extremism
Jason Paladino, Sep 12, 2025 [via dropsitenews]
…The original paper, authored by six researchers and published last year, is still available thanks to The Internet Archive at this link.…
The study’s findings are not surprising to anybody living in the real world:
“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
The timing for this apparent censorship could not be more suspect. As members of Congress, MAGA influencers and the president himself have signaled that they’re out for leftist blood….
Trump Administration Rushes To Kill Free Speech In Response To Kirk Assassination
Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 09-17-2025]
[A useful collection of quotes from regime officials]
J. D. Vance, Charlie Kirk, and the Politics-as-Talk-Show Singularity
Andrew Marantz, September 18, 2025 [The New Yorker]
Broadcasting from the White House, the Vice-President seemed to complete the merger of politics and red-meat live streams—and to threaten more ominous crackdowns ahead.
Remember This Week—It’s the Week America Became a Different Place
Michael Tomasky, September 19, 2025 [The New Republic]Trump 2.0 has executed any number of offenses against the Constitution, human decency, and more. But here’s why the Jimmy Kimmel matter is different—and the most dangerous move yet.
Trump’s Latest Crypto Play Is His Biggest and Most Corrupt Yet
Nitish Pahwa, Sept 04, 2025 [Slate, via The Big Picture, September 14, 2025]
The entire Trump family just cashed in on another big cryptocurrency payday. This Labor Day, the digital-assets firm World Liberty Financial—which the president’s three sons co-founded just a year ago—launched a public sale of its flagship WLFI tokens, spurring $1 billion worth of trades on popular crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance (all of whose founders have ties with the current administration). Collectively, the Trump family already holds billions of World Liberty coins, and the public trading—carried out mostly overseas and involving few retail traders—boosted the value of those tokens. Per the Wall Street Journal, the four male Trumps involved made as much as $5 billion on Monday, in what was “most likely the biggest financial success for the president’s family since the inauguration.”
…. The companies behind the $TRUMP meme coin (one of which shares an address with the president’s Florida golf club) held an auction that traded hoards of tokens for chances to dine with the Donald himself; according to the New Yorker, the Trumps and their partners netted $320 million from transaction fees alone….
And Trump keeps pacifying the crypto industry at large, signing deregulatory legislation into law and dropping Biden-era investigations into various companies that have since worked with his crypto projects—like Binance, Crypto.com, and Coinbase….
Here’s What Trump’s Offering People Who Help Fund His New Ballroom
Rachel Kahn, September 19, 2025 [The New Republic]
Trump Firing Top Prosecutor for Failing to Invent Fake Crimes by Foes
Greg Sargent, September 19, 2025 [The New Republic]
Russ Vought’s Scheme Has Been Unmasked
Rosa DeLauro September 16, 2025 [The American Prospect]
The courts have decided: Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought broke the law. The American people deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent, but time and again, Russ Vought hides the truth.
During the Biden administration, I led the charge to require the public disclosure of legally binding funding decisions known as apportionments. When I drafted this requirement—and it was signed into law—it was not about which party held power. It was about showing the American people how their hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being spent in their communities.
On March 24, at Russ Vought’s command, OMB illegally removed this transparency website. At the end of July, United States District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan emphatically ruled that Vought has been illegally hiding his sabotage of investments and services for over four months. The courts continued to deny OMB’s request to keep hiding their stealing, with a panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit forcing Russ Vought to restore the website on August 15 with equally forceful criticism of his lawlessness. While OMB was slow to share the information, and they have yet to post all that is required under the law, one thing is clear: Russ Vought and his relentless desire to single-handedly control every investment in American communities have been unmasked….
Kimmel wasn’t suspended for a joke about Kirk — he was suspended for mocking Trump.
Dean Obeidallah, Sep 18, 2025
The same corporate media helping Donald Trump silence dissent, wants you to believe that Jimmy Kimmel was suspended “over his Charlie Kirk comments.” That’s a lie. The joke that angered MAGA world did not include any barbs or attacks on Kirk in any way. Rather the joke was mocking Trump….
Kimmel then mocked Trump’s bizarre response to the fatal shooting on Friday—which I also played on my show given the jarring nature of it. When asked by a reporter how he was “holding up,” Trump had said, “I think very good,” before then quickly adding, “And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House.” An excited Trump then bragged that the new ballroom was “gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”
Kimmel used that reaction for the joke, saying about Trump, “He’s at the fourth stage of grief, construction.” He added to big laughs, “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Trump’s Ouster of Jimmy Kimmel Is Much Worse Than You Think It Is
Greg Sargent, September 18, 2025 [The New Republic]
Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, tells TNR that chairman Brendan Carr’s move violates both the First Amendment and the Communications Act. Democrats must extract consequences.
The 1933 Nazi Playbook That Explains Why ABC Cancelled Kimmel
Richard Murphy, September 20 2025 [Funding the Future]
This is too important, and frightening, not to share:
The speaker is Tad Stoermer, an academic historian who suggests he is:
Torching lies
Teaching resistance
Explaining revolution.
He is the author of ‘A Resistance History of the United States’ (Steerforth Press, 2026). He is a
lecturer at Johns Hopkins University and a visiting scholar at the University of Southern Denmark.
Trump Files $15 Billion Libel Suit Against The New York Times And Its Reporters
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 09-14-2025]
Trump’s lawsuit mentions several articles published by the paper, including an editorial calling him unfit for office, and a book, “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” published by Times investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig. In the filing, Trump’s attorneys allege that the paper and the journalists “maliciously published the Book and the Articles knowing that these publications were filled with repugnant distortions and fabrications about President Trump.”
Judge throws out Trump suit against New York Times
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2025]
60 violations in 50 days: Inside ICE’s giant tent facility at Ft. Bliss
[Maxar, Reuters / The Washington Post, Sep 16, 2025]
As the Trump Administration rushes to open massive makeshift holding centers nationwide, one former official called the list of violations at Fort Bliss among the worst she’s ever seen.
A Prosecutor Sues — Maurene Comey v. The Department of Justice
Joyce Vance, Sep 15, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Maureen Comey, in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed today against the government….
There is a lot of factual and legal detail in the case, but it’s important because it will have an impact on Trump’s ability to fire at will in the federal bureaucracy, ignoring existing civil service protections for government employees, not just at DOJ, but likely closer to government wide. The 38-page complaint alleges the following violations of law when Comey was fired:
- Violation of the United States Constitution (Article II and Separation of Powers) (Against All Defendants): Article II gives the president the ability to appoint and fire “principal officers” (like U.S. Attorneys), but as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Comey is an “inferior officer”, subject to governance by Congress, which created civil service provisions that prevent firing without due process or without cause and rendering the way Comey was fired a violation of the law.
- Violation of the Administrative Procedure Act 5 U.S.C. §§ 706(1) and 706(2) (Against All Defendants): Comey’s firing violated the Administrative Procedure Act by withholding the due process she was entitled to and firing her in an arbitrary, capricious fashion that is contrary to the Constitution and goes beyond what the law permits.
- Violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (Ultra Vires in Violation of Statutory Authority) (Against All Defendants): Ultra vires means acting beyond one’s legal power or authority. Comey claims that because her firing violated the law, it is ultra vires, so it has no legal force or effect, and it’s as if she was never fired…..
Because that’s a lot, and because this is a very important case, we’ll spend time tonight going through the allegations in the complaint in more detail. What’s at stake is the ability of the president to fire prosecutors, even exemplary ones, because he doesn’t like them, or their father, or the cases they’ve been working on, or simply thinks they lack personal loyalty to him, or just wants to get rid of them. That’s no way to run the Justice Department, where prosecutors have civil service protections that make it difficult to fire them absent solid cause. But the administration did an end run around those longstanding rules in Maurene Comey’s case, despite the fact that she’d been asked to be the lead prosecutor on “a major public corruption case” just the day before she was fired….
The Age of Monsters [Citizens United]
Josh Marshall, Sept 19, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
We live in an age of monsters: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Ellison family, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, the sundry billionaires who don’t own apps. This may sound like a caustic and dramatic comment coming from me. Some of them are genuine monsters: Musk, Trump, probably Thiel. In other cases, like with Zuckerberg, they are probably more or less normal and might even be okay to have lunch with. But functionally, in the role they play and power they wield in our society, they are monsters. And the function of the Trump era has been to wind them all together into a single formation, first by allurement and then by force.
This realization first started to dawn on me in the years after Citizens United, the court decision that essentially ended meaningful campaign finance law in the United States. It came in the first reactions to Citizens United or more specifically the spending it made possible. Billionaires and centi-millionaires started gaining publicity and critical reactions to the scale of their spending and the impact it had on elections. Political giving at scale by the extremely wealthy wasn’t new. It had just taken a half-century hiatus. Perhaps the difference was the internet. Whatever it was, the years after 2010 spawned the idea that the very wealthy and the extremely powerful needed to be afforded more protections, more privacy for their giving then ordinary people who might donate $50 or even $5,000 up near the candidate donation limit….
Strategic Political Economy
Ford Shutting Down its Glass House Headquarters
Robert Schoenberger, Sept. 15, 2025 [IndustryWeek]
After more than 70 years in its iconic building in Dearborn, Michigan, Ford Motor Co. plans to tear that facility down after 2027 when it moves into a new campus a few miles away.
“We were never going to leave Dearborn. We’ve been here for 122 years,” Chairman Bill Ford said in a video released with the announcement. Still, the move out of the iconic Detroit-area building will be a major change.
The new facility will be built about three miles away, next to Ford’s tech center and vehicle proving grounds—near the campus of the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. Once finished, the four-story structure will have about 2.1 million square feet of office and meeting space, about double the 12-story structure it replaces….
[TW: Ford moving management next to the engineers is a very hopeful sign. Probably much too late, but hopeful.]
Global power shift
New security pact between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2025]
I don’t think I’m exaggerating by saying that this truly is the US’s Suez moment: Saudi Arabia just entered into a NATO-like alliance with Pakistan whereby “any attack on either country is an attack on both.”The symbolic is extraordinary: Saudi Arabia was in many ways THE poster child of US client states. If they no longer trusts American security guarantees, why should anyone else? And of course the fact this actually happened and wasn’t prevented by the U.S. is immensely telling in and of itself.This has so many other consequences that it’s almost too much to fathom:- First of all, it means that Saudi Arabia now benefits from Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence….– This undoubtedly kills IMEC (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor), the Biden administration’s flagship grand strategy to counter China’s Belt and Road that was supposed to connect India to Europe via Saudi Arabia– There is a monetary aspect too: this is another nail in the coffin of the petrodollar system (an agreement to price oil exclusively in USD in exchange for US protection). Saudi Arabia is now much more flexible to price oil in whatever currency it wishes
China’s trade with Africa outracing the rest of world, supplanting North America
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 09-15-2025]
Chinese exports to the United States are down double digits since the beginning of the year.
But China’s exports overall are much higher than expected, as Chinese firms are successfully expanding into new markets.
This is glaringly true of Africa. Bilateral trade between China and Africa is rocketing higher, and doing so in surprising ways.
Chinese exports to Africa are high up in the value chain: advanced machinery, vehicles, electronics, and power generation.
But these products are also falling in price, making them more affordable then ever to Africa’s emerging middle class and business sectors.
It is also a de-dollarization story. Chinese banks make trade credit and finance widely available using pools of renminbi. African firms can far more easily access capital in RMB compared to USD, and are refinancing their dollar-denominated debts to the Chinese currency.
From Research Academy to State Venture Capitalist: The transformation of Chinese Academy of Sciences
[Sinocities, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2025]
Intel chip architect Su Fei returns to China after 20 years in the US
Ling Xin, 12 Sep 2025 [South China Morning Post]
The award-winning engineer with a reputation for mentorship has taken up an endowed chair professorship at Tsinghua University
Central Banks Now Hold More Gold Than U.S. Treasuries
Christina Comben, September 11, 2025 [thecoinrepublic.com]
Central banks now hold more gold than U.S. Treasuries for the first time since 1996, prompting big questions about the health of the dollar and the future of “hard money” in the global financial system.
Funds Shifting Away From US Assets Due to Trump, Mercer Says
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israel as ‘Super-Sparta?’ — Netanyahu’s Insanity and Arendt’s Prophecy
John Ganz, Sep 16, 2025 [Unpopular Front]
Zionist Lawfare Operation Facing Collapse?
Kit Klarenberg [via Naked Capitalism 09-15-2025]
Families of US citizens killed by Israel say Trump administration refuses to investigate
[Middle East Eye, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2025]
Israel’s Intelligence Service Mossad: The Myth of “Long Arms” and the Reality of Failure
Elijah J. Magnier [via Naked Capitalism 09-19-2025]
Russia / Ukraine
Is Russia really going to build Europe’s largest high-speed rail network?
Brian McDonald [Naked Capitalism 09-15-2025]
Oligarchy
Most Of Billionaires’ $7.6 Trillion Has Never Been Taxed
[Americans for Tax Fairness, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2025]
American billionaires reached a record breaking $7.6 trillion of personal wealth as of Labor Day 2025, up $4.7 trillion (or 160%) in the less than eight years since the first Trump-GOP tax law was enacted in December 2017, according to the latest billionaires report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) based on Forbes data. Most of that wealth increase (an estimated 56%, or $4.2 trillion) has never been taxed and may never be under current law. But key Democrats, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), and Rep. Donald Beyer (D-VA) are introducing a major overhaul in the tax code which would finally end that injustice by taxing billionaire wealth gains as they are made….
GRAPH — US billionaires and their net worth, 2025 compared to 2017
…Enactment of the 2017 tax law is used as the starting point to track billionaire wealth growth because it likely turbo-charged the process. The law’s centerpiece was a two-fifths cut in the corporate tax rate, reducing it from 35% to 21%. Since 93% of corporate stock is owned by the wealthiest 10%–including billionaires–corporate tax cuts are by definition tax cuts for the rich. The law also reduced the top individual tax rate, the one that applies to the great bulk of the richest Americans’ income. Meanwhile, the law failed to close any of the many loopholes enjoyed by the rich; the biggest one for billionaires is the tax-free status of wealth-growth income.
Leading economists have determined that on average, the wealthiest 400 families paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 8.2% in recent years, when the increased value of their stock is counted. That means billionaires can pay lower tax rates than middle-class workers like teachers, nurses, and firefighters. An analysis of billionaire tax data found that 26 of the wealthiest billionaires paid an effective tax rate of just 4.8% on a $500 billion increase in their collective fortune between 2013-18. ProPublica also found that billionaire Jeff Bezos paid $0 in federal income tax from 2007 through 2011.
David Dayen September 18, 2025 [The American Prospect]
We are closing in on the 20th anniversary of one of the most revealing pieces of bank analyst research in recent American history. On October 16, 2005, Citigroup released an “industry note” for investors that started with a bracing statement: “The World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest.”
Plutonomy is defined as an economy where, well, plutocrats provide the lion’s share of the economic activity and have a distortionary effect on economic statistics. One way to describe it is that if Bill Gates walked into a room with three laborers, the average wealth of all four in the room would be in the billions. But that wouldn’t tell you anything about the circumstances of the non–Bill Gates members of the sample, or how the economy feels to the “average” person in the room. “Consensus analyses that do not tease out the profound impact of the plutonomy on spending power, debt loads, savings rates (and hence current account deficits), oil price impacts … are flawed from the start,” the note explains….
The top 10 percent have been increasing their overall share of consumer spending for the past three decades, from a little over 35 percent in 1994 to 49.2 percent in the most recent quarter, a new record high according to Moody’s analyst Mark Zandi. Breaking out income earners by level of consumer spending, as Zandi did, shows that while the bottom 80 percent of earners spend at levels consistent with the Consumer Price Index, the top 20 percent spend at staggeringly higher levels. “The U.S. economy is being largely powered by the well-to-do,” he concluded….
How can we hold together the concepts of soft employment numbers, higher inflation, and climbing retail sales? You can search for reasons to explain why U.S. consumers are lying, spending with abandon even as they despise the economic picture. Or you can simply reject the average and look to the differences within the income distribution. If you do, you reveal the K-shape: Consumer spending is being driven by the top 10 or 20 percent, and unemployment, food insecurity, and gloominess are driven by everyone else. Both groups are experiencing inflation, but only the lower-income earners truly feel it. Higher-income folks are happy to spend more money on goods and services, bolstered by fat wallets and stock portfolios….
Top 10% account for nearly half of all consumer spending
[News Nation Now, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2025]
Felonomics
GRAPH — Stagflation, a dilemma for the Fed
[Hakyung Kim, via The Big Picture, September 14, 2025]
Here’s the inflation breakdown for August 2025 — in one chart
[CNBC, via The Big Picture, September 14, 2025]
US economy: stagflation now more than a whiff
Michael Roberts [via Naked Capitalism 09-17-2025]
[TW: Lotsa graphs]
‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It’: Trump Policies Leave US Farmers in Dire Straits
Brett Wilkins, September 16, 2025 [CommonDreams]
…After Trump slapped 30% tariffs on Chinese imports in May, Beijing retaliated with measures including stopping all purchases of US soybeans. Before the trade war, a quarter of the soybeans—the nation’s number one export crop—produced in the United States were exported to China. Trump’s tariffs mean American soybean growers can’t compete with countries like Brazil, the world’s leading producer and exporter of the staple crop and itself the target of a 50% US tariff.
“We depend on the Chinese market. The reason we depend so much on this market is China consumes 61% of soybeans produced worldwide,” Kentucky farmer Caleb Ragland, who is president of the American Soybean Association, told News Nation on Monday. “Right now, we have zero sold for this crop that’s starting to be harvested right now.” … It’s a five-alarm fire for our industry that 25% of our total sales is currently missing…”
Trump Says the U.S. Will Institute $100,000 Fee for Skilled Worker Visas
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2025]
Defense Bill Opens Door To Guns-For-Hire At The Border
Katya Schwenk, Sept 17, 2025 [The Lever]
The $893 billion defense policy bill that passed the House of Representatives last week would grant the Department of Defense unprecedented new authority to deploy private military contractors to the United States’ southern border.
A provision in the legislation, tacked on in a July amendment, for the first time gives the Defense Secretary authority to outsource the agency’s work at the border, a proposal that critics warn could prove a bonanza for the shadowy mercenary and private security firms that work with the Pentagon, often with little public transparency….
Memphis asks Shelby County chancellor to invalidate all agreements with city unions
[USA Today, via Naked Capitalism 09-17-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Neoliberalism Comes for the Warfare State
[Compact, via Naked Capitalism 09-14-2025]
“If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say we’re going to govern those countries … You can say that about pretty much all of Africa; they’re incapable of governing themselves.” So claims Erik Prince, the billionaire entrepreneur of the modern mercenary business. Speaking on his podcast Off Leash, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide advocated for the United States to get back into the intervention business, albeit with a twist: Rather than sending American troops to enforce order abroad, the dirty work of empire should be contracted out to private firms. Prince’s provocation is not a relic of colonial thinking but rather a fact of modern politics: a neoliberal model of state violence.
Prince’s latest venture has been security contracting in weak countries, primarily Haiti and Peru. He has carved out a niche for himself by offering a market-based option for functions typically performed by sovereign states—in particular, the exercise of violence for both domestic order and operations abroad. In Haiti, Prince’s services have been retained to combat rampant gang violence near Port-au-Prince, where opportunistic non-state actors have all but taken over territories surrounding the capital city. In Peru, Prince’s company Vectus Global recently signed a contract worth $10 million a year to eliminate criminal networks that threaten the country’s gold mines. Governments too strained to monopolize violence within their borders engage Prince, who brings the organization, discipline, and technology that local security forces lack….
Affordable Housing Out of Reach for Half of All U.S. Workers
[Governing, via Naked Capitalism 09-17-2025]
[Hoodline, via Naked Capitalism 09-17-2025]
The social crisis fueling the collapse of democracy in America
[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 09-19-2025]
One of the leading mouthpieces of big business, the Wall Street Journal, gave a glimpse of this deepening crisis in an article posted Wednesday on its website with the headline, “The Two-Speed Economy Is Back as Low-Income Americans Give Up Gains.” The article is published in the newspaper’s Thursday print edition under the headline, “Divergent American Economy Gets More Divided.”
“There are two economies in the U.S. right now, and they are moving in different directions,” the commentary begins, noting that higher-income Americans “are still spending like gangbusters,” while for most workers, wage growth “has petered out.” The article continues, “Those workers are curbing their spending and in some cases are struggling to find jobs.” Unemployment is hitting African Americans and young people particularly hard, while home prices and rents are soaring.
“The divided fortunes of rich and poor in the U.S. may sound like an old story,” the Journal acknowledges, but “the gulf is widening again.” Wage growth for the bottom third of workers was the smallest in August since 2016, and these workers could spend only 0.3 percent more than a year ago. With inflation at nearly 3 percent, and prices on many essential goods rising much faster than that, this means a cut in real consumption….
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
The Epstein Files and the 5-Count Felon Bank: The Untold Story
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, September 18, 2025 [counterpunch.org]
[TW: You should save this to your computer, or at least book mark it, because this will stand as one of the definitive explanations of the crime ring behind Epstein, and Trump’s attempts to cover up]
…The way that JPMorgan Chase facilitated money laundering for Epstein sounds uncannily similar to how it facilitated money laundering for Ponzi kingpin Bernie Madoff. Both Epstein and Madoff used JPMorgan Chase as their primary bank according to court records. And the bank made multi-million dollar loans to both men.
FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge George Venizelos said this in a formal statement when the two felony counts were lodged against JPMorgan Chase in 2014 over its Madoff conduct:
“J.P. Morgan failed to carry out its legal obligations while Bernard Madoff built his massive house of cards. Today, J.P. Morgan finds itself criminally charged as a consequence. But it took until after the arrest of Madoff, one of the worst crooks this office has ever seen, for J.P. Morgan to alert authorities to what the world already knew. In order to avoid these types of disasters in the future—we all need to be invested in making our markets safer and more equitable. The FBI can’t do it alone. Traders, compliance officers, analysts, bankers, and executives are the gatekeepers of the financial industry. We need their help protecting our markets.”
Let that carefully sink in for a moment. JPMorgan Chase, then and now headed by media darling Jamie Dimon (as both Chairman and CEO) was simultaneously laundering money for two of the biggest criminal masterminds in U.S. history. Exactly what was it that these two Machiavellian marauders found so comforting about running their financial affairs out of JPMorgan Chase? The answer is more than likely found in a three-letter acronym—SAR, short for Suspicious Activity Report. If you were running illicit billions of dollars through the bank, and generating big profits for the bank, that pesky detail of filing those SARs in a timely fashion with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), as legally mandated, somehow gets forgotten at the bank, at least in both the Madoff and Epstein cases.
Despite enormous red flags on weird money transactions, JPMorgan Chase failed to file any Madoff-related Suspicious Activity Reports until Madoff confessed to his crimes in December 2008 after being turned in to prosecutors by his sons….
FinCEN plans to delete data on U.S. companies from beneficial ownership database
Carmen Molina Acosta, September 17, 2025 [International Consortium of Investigative Journalists]
Five years after ICIJ’s FinCEN Files investigation exposed the pivotal role the U.S. financial system plays in global dirty money flows, authorities are winding back landmark reforms pushed through in the wake of the revelations, prompting widespread concerns from transparency advocates.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — the namesake of ICIJ and BuzzFeed News’ 2020 investigation — announced last week that it expects to delete ownership information that U.S. companies submitted as part of the launch of the previously celebrated company ownership registry….
Experts told ICIJ that the move further guts the Corporate Transparency Act, a 2021 bipartisan law passed months after the publication of the FinCEN Files aimed at cracking down on anonymous shell companies that facilitate illicit finance. A key part of the legislation was the establishment of the company ownership registry, which was officially launched last year amid ongoing political and legal challenges, and which required companies operating in the U.S. to submit ownership information to the Treasury.
In March, the Treasury Department moved to exempt all U.S. businesses from the requirement, meaning only foreign-owned firms operating in the U.S. would need to comply with the reporting obligations. The potential destruction of data would be “doubling down on Treasury’s unlawful gutting of this statute,” Ian Gary, executive director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition said.
Restoring balance to the economy
Monopoly Round-Up: Did the Death Blow of Hollywood Just Happen?
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 09-15-2025]
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 09-19-2025]
…Axios did a useful round-up of the broader context, which is the roll-up of media properties by oligarchs over the last few years. In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post and killed a Kamala Harris endorsement, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked his paper’s endorsement of Harris, Univision got bought by a Trump-friendly outlet, and the Baltimore Sun did as well. Apple, Google, and Meta CEOs have all moved in more Republican directions, in Meta’s case explicitly settling with Trump for millions of dollars over deplatforming allegations. And now Trump ally, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, is trying to buy CNN-owner Warner Bro. Discover, and potentially TikTok.
While this kind of political behavior is disturbing, it’s important to see that there are really two separate problems. The first is Trump’s choices, and he is seeking controls over his critics. The answer to an elected leader doing these kinds of things is ultimately elections. The public must express disapproval, and if they do not, then that is that. Elections aren’t my forte, so I’ll leave that to others.
The second problem is that the tools exist for Trump to engage in a coercive censorship regime because Bill Clinton and a Newt Gingrich-led Republican Congress helped consolidate the media with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which supercharged a wave of media and telecom consolidation kicked off by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. As More Perfect Union noted, “In 1983, 50 companies controlled 90% of the U.S. media market. That number is now down to 5.” If the ability to wield power over content exists, it will likely be purposed, and Trump isn’t the first one to do it….
Why was the 1996 law so important? The fundamental thrust of the Telecom Act was to overturn New Deal restrictions on media consolidation. That law changed strict bright line media ownership rules that prohibited acquisitions of local stations by chains, and moved them to a discretionary system where regulators could approve such acquisitions, which they did and are doing now. It also, not coincidentally, laid the foundation for broadband monopolies with its deregulation of telecom providers, and big tech, with Section 230 that disallowed a whole suite of common law rules from applying to platforms.
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
This Brick Is the World’s Most Boring Climate Solution
[Atmos, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2025]
“If you have solar energy and you want to use it for an industrial process, first thing you need to do is find a way to store it,” O’Donnell said. If he could design a tool capable of storing that electricity, he explained, “we could actually create these conditions where large flows of private capital would build profitable projects that would solve the problem.”
After 15 years of work and prototyping, O’Donnell created his firebrick: the cornerstone of his new company and the defining feature of Rondo Energy’s heat battery.
The battery looks simple; it is anything but. Composed of a stack of bricks placed inside a steel container about half the size of an NBA basketball court, it functions like a rechargeable furnace. Electricity from solar panels and wind turbines flows into the device and gets converted to heat, reaching searing temperatures in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat is locked away, ready to be released hours or days later. When a factory calls for power, air is pushed through the glowing bricks, emerging as a blast of heat or steam hot enough to forge steel or fire cement. AI systems fine-tune the process, delivering precise energy on demand. Designed to be modular and easy to install, these brick batteries can drop into existing facilities, O’Donnell said, replacing fossil-fuel boilers and supplying factories with round-the-clock clean heat….
[International Business Times, September 13, 2025]
In a huge medical breakthrough, scientists in China have reportedly invented a bone glue that sets within three minutes and can heal fractures. The project, known as “Bone-02,” was unveiled to the public by researchers in China’s Zhejiang Province on September 10, according to NDTV, citing local reports.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
The old SF tech scene is dead. What it’s morphing into is far more sinister.
[SF Gate, via The Big Picture, September 18, 2025]
If you commute from the East Bay into the gray heart of San Francisco, you’ll see them everywhere.
They string together nonsense words. They stare at us with dead eyes. They exalt the far right while claiming to be apolitical. And, worst of all, they bully us: As you wait to board the crowded Muni bus home after a long day at work, they brag about how they’ll eventually replace you and rob you of your livelihood.
In the year 2025, billboards advertising artificial intelligence have become inescapable, crowding the city’s skyline and sneering at us from every corner. To the average person, they’re both dystopian and indecipherable, and for cash-bloated executives behind these campaigns, that’s the point….
According to tech recruiters, executives believe that perfectly capable, intelligent people who have been laid off are “table scraps” and “damaged goods.” Mark Zuckerberg wants us to trust and develop relationships with his digital chatbots, stating that “the average American, I think, has fewer than three friends.” Meanwhile, his same company’s guidelines also previously said that it was totally “acceptable” for them “to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.” Marc Benioff is practically frothing at the mouth to cut costs, declaring that now, thanks to his company’s new fleet of AI workers, “We can have less support agents, human support agents, more digital support agents. We can mix our human labor with our digital labor in a new way and create an incredible new Salesforce.” ….
What these tech oligarchs are ultimately telling us, dear friend, is that they simply don’t care about us, and when they finally pillage every last resource the Earth has to offer, they’ll happily throw back $64 olive oil shots while dancing like idiots on our graves.
After child’s trauma, chatbot maker allegedly forced mom to arbitration for $100 payout
[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
Only a third of world’s river basins experienced normal conditions in 2024
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2025]
Increasingly erratic water cycle is creating food scarcity, rising prices, conflict and migration, says UN agency
Did your area just have its most humid summer? Find out.
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture, September 15, 2025]
More than 120 million people across the United States just experienced a near-record humid summer. See how humidity patterns are changing in your region.
Texas Oil Boom Spawns a Toxic Crisis of the Industry’s Own Making
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-20-2025]
Hawk Dunlap fought fires and blowouts in oil fields around the world over a 30-year career, but nothing prepared him for what he found when he finally came home to Texas. There, on the Permian Basin’s dusty expanse, Dunlap encountered towers of toxic wastewater that gushed more than 100 feet (30 meters) in the air, bursting through oil wells cemented shut decades ago. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen in Algeria, Uzbekistan or Iraq.So was the resistance to his attempts to figure out the cause.When Dunlap was asked by a rancher to investigate leaking wells owned by Chevron Corp., he expected state regulators to help. Instead the commission that oversees oil and gas operations in Texas directed the ranch’s concerns to its lawyers. Relations with Chevron deteriorated into an acrimonious lawsuit. And after the rancher captured drone footage of wastewater spewing high into the sky, the regulatory commission made the area a no-fly zone, citing safety concerns….Three years after Dunlap began investigating, the wells are still leaking. The problem of too much wastewater is spreading across America’s biggest oil field, posing a pressing threat to a basin that has grown into a cornerstone of global markets and is critical to President Donald Trump’s push for energy dominance….The RRC has long known that underground water disposal increased the risk of earthquakes. The practice was found to cause seismicity in North Texas around 2008 because the fluid put pressure on natural rock faults, leading them to slip. But the tremors in the early days of the Permian’s growth were small, and the RRC was content to take a “reactive not proactive” approach to seismic activity, according to one internal presentation.The RRC adopted guidelines for permitting disposal wells in seismically active areas in 2019 but was forced to change tack on March 26, 2020, when a 4.9 magnitude earthquake struck near Mentone, Texas, in the heart of the Permian. It was the fifth-biggest in the state’s history and was felt 200 miles away in El Paso.
How Climate Scientists Saw the Future Before It Arrived
[Quanta Magazine, via The Big Picture, September 20, 2025]
Over the past 60 years, scientists have largely succeeded in building a computer model of Earth to see what the future holds. One of the most ambitious projects humankind has ever undertaken has now reached a critical moment.
Democrats’ political malpractice
Right-Wing Propaganda All The Way Down
Brian Beutler, Sep 16, 2025 [Off Message]
I reflect frequently on the hours and days after the January 2021 insurrection, how clear it was to me and a small handful of others that House Democrats should have impeached Donald Trump on January 7, and used his remaining two weeks in office leaning on Mitch McConnell to convene a trial, remove Trump from the presidency, and disqualify him from future office.
Instead, fear and a vision of a future dominated by recriminations took hold of Democrats, and they scattered. Multiple Senate Democrats announced that they didn’t want to dwell on the attack; Nancy Pelosi adjourned the House; the moment of maximal GOP disarray passed; Trump avoided accountability.
When the impeachment trial finally did convene of February 9, after Trump had already left Washington, Senate Democrats were once again half-hearted about it….
“I want to focus as much attention right now on the Biden agenda as possible and minimize the attention on anything other than the Biden agenda,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), before the trial began—forecasting that the trial would be a box-checking exercise.…
I think it’s safe to say there is no longer even a partial symmetry between the parties on this score—particularly after Donald Trump signed his megabill cutting taxes and health care. The entire apparatus of the government is now geared in various ways toward harming and weakening progressives, liberals, leftists, Democrats, and their constituents. That has become the end in and of itself….
Resistance
Joyce Vance, Sep 20, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
On Thursday, E. Jean Carroll started it: Paper Clip Protest.
“Comely Reader! I suggest we all start wearing the paper clip. Subtler than a red hat, more powerful as a CONNECTION,” she wrote, explaining they were also worn during World War II as a sign of resistance against the Nazis.
Norwegian teachers and students wore paper clips to signal their opposition to Nazi occupation. They attached them to their lapels and wore them as jewelry, a symbol of solidarity binding them together as paper clips did with papers. It was a quiet act of defiance, expressing that Norwegians remained united against Nazi rule.
Friday, when I signed on to tape the #SistersInLaw Podcast, Jill Wine Banks had a clip delicately attached to the collar of her shirt. It made me smile. In that moment, I knew E. Jean was onto something. Our defiance can and must be loud and public at this point. But the quiet symbol of solidarity on someone’s collar when you walk into a crowded room? Genius. And much better than a red hat.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Violence As Policy in Trump’s America
Jan-Werner Mueller, Sep 12, 2025 [project-syndicate.org]
Unlike the Democrats and most Americans, many leaders on the right view their supporters’ violence as legitimate.
Debunking ANTIFA — How the alt-right created a meme the Trump regime intends to use in its crackdown
Jim Stewartson, Sep 19, 2025 [MindWar]
[TW: One of the best examinations of how Trumpists created a false, dangerous meme]
…Here is the Google Trends chart for “antifa”—which shows the number of times the word was searched for—showing almost no activity at all until 2017… With the exception of Rose City Antifa, a loose group of anti-racists and antifascists in Portland, Oregon started in 2007 to protest a neo-Nazi festival, it did not exist as a national concept until 2017….
On August 17th, 2017, infamous alt-right troll Microchip posted this petition to the White House. It was picked up by right-wing outlets like Breitbart and promoted heavily through the MAGA echo chamber. Note the spelling, with a capital-F, a flourish that did not survive its later permutations…
A week later, 8/24/17, Politico interviewed Microchip who made it very clear what “antifa” really is:
“It was to bring our broken right side together” after Charlottesville, he said, “and prop up antifa as a punching bag.”
“So the narrative changed from ‘I hate myself because we have neo-Nazis on our side’ to ‘I really hate antifa, let’s get along and tackle the terrorists,’” he explained.
Here are some of the Discord logs released by Microchip, along with his partner James Brower (“Dreamcatcher”) that show them in the process of turning the petition into a weaponized meme….
Despite the continuous stream of hoaxes and lies about the phantom of Antifa, a bill was introduced the House in June 2018, the Unmasking Antifa Act, which sought to penalize people for up to 15 years for wearing a mask while committing a violent act. It didn’t pass, but it validated the idea of “Antifa” as a threat and kept the term in the public consciousness.
Antifa continued to be stoked online through fake accounts through 2019 and by white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys, who used it as their rallying cry—“Fuck Antifa! Fuck Antifa!” This was punctuated by an incident in 2019 in which alt-right provocateur Andy Ngo, working for the Thiel-funded Quillette, was sprayed with silly string and hit with a milkshake by antifascist activists at a Proud Boys rally.
Chris Hedges, Sep 18, 2025
The designation of the amorphous group antifa as a terrorist organization allows the state to brand all dissidents as supporters of antifa and prosecute them as terrorists.
Israel, Charlie Kirk, and the Weaponization of Murder (w/ Max Blumenthal)
Chris Hedges, Sep 15, 2025
Charlie Kirk’s assassination will likely serve as the crux of a new era of political violence and repression in the United States. In the days since Kirk was shot at a speaking event at Utah Valley University, right-wing groups and figures have demanded mass censorship of all critical online speech directed at Kirk. President Donald Trump has effectively attributed the attack to the “radical left” and vowed to go after those he deems responsible. Mass doxing campaigns targeting people who contextualized Kirk’s politics or celebrated his killing has led to firings across the country….
Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade apologizes for saying mentally ill homeless people should be executed
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 09-14-2025]
The South Rises Again
Bishop William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Sep 18, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
“I think this is the time when preachers and those of us in pulpits that have a responsibility to challenge a nation and its morality must say to those in power, “Stop it. Stop lying.” ….
Donald Trump has demonstrated that he has the power to remove some comedians who mock him on national news networks and to punish journalists who tell the truth about him and the agenda he is enacting. But he is not the first authoritarian in US history to abuse power while he invests in propaganda to spread lies and distract attention from the way their policies harm most Americans.
We are both from North Carolina, where authoritarians manipulated the truth for generations to cling to power. Plantation owners were outraged when a democratically elected legislature, made up of Black and white citizens for the first time, imposed taxes on their extreme wealth in order to guarantee public education to everyone in the state after the Civil War. Because public education was popular, those authoritarians did not channel their anger into a political campaign to cut education. Instead, they invested in propaganda that played on racial fears to pit white people against Black neighbors. Their lies inspired lynch mobs that terrorized generations of citizens in the Jim Crow South….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Secret Curriculum That Rewired America’s Judges
Lucy Dean Stockton, Sep 11, 2025 [The Lever]
new study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics reveals that nearly half of U.S. federal judges attended crash courses in economics at the conservative-leaning Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges between 1976 and 1999 — and it changed how they behaved on the bench.
Reviewing more than a million circuit and district court rulings, the study’s researchers found that after attending the popular economics “training,” judges ruled against regulators more often and imposed more severe sentences against criminals.
This isn’t the first evidence that “law and economics” courses push judges to the right. The same authors previously found that Manne attendees were less likely to rule in favor of environmental or union regulations and gave longer prison sentences to federal defendants….
Civic republicanism
We’ve Just Crowned a King. What Next?
Thomas Neuburger, Sep 16, 2025 [God’s Spies]
“When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”
—Richard NixonI recently wrote a piece, unpublished so far, that contends at length that it’s over constitutionally. The state has been transformed, by both corrupt parties, into an American kingship. I’ve been writing an ongoing series (“The Fourth American Constitution”) contending just that.
The change is now complete, the last piece in place. Yes, the corner cases need to be sorted, cases that in practice will almost never occur — for example, could the president commit rape in the nation’s defense? But the territory is already marked, defined, surveyed. Unstopped reconstruction is next.
In defense of that point, I want to go back to the ruling in Trump v. US, the one that cements what previous administrations have tended toward, that the president has near-absolute power….
[Slate:]: “Georgetown Law’s Marty Lederman promptly flagged that holding as a “profound” shift in the law, one that will be “weaponized” by “executive branch lawyers and officials for time immemorial.” He also noted that this new rule is not limited to the Justice Department, but seemingly applies to all federal agencies, many of which have their own law enforcement operations. Roberts essentially decreed that Congress may no longer bar the president from corrupting these agencies by instructing them to open fraudulent investigations and lie to the public. That is, Lederman warned, “an extraordinarily radical proposition”—a loaded gun that an unscrupulous president could easily brandish to shoot down the rule of law.” ….
The focus on ‘what to do next’ is now first in our thoughts. This will mean testing ideas, refining, revising. I’ll offer these few ideas initially:
- It’s important to accept, unflinchingly, where we are. Middle class wealth and power of the 1950s and 60s — relative at least to our nation’s previous years — is gone for good. Attacked by every administration from Reagan till now, it will not come back.
- National Democrats, in the aggregate, offer little protection. At best they slow the decline, at worst they concur.
- The solution will come from outside regular channels, if one comes at all.
I’ll expand on (3) later. Many paths come to mind, from national dismembership due to climate change stress (this could be a good thing), to something that looks like a slow-moving civil revolt or general strike.
I’ll say for free that at least one of those things will occur — I’m just not sure which will come first, or who of us will be ready, when that time comes, to mobilize toward the next phase….
From Saul To Manasseh to Trump: The Bible’s Long, Sordid Warning About Corrupt Leaders
Howie Klein, September 20, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…The text says even Josiah’s later reforms cannot undo the damage. This is the warning for our moment— not to mention current-day Isarel’s— a president (and prime minister) who undermines democratic institutions and traditions so deeply that even their successors will struggle to repair them, who normalize cruelty and political violence so thoroughly that it becomes the new baseline.
Again and again, Kings repeats, “He did evil in the sight of the LORD.” Again and again, the people tolerate it until disaster hits. The authors of these books aren’t just writing history; they’re writing a sermon about political reality. Bad leadership isn’t just personal failure— it hollows out institutions, hardens hearts, and drags a whole nation into ruin. There were reformist kings, Hezekiah and Josiah, who tried to restore justice and covenant faithfulness. Renewal proven possible but fragile. Their efforts showed that even after long seasons of corruption, a leader can begin to heal the breach— but only if the people demand it, and only if they remember the cost of complacency.The books of Kings end with Jerusalem destroyed, the Temple burned, the people in exile. The text’s moral is clear: a nation that tolerates corrupt rulers, that shrugs at injustice and idolatry, will eventually lose its freedom. The authors of the Hebrew Bible told this story so that later generations would not repeat it….
Aurelien [via Naked Capitalism 09-18-2025]
There are certainly different parties in western countries today, as there are ostensibly competing banks and mobile phone providers, and some of them have retained historic names. But as with banks and mobile phone companies, a lot of effort goes into publicity and advertising, but very little into real competition. In effect, politics in most western countries resembles a commercial cartel, where competition is strictly limited and the members of the cartel divide the market between them and fiercely resist the arrival of newcomers. This is what has produced the system I usually describe as the Party.
The result is that the established political parties have their own priorities, developed and enforced from the top down, and see no need (in that deadly phrase of 80s Labour Party militants) to “appease the electorate.” In most western countries, the concerns of the electorate are clear: standard of living, the economy, crime, uncontrolled immigration and public services. These are not the priorities of the ruling elites, and they see no reason to bestir themselves to satisfy mere voters. So in effect, the supply and demand curves now have no relationship: the axes never cross. Now of course if the market analogy were in any way accurate, you ought to see new parties appearing, catering to those parts of the political market that existing parties are not addressing. And that is what the Liberal theory of politics would suggest. But it isn’t quite like that, because almost all the new (and mostly transitory) parties that do appear are based solely on opposition to the current political system. There’s a limit to how far you can take that. And then what would actually you do if you ever had a share of power?
This is in a context where, as I’ve pointed out many times, today’s establishment politicians are not even very good at politics, or at running their own party. The British Labour Party was always something of a mess, but Mr Starmer’s version of it, whether as a government or just a political party, sets new standards for amateurishness and incompetence, combined with a vindictive approach to dissent. As a result, the Labour Party could not offer potential voters any genuine reason why they should vote for it in 2024, other than as a way of ejecting the widely-despised Tories, which is indeed what happened. That is typical of a political system where voters are encouraged to vote against parties, rather than for any positive agenda. And just as large private-sector companies now serve the interests of their managers and shareholders alone, and ignore and exploit their customers, so political parties now serve only the interests of their leaders and (in some cases) their donors, and ignore and exploit their voters.
The consequence is that ruling parties and the governments they form are actually weak, not strong. Behind the facade of bluster, the attempts to suppress dissent and to introduce ever more intrusive laws, are groups of frightened individuals out of their depth with problems they had never imagined would ruffle the feathers of their placid managerial world, lacking much public support, and lashing out indiscriminately and often randomly at what they see as threats….
We thus arrive at the central contradiction of modern politics, for all that it is seldom articulated. The current political system is widely hated and despised, its leaders are recognised to be incompetent, and the states they govern are becoming weaker and less effective all the time. They are overwhelmed by current crises, and are frightened by the depth of public resistance and opposition, which they make no attempt to understand. They are well aware of the fragility of the systems they head, and they know that a relatively small but determined push from the streets would topple them. They also know that Right-wing fantasies of mowing down demonstrators with machine-guns are just that: fantasies. But, other than insulting and threatening the electorate, they have no real strategy for staying in power, gimmicks like AI and drones notwithstanding….
…western governments hang on less because of their own strength, than because their opponents, whilst strong numerically, lack discipline; organisation and ideology. Of those, I suggest that the last is the most important, because it makes the first two possible. History tends to agree. The Liberal intellectuals of the eighteenth century did not bring about the French Revolution, but they coopted it because they had an ideology. The Bolsheviks did not overthrow the Tsar, but in Lenin’s famous phrase they “found power lying in the streets” and took it. And the Islamists in Iran were only one of the actors in the overthrow of the Shah, but their ideology gave them the organisation and discipline to take over the country. It’s striking that, in each case, a superficially strong regime turned out to be incapable of facing a real challenge when it arrived. (I still remember the consternation and disbelief in western governments when the Shah’s regime collapsed like a pack of cards.) The problem is that waiting for collapse is not enough: I continue to insist that politics is like engineering: it requires forces to act on a body get things done. And the instruction manual, if you like, has to be based on an ideology….
…The lack of ideology in today’s ruling class, or even of interest in it, produces people with no firm principles, and no beliefs that go beyond tired performative clichés. When power is the only motivating factor, and when much of that power is acquired and held only by defeating others, there is no chance of any group solidarity developing, and that is the essential reason for the fragility of our present system. No-one is going to die, or even make personal sacrifices, for the European Growth and Stability Pact, or for the right of people to use the toilets of their choice, even though they may happily persecute others. But of course even very fragile systems can endure for long periods of time until something arrives to push them over.