Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 17, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest
Alex Horton and David Ovalle, August 12, 2025 [Washington Post]
The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.
Jim Stewartson, Aug 11, 2025 [MindWar]
[The Guardian, via The Big Picture August 10, 2025]
Video from Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio, 18, puts fresh scrutiny on the harsh tactics used to reach the Trump administration’s ambitious enforcement targets.
Trump: Now the Cops Can ‘Do Whatever the Hell They Want’
Harold Meyerson, August 12, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…D.C.’s police union reacted to Trump’s takeover with unconcealed glee; like many cop unions, it gives voice to those officers who see themselves as occupying hostile territory and being held back from sufficiently forceful action. The union, in an official statement it released yesterday, said it “acknowledges and supports the President’s announcement this morning to assume temporary control of the MPD in response to the escalating crime crisis in Washington, DC. The Union agrees that crime is spiraling out of control, and immediate action is necessary to restore public safety.”….
Just as the presence of troops in L.A. provoked protests, so Trump is hoping that the quality of his now enhanced D.C. policing will provoke protests even if the quantity of newly deployed troops and agents isn’t in itself up to the task. In his press conference yesterday, he all but ordered the cops to run amok. Currently, he said, “they’re not allowed to do anything. But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want.”
Masked Border Protection Agents Open Fire on Family’s Truck After Smashing Its Windows
Brad Reed, Aug 17, 2025 [CommonDreams]
A video of the incident filmed from inside the truck showed the passengers asked the agents to provide identification, which they declined to do.
An agent was then heard demanding that the father, who had been driving the truck, get out of the vehicle. Seconds later, the agent started smashing the car’s windows in an attempt to get inside the vehicle.
The father then hit the gas to try to escape, after which several shots could be heard as agents opened fire. Local news station KTLA reported that, after the father successfully fled the scene, he called local police and asked for help because “masked men” had opened fire on his truck.
Steve Vladek [via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2025]
…it seems worth putting into context both the historical relationship between the federal government and the District of Columbia and the relevant current statutes. To make a long story short, the Constitution gives the federal government “plenary” authority over the “seat of government.” But just about everything else—including the fact that the District of Columbia is the “seat of government”—is up to Congress.
And although Congress has retained, both for itself and the President, more authority over D.C. than over any other federal enclave (including, as especially relevant today, with regard to the National Guard and the Metropolitan Police Department), the critical point for present purposes is that it was Congress that created and stood up a local government in 1973. Congress may have the constitutional power to return the city to true federal control, but the President can’t do it all by himself….
Trump’s crackdown hits Washington — federalized police NOT deployed in DC’s high crime areas
ZACK STANTON, 08/17/2025 [politico.com/playbook]
For supporters of the president’s actions, crime in the district is a blaring crisis that merits an overwhelming federal response to avoid something like failed-state status. They point out that crime, while on a downward trend, is unacceptably commonplace (the district’s homicide rate is still “almost as high as New York’s at its most dangerous, in 1990,” NYT’s Maureen Dowd notes). It demands a round-the-clock response, with FBI agents patrolling the street on foot. … And yet, much of the federal response has been concentrated in some of the safest areas of the city rather than those neighborhoods most devastated by crime. More than half of the district’s homicides last year occurred across the Anacostia River in Wards 7 and 8, The Atlantic’s Michael Powell writes; as recently as Friday, they had yet to see much of a federal response, per USA Today’s Josh Meyer.
How Pretexts Work — A manufactured crisis unfolds.
Hamilton Nolan, Aug 15, 2025 [How Things Work]
Trump’s Invasion Of D.C. Started On K Street
[The Lever, August 12, 2025]
Before the president seized control of Washington, D.C.’s police, corporate lobbyists posed as local businesses to drum up panic about local crime.
Heather Cox Richardson. August 11, 2025 [Letters from an American]
The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”
Ip points to the government’s partial control over U.S. Steel that it took as a condition for Nippon Steel’s takeover, the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners that Trump has claimed the right to direct personally, the 15% of certain chip sales of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to China that will go to the administration (although who or what entity will get that money I can’t figure out), and Trump’s demand that the chief executive of Intel resign.
Ip calls this system of state capitalism “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” He notes that it is a “sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.”
Ip also notes that state capitalism is a means of political control, using the power of the state to crush political challenges. “In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade,” Ip writes. “Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.” Ip pointed out that Trump is deploying financial power and regulatory power to cow media companies, banks, law firms, and government agencies he thinks are not sufficiently supportive.
Trump Has a Bonkers New Rating System for Private Companies
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, August 15, 2025 [The New Republic]
The Trump administration has released a scorecard to rank the endeavors of some 553 companies and trade associations to advance the president’s agenda and his “big, beautiful bill.”
Organizations are ranked on the sheet as strong, moderate, or low, Axios reported Friday, with ratings built off social media posts, press releases, video testimonials, ads, White House event attendance, and other budget law–oriented efforts.
The data is being circulated among White House senior staff as a temperature gauge on how to interact with companies and open calls with K Street (a nickname for Washington’s business district)….
Joyce Vance, Aug 14, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
This afternoon, a three-judge panel in the D.C. Circuit signed off on the Trump administration’s efforts to block funds for foreign assistance that have been appropriated by Congress. Despite arguments made by the plaintiffs that this violates Congress’ Article II Spending powers, the court ruled that only the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has the ability to bring Impoundment Control Act (ICA) claims. Impoundment refers to a decision by a president to delay spending or withhold funds that Congress has allocated in the budget. The GAO was not a party to this lawsuit, although it has made multiple findings that this administration has violated the ICA in other regards.
The court’s decision was 2-1, with Judges Karen Henderson and Gregory Katsas in the majority and Judge Florence Pan dissenting. As Judge Pan notes in dissent, they reframed the issues argued by the government in order to rule in its favor, so that they could “excuse the government’s forfeiture of what they perceive to be a key argument, and then rule in the President’s favor on that ground, thus departing from procedural norms that are designed to safeguard the court’s impartiality and independence.” There will likely be a motion to ask the full court to rehear the case en banc, with all active judges sitting, before the losing party takes it to the Supreme Court….
Men DOGEbags at Work
A DOGE AI Tool Called SweetREX Is Coming to Slash US Government Regulation
[WIRED, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2025]
Strategic Political Economy
China Is Choking Supply of Critical Minerals to Western Defense Companies
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture August 10, 2025]
For the US, it’s Mountain Pass – or fail – in bid to supplant China’s rare earth supremacy
Alice Li and Kandy Wong, 6 Aug 2025 [South China Morning Post]
Rare earths are needed for everything from consumer electronics to electric vehicles, wind turbines and fighter jets – and China controls the supply chain. In the second of a four-part series, we look at how China gradually took a commanding role in the rare earth industry, and how the US is now working to strengthen its sources and production….
The Urgent Need For Revolutionizing Economic Statistics
[Noema, via Naked Capitalism 08-10-2025]
Russia / Ukraine
Scraping the Barrel: Attrition and Cannibalization
[Big Serge, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2025]
THE RUSSIA I DREAM OF FORGETTING; WHAT PEOPLE ARE DYING FOR IN UKRAINE
Marat Khairullin [Substack, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2025]
[TW: A disturbingly graphic description of the human cost of the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the most distressing articles I’ve ever read. Khairullin does not point out the obvious — Putin being seen as the man who put an end to these conditions is why he is immensely popular in Russia. Compare that to western elites being stubbornly blind to the damage caused by their neoliberal policies over the past half century.]
Ukraine’s Patriots Now Struggling To Intercept Enhanced Russian Ballistic Missiles
Joseph Trevithick, Aug 14, 2025 [The War Zone]
U.S. intel confirms that improvements to Russia’s ballistic missiles are proving to be a major challenge for the Patriot air defense system….
…“the UAF [Ukrainian Air Force] struggled to consistently use Patriot air defense systems to protect against Russian ballistic missiles due to recent Russian tactical improvements, including enhancements that enable their missiles to change trajectory and perform maneuvers rather than flying in a traditional ballistic trajectory,” according to a Special Inspector General report released this week.
This particular passage is cited to “DIA, response to DoD OIG request for information.” The entire report, which was jointly put together by the Offices of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of State, and U.S. Agency for International Development, discusses U.S. government activities related to Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe between April 1 and June 30.
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Leaked Cabinet transcript reveals Israel chose to starve Gaza as a strategy of war
Qassam Muaddi, Aug 7, 2025 [defenddemocracy.press]
Israel decided to starve the people of Gaza as a strategy of war and in order to sabotage the ceasefire deal, according to Israeli cabinet meeting minutes leaked on Wednesday to Israel’s Channel 13.
The document purports to show that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused multiple proposals that would have secured the release of the remaining Israeli captives during the ceasefire between January and March 2025. Netanyahu decided to break the ceasefire, against the advice of top Israeli military and security officials, and to cut off all aid to Gaza to “force Hamas to surrender,” the leak shows….
Netanyahu chose to blow up the ceasefire and starve Gaza’s population in order to force a surrender from Hamas, while top military and security officials favored moving to the second phase of a ceasefire, leaked cabinet meeting minutes reveal.
Poll: 4 in 5 Jewish Israelis Not Troubled By Situation in Gaza
Kyle Anzalone, Aug 6, 2025 [defenddemocracy.press]
The ongoing starvation crisis and genocide inflicted on the people of Gaza are not causing concern among most Jewish Israelis, according to a new poll.
Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Aug 11, 2025 [Drop Site News]
In All of History, Gaza Is the Most Dangerous Place Ever for Journalists
Farrah Hassen, Aug 17, 2025 [OtherWords, via CommonDreams]
Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza than have died in essentially all other modern conflicts combined. But their work is still reaching the world.
In one night, Israel murdered Al Jazeera’s entire media crew in Gaza City.
The Israeli military admitted to assassinating the journalists in an August 10 airstrike on a media tent outside Al-Shifa hospital. The strike killed Al Jazeera Arabic correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal.
Freelance cameraman Moamen Aliwa and reporter Mohammad al-Khaldi were also killed….
Nearly 270 journalists and media workers, the vast majority of them Palestinians, have been killed by Israel since October 7, 2023. They are not “collateral damage” — they’re being hunted.
According to Brown University’s Watson Institute, more journalists have been killed in Gaza over the past two years than in the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine combined….
The Brainrot of a Nazified Society
[BettBeat, via Moon of Alabama 08-11-2025]
The statistics are as chilling as they are revealing. Four out of five Jewish Israelis express no concern for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, as Israeli bombs began falling on Palestinian civilians, optimism about the country’s future shot up dramatically among the Israeli public. This was not the response of a people in genuine fear for their survival—this was the euphoria of a population finally given permission to unleash its darkest impulses.
What we are witnessing in Israel today is the logical endpoint of a process that Hannah Arendt warned us about decades ago: the transformation of ordinary people into willing participants in systematic brutality through the machinery of a fascist state. It is what happens when a society becomes so thoroughly “nazified“—to borrow the stark but accurate term from American Exception podcast host Aaron Good—that mass murder becomes not just acceptable, but cause for celebration….
All Talk, No Action: Why Doesn’t the West Intervene in Gaza?
[Haaretz, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2025]
Michael G. Holzman, Aug 10, 2025 [theunpopulist.net]
He wants to give Protestant America the right to disempower other faiths and ethnic groups so that Israel can do the same
Oligarchy
Richard Murphy, August 16 2025 [Funding the Future]
The frequent commentator on this blog who uses the name Schofield suggested this morning, in response to today’s video, that:
“Not being willing to pay tax is a form of “sociocide” a rupturing of the social fabric because a government’s ability to create money from nothing in order to spend on reserves for the payment settlement system, deal with emergencies, and optimise the economy requires a return flow in the form of taxation in order to avoid triggering strong inflationary pressures. Rich people who try to avoid paying an equitable share of taxes should therefore be called “sociocidal”! “
I did some quick research and noted that the term “sociocide” is not new. The philosopher and sociologist Johan Galtung suggested it in the 1980s when explaining that there are many ways to destroy a society….
I think it might be appropriate to call tax avoidance by the wealthy sociocidal. It is not merely a technical problem or a matter of loopholes and supposedly clever lawyers and accountants who abuse them. It is a deliberate assault on the bonds that hold us together.
If we are to rebuild societies fit for the future, naming this behaviour for what it is can be important. Those who undermine the common good in the pursuit of private gain are not innovators or wealth-creators. Nor are they astute financial planners. They are simply destroying the very possibility of society itself. And if that is not sociocide, I am not sure what is.
San Francisco estate auction offers peek into Dianne Feinstein’s private world
[SFGate, via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Corporate America’s New Ploy To Trap Workers
Luke Goldstein, Aug 12, 2025 [The Lever]
…These are all examples of how millions of workers across the country are increasingly finding themselves bound by Training Repayment Agreement Provisions (TRAPs), a new form of “stay-or-pay” contract that indebts employees to their bosses. Often inserted into contracts without workers’ knowledge, these restrictive labor covenants turn employer-sponsored job training and education programs into conditional loans that must be paid back — sometimes at a premium — if employees leave before a set date….
Employers argue that these clauses are a way to recoup their investment in employees who decide to leave the company prematurely. But these contracts have come under fire from labor groups and regulators. Oftentimes, the amount of debt demanded under TRAP contracts — which can be upward of $50,000 — is far higher than the employer’s training costs….
Last month, the California Attorney General’s office announced a $1.5 billion multistate settlement with HCA Healthcare, one of the largest for-profit hospital networks in the country, for its illegal use of TRAPs to demand low-paid nurses pay for their $4,000 training expenses. As part of that initial lawsuit, the California Nurses Association conducted a survey finding that 40 percent of new nurses nationwide have been forced to sign a TRAP….
Transformer supply bottleneck threatens power system stability as load grows
[Utility Dive, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2025]
Trumpillnomics
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2025]
This is, without exaggerating, one of the most extraordinary things a US Treasury Secretary ever said.It should be mandatory viewing for all citizens of US “allies”, Europeans first and foremost.What Bessent is saying is that the US will now treat US allies’ wealth as an American “sovereign wealth fund” (his words), “directing” them, “largely at the [US] president’s discretion”, how to use their money in order to build American factories and reshore American industries. Even the Fox News host can’t believe it, calling it “offshore appropriation”, another word for theft.That’s exactly what it is: straight up unabashed colonial plunder.That’s the pattern we see emerge: unable to extract wealth or win wars against an increasingly strong Global South, the US has turned inward to feast on its own “allies” – who can’t resist precisely because they depend on their exploiter for military “protection”. They’re as defenseless against American wealth extraction as any 19th-century colony was against its colonial “protector.” That’s exactly what I wrote in my latest article on “Europe’s colonial moment”: https://open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbertrand/p/not-at-the-table-europes-colonial?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4r0pw
Foreign investors disappear from US Treasury auctions, as China borrows at the lowest rates ever
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2025]
Trump’s tax law will mostly benefit the rich, while leaving poorer Americans with less, CBO says
[Associated Press, via North Carolina AFL-CIO, August 15, 2025]
GRAPH — CBO expects poor Americans to become poorer under Trump / Republican Big Bill.
[The Lever Daily, Aug 12, 2025]
Bobby Kogan [Congressional Budget Office, via The Lever Daily, Aug 12, 2025]
Tariffs wiping out American farmers on all sides, and farm equipment manufacturers are laying off
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 08-13-2025]
…The export markets for American farms have disappeared. There is no other way to say it. The BRICS countries – namely Russia and Brazil, are having no problem supplying markets that used to be served by American farmers….
Across global markets, US soybean sales are the lowest level in almost 20 years. The buyers aren’t there, crop prices are plunging, and everything on the input side costs a lot more because of the tariffs. Fertilizer prices are going up, along with costs for tools and machinery. Phosphate and potash imports are down 20% from last year, as prices are going way up. US farms saw a 35% price increase in just this year alone for fertilizers.
The tariffs are also hitting capital spending for heavy equipment. AGCO is a major manufacturer of farm tractors, and they’re raising prices, along with their competitors. And that is hitting demand….
Thirty percent of ag equipment built in the United States is exported, and Canada is the biggest market for it. The Canadians aren’t buying, and Case New Holland announced big layoffs for their plants in North Dakota and Minnesota….
And remember, these Canadian farmers have the same problem American farmers have got. China is seeing record harvests on their own farms—this year’s harvest of summer wheat is just slightly below last year’s, which was a record, and is a major contributor to falling wheat prices everywhere. And China is moving its supply chains around for whatever they’re not growing enough of themselves, to friendly countries. Russia, South America – and even Kazakhstan now – they’ve have stepped up to satisfy global demand—not just for China–and fill orders that used to go through Australia and North America.
Trump and the GOP’s goal is to “exterminate” the disability community
Dean Obeidallah, Aug 10, 2025
“They want to exterminate us.”
Those were the blunt words of Steve Way—a long time disability rights activist—to describe Donald Trump and the GOP’s multi-front war targeting the disability community. Way—who was born with Muscular Dystrophy—explained that the GOP’s cutting $1 trillion dollars from Medicaid, gutting of the Department of Education and rolling back of protections for the disability community are all intended to make them “undesirable.” He added in a very matter of fact way, “They want to get rid of us,” that is why, “we need to call this for what it is: It’s eugenics.” ….
We’ve never seen such a laser focused effort by an administration to undermine the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—which just marked its 35th anniversary–that ensured every American could participate fully in society. As Rep. Lateefah Simon (D-Calif)–who is legally blind–explained to me, the Trump policies will at the very least lead to a more “segregated” society when it comes to those with disabilities.
One of the deadliest examples of Trump and GOP’s war on the disability community comes in the form of their heartless $1 trillion cut to Medicaid to fund a tax cut for their wealthy donors. Medicaid is a lifeline for more than 15 million Americans with disabilities–including 2.3 million children, 8 million working-age adults, and 4 million adults ages 65 and older….
Survey: Tariffs Have Caused Double-Digit Operating Cost Hikes at Nearly Half of Companies
Geert De Lombaerde, Aug. 13, 2025 [IndustryWeek]
Greedflation Is Back as Corporations Use the Tariff Excuse to Hike Prices
Matt Stoller [BIG , via Naked Capitalism 08-15-2025]
Martin Filler, August 10, 2025 [The New York Review]
Condé Nast’s editors shone brightest in its premillennial heyday, but the media company’s opaque proprietor, S. I. Newhouse Jr., made his most consequential discovery in Donald Trump….
Grynbaum zeroes in on Cohn as the link between Si Newhouse and Donald Trump, a connection that Thomas Maier first explored in his excellent 1994 biography Newhouse but that has since attained epochal significance. Exact contemporaries born in 1927, Cohn and Newhouse both lived on Park Avenue and bonded as preteens at the private Horace Mann School. Cohn went on to become a notorious New York lawyer with mob connections and a political fixer who rose to prominence as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the televised Army–McCarthy congressional hearings of 1954.
I became aware of the extent to which these childhood pals were still attached during a weekend stay that my wife, our son, and I had in 1984 at the Newhouses’ Palm Beach getaway, Casa Nova (a play on the family name), a Spanish Revival mansion designed by Marion Sims Wyeth, architect of Mar-a-Lago. After we returned from a walk on the beach with Si and Victoria, her mother, Bettina Carrington Benedict (who lived in Palm Beach), announced, “While you were out, Roy phoned.” The two men spoke every day, and while Si went into another room to return Cohn’s call, we waited to begin lunch and tried not to eavesdrop.
Two years later Cohn died from complications of AIDS, and in 1987 Vanity Fair ran an article titled “Roy Cohn’s Last Days.” Written by David Lloyd Marcus, a Miami Herald reporter and a cousin of the subject, it was a forthright exposé that identified his final lover and detailed the extreme lengths to which Cohn went to conceal his condition. But it made no mention of the subject’s enduring friendship with Newhouse.
Not least among the book’s revelations is the belief of Si Newhouse’s first wife (and Pamela Mensch’s mother), Jane Franke, that his best friend helped ruin their marriage. The couple met as Syracuse undergraduates, wed in 1951, and had three children. She came from a middle-class Jewish family in Westchester and was content to be a homebody. But as Grynbaum writes, based on interviews with Franke, “Cohn was also subtly driving a wedge between Si and Jane, suggesting to Si that, given his family fortune, he could aim higher for a spouse.” They divorced in 1959 (with Cohn acting as Si’s lawyer). Although it took Newhouse fourteen years to remarry, his next spouse, Victoria Carrington Benedict de Ramel, is the Brearley-and-Bryn-Mawr-educated ex-wife of a French count.
The Newhouse–Cohn relationship has received less attention now that Cohn is best remembered as Donald Trump’s Svengali. During the 1970s, as the Queens real estate brat sought to make a name for himself in Manhattan, the controversial attorney took him under his wing. In 1984 Condé Nast’s GQ magazine ran Graydon Carter’s zingy cover story on Trump. The issue sold so well that in due course Newhouse insisted the developer write a book for Random House, which Advance Publications had acquired four years earlier….
Predatory finance
Everyone Is Along for the Crypto Ride Now, Even if It Ends Badly
[Barron’s, via The Big Picture August 10, 2025]
The Trump administration is helping put digital assets at the heart of the financial industry. The next crash will be very different.
Scams And Bribery Are Becoming the Foundation of Our Economy
Hamilton Nolan, Aug 12, 2025 [How Things Work]
The United States government taking steps to deliberately introduce cryptocurrency into the heart of our nation’s economy is kind of like a healthy person deciding to pick up a syringe and inject an unknown, harmful virus into themselves. Stick it right in the heart there! Make sure it gets into every last vein and capillary! Let’s see what this sucker does. Hey—it’s the future!
What is crypto? It is not anything. Is it money? No. Its value fluctuates far too drastically for it to be a proper currency. Is it an investment? Not really. A stock or a bond is a tangible claim on some future revenue stream; real estate and commodities are physical things that you can use even if their price drops. Crypto coins, or tokens, or however it pleases you to visualize these bits of ephemeral code, are pure speculative baubles, endowed with value only to the extent that you can convince another person to pay you more for them than you paid. They are a claim on nothing. They are the grandest embodiment of Greater Fool Theory ever invented by mankind. For most regular people, trying to work and save and invest for retirement, this is all that you need to know about cryptocurrencies.
The most meaningful use case for crypto—the one that we can use if we are trying to ascribe the least scammy motives to crypto people—is that they will one day create a global monetary system that sits completely outside of the control of governments. Is this a desirable thing? Though it is possible to conjure up use cases when this seems good (“the resistance supporters abroad must be able to stealthily funnel resources to the brave resistance fighters inside the dictatorship!”), the real answer to this is “no,” especially not if you believe in things like “financial regulation to protect consumers” and “responsible monetary policies carried out by central banks in order to stave off depressions and whatnot.”
But what if you don’t believe in those things? What if the totality of your view of the entire global economy is “I gotta get mine, and once that is done, fuck the world?” Well, in that case, you might be quite drawn to the crypto industry….
Private Equity Managers Are Primed to Pounce on Your 401(k)
Eric Salzman, Aug 13 2025 [Racket News]
President Trump has made the move to firmly hit private equity’s (PE) G-Spot: unfettered access to the $12 trillion 401(k) market. This past Thursday, Trump signed an executive order Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(K) Investors
The order directs the Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer to review and potentially remove the biggest obstacle PE has had in gaining access to 401(k) plans, most notably the plan manager being sued for not performing their fiduciary responsibilities by investing in PE. That’s what happened in 2015 when Intel employees sued the company for what they considered to be lousy returns from PE investments….
U.S. corporations on track to buy back over $1.1 trillion this year (graph)
[The Wall Street Journal , via Lever Daily, Aug 11, 2025
U.S. corporations are on track to buy back more than $1.1 trillion of their own stock in 2025, more than ever before.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Fintan O’Toole, August 12, 2025 [The New York Review]
…For Trump, the great problem of the Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. It is a hybrid of fevered conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy. It lives at once in a gothic horror movie he has helped to script and in the all-too-tangible world of untrammeled power and merciless exploitation he actually inhabits. It provokes both wild surmises and entirely rational questions. This is a combustible mix that Trump does not know how to control….
…Yet this tactic has of course been spectacularly successful—it has helped Trump to become a two-time president. It works because, being pure invention, it does not need to concern itself with mere evidence. These conspiracies float in the Trumpian universe of alternative facts—otherwise known as fictions. They are part of the never-ending show in which Trump demands of his fans not belief in the veracity of his claims but rather suspension of disbelief. What matters is those emotions of dread and antagonism, and Trump has always understood that lurid fictions are the most effective in provoking them….
QAnon, like Trump’s own conspiracy theories, is a solution without a problem, a signifier without a signified. It recycles preexisting paranoid tropes: the antisemitic myth of Jews preying on Christian children (one of QAnon’s most visible early influencers ranted about the “synagogue of Satan”); the threat of witches in league with the devil; the promise of an omnipotent messiah (in this case Trump himself) who will vanquish the evildoers and instigate a new order. It also offers a more specific flight from contemporary reality: it is hard not to see the popularity of QAnon among conservative Christians as a displacement of the anxiety generated by the revelation of widespread child abuse by evangelical church leaders and Catholic priests. (One study found that in 2016 and 2017, when QAnon was taking off, there were “192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography.”) The rerouting of these horrors onto a cabal of senior Democrats is a way of coping with the cognitive dissonance generated by the betrayals….
…the Epstein case gave QAnon’s believers a foothold in reality. There truly was a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by a man with very close connections to business and political elites….
Trump’s difficulty with the QAnon-influenced section of his base, however, is that people whose preconceptions include the existence of a massive conspiracy of elite pedophile satanists are not well trained in the habits of skepticism. And for a time, rather than telling them to forget all about it, Trump encouraged those people to double down on their belief in a massive Epstein-related conspiracy. In August 2019, after Epstein’s apparent suicide in prison, Trump retweeted a post: “Died of SUICIDE on 24/7 SUICIDE WATCH? Yeah right! How does that happen #JefferyEpstein (sic) had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.”….
The undead Epstein continues to stalk the land partly because of the overlap of his true story with QAnon’s wild imaginings and partly because his vampiric activities dramatize much larger realities. He embodies the monstrously exploitative operations of both patriarchy and social class. As with Dracula, the superrich overlord is the predator and the girls from working-class families are the prey. Many of Epstein’s victims lived in financially precarious households in West Palm Beach—as the Justice Department put it, they were “typically from single-mother households and difficult financial circumstances.” The two or three hundred dollars they were each offered to perform massages on middle-aged men was a lot of money for these girls and their families. To cross the bridge into Palm Beach was to enter a different world of extravagant opulence. This is a tale of two Americas, and of the awful things one of them can do to the other.
Trump’s political genius lies in his ability to embody these same realities of male power and economic abuse while simultaneously presenting himself as the savior of those who suffer under them. But Epstein is his all too obviously evil twin. He reminds Trump’s base what an exploitative elite really looks like. His network of friends and enablers brings back to their minds Trump’s original political message of 2015 and 2016: the idea that the true divide is not between Republicans and Democrats but between parasitic elites and ordinary people. His proximity to Epstein threatens to drag Trump back onto the side of that line where he actually belongs….
Is Trump Protecting a Child Sex Trafficker?
David Atkins, August 14, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
We are witnessing in real time what may be the biggest cover-up in modern American history by a sitting president of one of the worst imaginable alleged crimes a person can commit.
[Going Deep with Russ Baker, August 11 2025
In an interview with the UK’s Telegraph, Epstein’s chef and driver in France, Valdson Cotrin, who remains loyal to his late boss, said that he, too, did not believe Epstein killed himself.
Equally tantalizing, Cotrin said Epstein told him he had been offered a job by Donald Trump in his first administration in 2016, but that Epstein had turned it down.
Murder, Drugs, and The Fort Bragg Cartel — A Look Into the Dark Underbelly of Special Operations
Andrew Cockburn, Aug 12, 2025 [Spoils of War]
The Global War on Terror launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks is broadly and correctly perceived as a pointless saga of waste and failure. But in his just published book The Fort Bragg Cartel, Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, reporter Seth Harp, himself a veteran of the regular Army, delves deep into the essence of that war, or rather wars, by describing in chilling detail the wreckage inflicted on its principal practitioners, the U.S. Special Forces headquartered at Fort Bragg, adjacent to Fayetteville, North Carolina, and more specifically the elite, highly trained, and privileged unit known as Delta Force, which operates under the auspices of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). As he recounts, the terror war was essentially a program of widespread assassination and Delta, with the full blessing of higher command, was a primary instrument of that task. This led to the slaughter of countless men, women, and children around the globe, as “targeted killing” operations (further euphemised as “night raids”) swept up innocents in their wake. Through officially promoted books and movies, American society has been schooled to cherish the notion of an elite, fearless, warrior force, but as Harp details in the stories of particular individuals, the reality was all too often one of progressive dehumanization and moral corruption, devolving into a culture of addiction, drug trafficking, and murder, hidden from the outside world by assiduous official cover-ups.
I caught up recently with Harp to discuss his book….
The Rise of the US Military’s Clandestine Foreign War Apparatus
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 08-13-2025]
Seth Harp’s new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, goes deep into the forming of the Joint Special Operations Command and its origins in the aftermath of 9/11.
Restoring balance to the economy
How Mexico Doubled the Minimum Wage
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2025]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Arguing with neoliberals – our new video series
Richard Murphy, August 10 2025 [Funding the Future]
Why it matters that government spending comes before tax
Richard Murphy, August 09 2025 [Funding the Future]
One of the most important things to understand about how government finances work is that in a country like the UK, which issues its own currency, has its own central bank and a reasonably well-functioning tax system, government spending always comes before tax is charged, and has to do so as a matter of fact. That simple fact changes everything. There are a number of reasons.
First, it means the government is never dependent on tax receipts to spend. If the UK government wants to pay for nurses, teachers, or infrastructure, it does so by instructing the Bank of England to make payments. That creates new money in the economy. Only after that money exists can it be taxed back.
In fact, and rather importantly, unless the spending came first, the money to pay tax due would not exist because it is, of course, the job of the government to create money, and it can only do that by spending it into existence.
This being said, the only constraint on this spending is the availability of the resources to buy. So long as they exist, the expenditure can always take place without the risk of inflation. The consequence is that understanding this permits policies of full employment and economic growth to be pursued in ways that would otherwise be impossible….
Second, reversing the sequence, i.e. believing that tax must come first, traps policy thinking in the household analogy. Households do need income before they can spend. Governments do not. When politicians think otherwise, they create unnecessary limits on public investment, cut services, and pretend there is “no money left” when the only real constraint is the availability of resources, skills, and technology….
Fourth, spending-first thinking makes clear that tax has a fundamentally different and more adventurous role to play in the economy. It is not there to “fund” spending, but to:
- Manage inflation.
- Give value to money by requiring that government-issued currency be used within the economy since tax has to be paid using it.
- Shape the distribution of wealth and income.
- Encourage or discourage certain activities in society.
- Manage the economic cycle.
- Reinforce the social contract between a government and those who elect it.
Tax is, then, more like an economic steering wheel. It is not a fuel tank….
The difference between “spend first” and “tax first” is massive. One liberates public policy to meet social and environmental needs. The other chains it to an entirely false idea of financial constraint. And that matters enormously when it comes to our well-being.
Central banks create money on behalf of their governments
Richard Murphy, August 10 2025 [Funding the Future]
Why “spend before tax” is the key to unlocking a future for young people
Richard Murphy, August 10 2025 [Funding the Future]
…If, on the other hand, we understand “spending comes first”, the story changes. The question is no longer “can we afford it?” but is, instead, “do we have the resources, skills, and technology to do it?” If the answer is yes, then, as John Maynard Keynes once noted, whatever it is we want can be done. The government can create the money, direct the work, and use taxation afterwards to keep the economy balanced, and that opens the door to a completely different policy agenda ….
Health care crisis
BeadLady, August 14, 2025 [DailyKos]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified
[Ars Technica, via The Big Picture, August 10, 2025]
Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say. (Ars Technica)
How the U.S. Installs “Backdoors” in Chips
[CCTV (Translation), via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2025]
Government Documents Show Police Disabling AI Oversight Tools
Tekendra Parmar, August 15, 2025 [Mother Jones]
Departments aren’t reviewing or disclosing AI-written police reports—which are now being used in plea deals.
Collapse of independent news media
[Free Press, via Naked Capitalism 08-10-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
[Reuters / gcaptain.com, via Naked Capitalism 08-13-2025]
The U.S. on Tuesday rejected the “Net-Zero Framework” proposal by the International Maritime Organization, which is aimed at reducing global greenhouse gas emissions from the international shipping sector, and threatened measures against countries that support it.
The announcement was made in a joint statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, comes ahead of a vote at the United Nations’ shipping agency to adopt the net-zero proposal in October….
Clear-Cutting Triggers 18x More Floods, for 40+ Years
[SciTech Daily, via Naked Capitalism 08-16-2025]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Ford to Invest $2 Billion for Louisville Electric Trucks
Robert Schoenberger, Aug. 11, 2025 [Industry Week]
Ford, the company that invented the moving automotive assembly line, is rethinking how it will make future vehicles, announcing plans to invest $5 billion in Louisville, Kentucky, and Marshall, Michigan, for its next generation of electric trucks.
“We have all lived through far too many ‘good college tries’ by Detroit automakers to make affordable vehicles that ends up with idled plants, layoffs and uncertainty,” Ford President and CEO Jim Farley said. “So, this had to be a strong, sustainable and profitable business. From Day 1, we knew there was no incremental path to success. We empowered a tiny skunkworks team three time zones away from Detroit. We tore up the moving assembly line concept and designed a better one.”….
Democrats’ political malpractice
WHAT STANDS IN THE WAY OF ABUNDANCE IN HEALTHCARE?
[LPE Project, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2025]
If you’re looking for a poster child of the dysfunction in pharmaceutical markets, insulin would be a good candidate. Invented more than 100 years ago, the drug has been improved very little since then, yet remains unaffordable to many around the world. In the United States, prices have skyrocketed over the past decade, and insulin now costs much more here than what it costs in other wealthy countries. As a result, one in four patients surveyed in my hometown, New Haven, reported skipping or rationing doses. In fact, studies show that more than a million people in the US ration insulin each year, risking kidney failure, blindness, and death. Many of these people, in fact, are blamed by providers for not “complying” with treatments that they cannot afford….
In a new paper, Sahil Agrawal, Trudel Pare, Melissa Barber and I examine what it will take to make these initiatives a success. What we find is important, we think, for the conversation about public options and industrial policy. It is also important for identifying some of the blind spots in the current “abundance” agenda. Today, any attempt to produce abundance (in healthcare or elsewhere) will run up against powerful entrenched interests. Unless we see this as a key part of the problem, and develop the political will to address it, there’s little chance that proposals to increase production will succeed….
Fundamentally, there are two challenges. One the abundance story recognizes: it’s hard to get big investments in public production, given the history of neoliberalism and the short time horizons of our fractious politics. But a second one it ignores: there are significant private interests that will stand in the way of such efforts at every step. This means that we need to generate sufficient political will not only for investment, but also to challenge and overcome these obstacles.
In the US there is no “market” in medicines. Instead, there is a supply chain with a variety of chokepoints where private power predominates. The most obvious chokepoint is the system of patent rights that ringfence most lucrative new drugs….
But it’s critical that we recognize the challenge that private power represents here. What’s needed is not just the political will but the political fight to insist that ordinary people matter, and that government both sees the problem of entrenched corporate power and is willing to tackle it. Any talk of abundance that doesn’t put this front and center can’t help us much today.
The return of the American Left
[Unherd, via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2025]
Zohran Mamdani Must Build Power, Not Bridges
[America’s Undoing, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2025]
Establishment Democrats Are Going to Torpedo the 2026 Midterms
Aaron Regunberg, August 13, 2025 [The New Republic]
Having failed to learn the key lesson from last year’s defeat, party leaders are promoting moderate candidates to run against populist progressives in next year’s elections….
The antipathy toward populism has been most apparent lately in the New York City mayoral race, where Zohran Mamdani remains unendorsed by leading Democrats despite winning the party’s nomination and facing off against two Democrats (who turned independent for the general election) who are now collaborating with Trump. But it’s in relation to the party’s top campaign apparatuses—the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—that this refusal to learn the lessons of 2024 could be most catastrophic to the party’s prospects in next year’s midterm elections….
We’re seeing this play out very clearly in the Senate race in Michigan. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Bernie Sanders, is a full-throated progressive populist (and an occasional TNR contributor). State Senator Mallory McMorrow is running as a D.C. outsider. Both are charismatic communicators and strong grassroots fundraisers; despite refusing to take corporate PAC money, they raised $1.8 million and $2.1 million, respectively, in the last quarter.
So naturally the Democratic establishment is pushing hard for a third candidate, with reports that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, are privately encouraging donors to line up behind Congresswoman Haley Stevens.
Resistance
Liberals Need Moral Clarity, Not Moral Purity, in Their Struggle Against Authoritarianism
Shikha Dalmia, Aug 14, 2025 [theunpopulist.net]
Jake Johnson, August 11, 2025 [CommonDreams]
An inter-union U.S. rail coalition on Monday announced its formal opposition to Union Pacific’s $85 billion bid to purchase Norfolk Southern and any other private consolidation of railroad giants, warning that such mergers serve only to enrich investors at the expense of workers, passengers, and communities across the nation….
Fragile Movements Crumble — Taking seriously the threat to organized labor.
Hamilton Nolan, Aug 10, 2025 [How Things Work]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
How Texas Became a Right-Wing California
Anne Kim, August 13, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
With the ascent of MAGA, Texas has embraced the nanny-state tactics it once eschewed in California….
…what exacerbated Republicans’ feeling about this was that those trial lawyers were often turning around and giving their money to Democratic candidates. So there was a big effort that lasted for 10 years to make Texas a very hard state to sue in. And that was part of the religion of the Republican coalition for many years. When Republicans were contrasting Texas and California, they would always point to the fact that California is a very good state to be a trial lawyer, which they said was an impediment on business and economic activity.
What changed in Texas is SB8, the abortion law from a few years back. It was passed before Dobbs(the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade), and they felt like they needed a novel legal mechanism to enforce an abortion prohibition. What they came up with was this “bounty hunter” provision—the idea that you could sue somebody who facilitated an abortion even if you were not party to it or had any connection to what was actually going on.
At the time this was seen as kind of a freakish legal provision, which would surely be struck down in the courts, but it wasn’t. And then what you saw was lawmakers turning to their pet issues and realizing, “I can attach a bounty hunter provision to this,” or “I can create a new way to sue somebody.”
In this recent session, which concluded in June, there were over a thousand bills filed in the legislature that created a new way to sue somebody or for the Attorney General to fine somebody. And they were for very strange issues. I think my favorite was a bill that gave the Attorney General the authority to pursue a half million dollar fine for any museum that contained “obscene” material, like a nude or something. But lawmakers really took to this idea that they could use private lawsuits as a way of social control. And it marks a real break from what Republicans thought about the proper role of government….
The South Rises Again
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth promotes repealing women’s right to vote
[Popular Information, via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2025]
DHS’s Neo-Nazi Memes Show the Agency for What It Is
Melissa Gira Grant, August 14, 2025 [The New Republic]
…“Which way, American man?” the @DHSgov account on X posted, along with an AI-sloppy cartoon of Uncle Sam considering competing road signs: “Cultural Decline,” “Homeland,” “Invasion,” “Opportunity.” It’s a message meant to help the agency with its “rapid recruitment” of 14,050 new immigration enforcement agents, as decreed by Trump (and with new funding from Congress). The phrase is a nod to the 1978 book Which Way, Western Man?, a foundational text for white nationalists. The book’s most accessible edition was published by the neo-Nazi press National Vanguard Books, which was founded by William Luther Pierce III, the author of the racist dystopian novel The Turner Diaries. Elements of The Turner Diaries’ fascist climax, “the Day of the Rope,” made their way into the far-right imaginary, and into the shape of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Cory Doctorow, 15 Aug 2025 [Pluralistic]
…Binding arbitration used to be illegal. Sure, two entities of similar size and power could elect to streamline their disputes by seeing an arbitrator instead of going to court, but you couldn’t take away people’s right to sue just by cramming 40,000 words of legalese down their throat as they passed over your threshold. It took the absolute fuckery of an Antonin Scalia to unleash the plague of binding arbitration waivers on the world, with the result that these days, everyone from dentists to solar installers to ride-hailing companies force you to permanently waive your right to sue, even if they are so negligent or malicious that you are permanently maimed or killed:
https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&context=blr
These days, binding arbitration is everywhere, allowing corporations to proceed with total legal impunity. When a woman died of allergens in her Disney World meal (after being told it was allergen-free), Disney told her widower that he couldn’t sue because he’d clicked through a binding arbitration waiver when he signed up for a free trial of the Disney Plus streaming service:
Civic republicanism
Today, We Launch Generation Refresh — and Invite America to Imagine a Refreshed Constitution — Nationwide campaign to crowdsource a proposed Citizen’s Constitution
Dr. Paul Zeitz, Aug 11, 2025
Elite impunity
Our Lawless Elites — The Rubicon is behind us when it comes to elite immunity
Thomas Neuburger, Aug 13, 2025 [God’s Spies]
The Next American Constitution is being written as we speak, and rather quickly at that. The situation is stark enough that we’ve started a series. Links to other posts on this subject can be found here.
Today, I’d like to look at one element — a bipartisan one — that defines the new arrangement our country is ruled by. That element is: elite immunity and absence of rule by law, and it’s already in place. I said this would be bipartisan. The absence of rule by law is a two-party problem….
Nation Unraveling— From Buchanan To Biden: How Failed Presidents Lit The Fuse For Our Cold Civil War
Howie Klein, August 11, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Obama deserves a share of this indictment too. He let Mitch McConnell steal a Supreme Court seat without consequence, normalized “looking forward, not backward” when war criminals and Wall Street wreckers should have been hauled into court, and allowed the Tea Party’s proto-MAGA authoritarianism to metastasize unchecked. His fetish for post-partisan kumbaya governance helped cement the illusion that Republicans were still operating in good faith long after they’d gone feral.
George W. Bush? His and Dick Cheney’s administration lit the fuse for the current nightmare: illegal wars, the PATRIOT Act’s surveillance state and the elevation of a fanatical evangelical right to political power. His catastrophic mismanagement and cronyism, capped by the financial collapse, made voters desperate enough to believe in “outsiders” like Trump. And let’s not forget Bill Clinton, whose triangulation on welfare, deregulation of Wall Street, and “tough on crime” policies shredded the social safety net, accelerated inequality, and fed the prison-industrial comple—fertile soil for the right’s racial grievance politics.
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