Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 30, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War on voting
Joyce Vance, Aug 28, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
After the Supreme Court made a (purely procedural) decision about Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting, rejecting judicial action in the case brought by blue state AGs because it wasn’t “ripe” for a decision yet, Judge Indira Talwani did the logical thing. She gave the plaintiffs in that case and in the case brought by the League of Women Voters a push toward updating their lawsuits. The government showed off the final rule it wants to use to implement the executive order. The ripeness argument is now moot. The administration zeroed it out when the Postal Service announced its final rule was ready to publish. The rule was published on Wednesday….
In essence, the Supreme Court directed her that the government hadn’t taken enough steps toward implementing Trump’s EO for the court to know what that implementation would look like and whether it was lawful. Too soon, the Supreme Court told Judge Talwani. You need to wait for the government to do more.
Now, the government has done more….
Judge Talwani also took a gentle, but satisfying slap at the Court, pointing out that the Trump administration isn’t exactly playing by the rules when it comes to court orders: ….
With the background laid out, we hit a critical juncture in the Judge’s decision. Here’s the most important thing to understand: the government defendants, who just days ago were arguing that the plaintiffs’ case wasn’t ripe for the court to decide, are now arguing that it’s too late for the court to intervene. Yes, you read that right. Too early has now become too late, with no Goldilocks spot in the middle. So much for the “justice” in Justice Department.
Here’s how Judge Talwani explains it. It’s worth reading her full layout: ….
The bottom line here is so grotesque that it’s impossible to imagine any other Justice Department advocating for such a plan, and any court taking longer than a few moments to reject it, as Judge Talwani did today. She notes that the government defendants “offer no reply to Plaintiff States’ assertion that compliance for the 2026 midterm elections will be impossible for many of them.” And what’s at stake is the right of Americans to vote. She notes the “significant risk of disenfranchisement” and finds that “In light of the State election officials’ unrebutted declarations that compliance with the Final Rule at this late date is impossible, the risk of irreparable harm to voters in those jurisdictions is grave.” As for the League of Women Voters, their members face irreparable harm for the same reasons—because they live in states that will be unable to comply with these new measures, and so, their ballots will not count.
This is another key point we should all note. Why won’t the ballots count? It’s not because the voters involved aren’t eligible to vote. They are. It’s not because they’ve done anything wrong—failed to register or vote in a timely fashion. They haven’t. Americans will be disenfranchised because Donald Trump does not want them to vote. No legal sleight of hand can legitimize that….
We’ve now reached the point in this case where the lawfulness—or not—of what Trump wants to do to our elections takes center stage. The case will go back to the Supreme Court and the Court will have to decide whether the Constitution, which clearly leaves this bit of election administration up to the states, still matters. Will the Roberts Court decide to undo 250 years of American democracy? Are there five votes left for the rule of law? One hopes that even on this court, a majority, however slender, that will do the right thing exists….
The Battle Over Mail-In Ballots
Robert Kuttner, August 28 2026 [The American Prospect]
… How does Trump get to dictate Postal Service meddling in partisan politics? As our colleague David Dayen has been writing for more than a decade, one reason is that the last two Democratic presidents, Biden and Obama, have been asleep at the switch.
Obama did not fill a single vacancy on the Postal Service Board of Governors during his entire eight-year term of office. As Dayen pointed out in a piece for The New Republic in 2014 (long before he joined the Prospect), the inspector general of the Postal Service proposed that the USPS provide basic postal banking, but it never happened—because the Postal Service’s board was still dominated by George W. Bush appointees. And Biden left in place Trump appointee Louis DeJoy as postmaster general because he never bothered to appoint enough board members to fire him….
States Are Quietly War-Gaming Trump Interference in the Midterm Elections
[The Allen Analysis, Aug 25, 2026, via Naked Capitalism 08-26-2026]
Democratic officials are preparing for seized voting machines, blocked mail ballots, rogue county officials and an attempt to prevent elected members of Congress from taking their seats.
Wyoming’s Primaries Were a Preview of Trump’s Midterm Interference – Mother Jones
Sophie Hurwitz, Aug 29, 2026 [motherjones.com]
Revisiting: Can Federal Troops Be Stationed At The Polls In 2026?
Joyce Vance, Aug 27, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
… The Bangor, Maine, Daily News reported earlier this week that the Republican nominee for Governor, Bobby Charles, told a group of young Republicans, “I’m going to ask Tom — three or four weeks before the election, maybe three — I’m going to make an appeal for ICE and marshals to be at our voting booths.” He continued, “Do you think the illegals who are being paid money are going to like that?”
Charles was taped. You can listen to the audio—exclusively obtained by the Daily News—here.
“Tom” is a reference to Tom Homan, Trump’s “Border Czar.” Apparently Homan and Charles are pals; Charles says they were on Fox together in the audio. (Homan, you may recall, was reportedly investigated for taking what he thought was a $50,000 cash bribe from a man who was actually an undercover FBI agent. Pam Bondi summarily dropped the investigation early in her tenure as AG.) Homan is decidedly in support of Trump’s anti-immigrant policy. He blamed state and local law enforcement for the federal presence in Minneapolis when he took over from Gregory Bovino after the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And Trump, of course, has been working the whole “illegal immigrants voting” narrative, despite the absence of evidence to support it, as a convenient excuse for interfering with the upcoming elections. It’s the basis for his contested executive order to use the Postal Service to control who can get a mail ballot….
War
Lawrence Wilkerson: U.S. Considers Nuclear Strike Against Iran
Glenn Diesen, Aug 19, 2026, via Naked Capitalism 08-24-2026]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Christopher Armitage, Aug 29, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
The strategy was spelled out in advance. First, push out everyone you can. Then institute loyalty tests for the people who remain. Ask those remaining to do unlawful things, so that the only ones who stay have partisan loyalty and are complicit in unlawful conduct. Project 2025 called for a president to make “aggressive use” of executive power “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will,” and for one who could “handcuff the bureaucracy” and bring “the Administrative State to heel.” What was a proposal in 2024 is now the staffing orders for the Department of Justice and the FBI.
Let’s first look at the purges. To carry it out, Project 2025 recommended a mechanism called Schedule F, which strips career civil servants of their job protections and lets a president fire them for any reason, exposing as many as fifty thousand positions. The Civil Rights Division, the office that enforces voting rights and prosecutes officials who break the law, employed about three hundred sixty-five attorneys in January 2025 and about one hundred five after an April deadline. Seven in ten had left. Seventeen inspectors general were fired in the administration’s first week, those were the watchdogs in charge of auditing agencies for fraud and abuse.
Now let’s look at the loyalty test. On her first day, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo demanding that government lawyers zealously advance and defend the administration’s interests, with almost no room for dissent. The people who would not work that way said so when they resigned. Two hundred eighty-two Justice Department alumni signed a public letter stating that they had carried out their duties faithfully regardless of who held the White House, until they no longer could. The departures kept coming, and by late April 2026 roughly fifty-five hundred people had left the department, with prosecutors describing colleagues who refused vindictive cases and were fired for it.
The people now staffing the federal criminal justice apparatus have acted at the behest of the regime….
So here is the serious problem, the one that makes this more than a bad year an election can fix. Suppose we win everything anyway. That presupposition means handwaving the reality that the next federal elections will be neither free nor fair, along with the methods of interference already in full deployment in Republican states and being pushed elsewhere. Say we move past all that. Say Democrats sweep it all. How do you undo the capture of these agencies? Do you fire everyone at the Justice Department and the FBI in a single day, and watch the agencies stop functioning? Do you rehire the thousands forced out, who have moved on, and then fire the ones who stayed? Do you investigate everyone who remained, each of whom will say they were doing their job? Do you build a new body to investigate the old one? That takes years. It takes funding. It takes Congress. It can be obstructed at every step. And the next president inherits all of it at once: a federal debt on track to pass its World War II record this decade and deficits the Congressional Budget Office calls large by historical standards, dozens of emergencies demanding attention, and a government stripped of the resources that would normally handle them….
Trump’s War on Reality Comes for the Census
[The Bulwark, via The Big Picture, August 23, 2026]
Catherine Rampell on the question she gets at least once a week — can we still trust the federal government’s data releases? One of America’s most trusted institutions just put its name on a totally bogus voter-fraud report.
Trump made more than 1,000 trades in June totaling millions, financial disclosures reveal
[Independent, via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2026]
ICE Illegally Scooped Up Medicaid Data, Then Shared It With Palantir
[TechDirt, via The Big Picture, August 23, 2026]
Last July, the Trump administration unilaterally decided ICE should have access to Medicaid data for the sole purpose of locating migrants to arrest and deport. That much was made clear by the administration itself, which said the data would give ICE officials better tools to discover “the location of aliens.” An agreement was reached with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service by the DHS because of course that happened. The administration had already purged plenty of non-loyalists, which meant those remaining wouldn’t put up much of fight.
Conservative-leaning coalition raises alarm over Trump’s political weaponization of ICE
[All-Source Intelligence, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2026]
ICE investigators want to buy voter data from every state
[Project Salt Box, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2026]
ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year — Including Young Children
[Wired, via The Big Picture, August 23, 2026]
Wired on the DNA dragnet — nearly a million profiles added to CODIS in a year, children included, with no criminal predicate required. Internal documents show ICE’s DNA collection has skyrocketed in the second Trump administration. Now hundreds of thousands of people never convicted of a crime are in an FBI criminal database forever.
[AZ Free News, via Naked Capitalism 08-23-2026]
Strategic Political Economy
Every Disease Is a Policy Failure
[Works in Progress, via The Big Picture, August 28, 2026]
Mathias Kirk Bonde on why doubling global life expectancy in a century fails to register.
US economist Barry Eichengreen on reality of de-dollarisation and next currency reshuffle
Sylvia Ma, Aug 24, 2026 [ South China Morning Post]
…My view is that a genuine structural shift is finally getting under way against the backdrop of some long-standing concerns about the US dollar – for example, concerns about the high level of public debt in the United States and whether the growth of the debt is sustainable or not.If there are chronic debt problems, will they have negative implications for the stability of the dollar and the value of foreign central banks’ holdings of US Treasury securities? Those concerns are long-standing, and people have been pointing to them when asking whether the era of dollar dominance may be coming to a close – they have been pointing to them for a long time.What is new and different, however, are two sets of questions that we did not use to ask about the United States and the dollar, but everyone is asking now.First, the strength of US political institutions. The dollar’s stability and confidence in the greenback rest fundamentally on the rule of law, separation of powers, the independence of the central bank and the control of corruption.People are beginning to ask whether those institutional arrangements are more fragile than previously assumed. This has begun to undermine the feeling of security among foreign central banks, governments and other investors holding financial portfolios heavy in dollars.Second, new questions are being asked about US geopolitical alliances. We know from history that central banks, governments and others prefer to hold and use the currencies of their alliance partners, because those partners are viewed as reliable stewards of their reserve holdings. If one is in an alliance with the United States, moreover, holding and using US dollars is a show of good faith in the country.However, US President Donald Trump has raised questions about the continued commitment of the United States to Nato and to its other security arrangements. That has led the Europeans and others to ask: Do we really want to be so reliant on the US and the dollar in this geopolitically uncertain world, or should we look to alternatives, including relying more on our own currency – the euro, in the European case?So, I think questions about both US alliances and the strength of US institutions are new and different, and they imply that the prospects for the dollar may be different going forward as well….
Monopoly Round-Up: Living in an Age of Cheating Means Having Your Time Stolen Constantly
Matt Stoller, Aug 23, 2026 [BIG]
… I want to explore a new concept I thought about recently, based on a conversation I had with a hotel owner. It has to do with the post-pandemic puzzle so many economists are noodling on, which is why the economy looks to be doing fine in most conventional measurements such as unemployment, jobs, economic growth, and so forth, but the public is just incredibly sour…. Something that isn’t being measured is affecting how we perceive commerce. And I think it has to do with the increasing cost we are paying for everyday goods and services, not necessarily just in cash, but in terms of time dealing with bullshit….
…I came to this realization because I was on vacation last week, and I had the common experience of being cheated by a tech platform that connects consumers and hotels. I know it’s common because the hotel owner told me so. “This year, it seems like the amount of cheating from tech platforms has just exploded,” he said….
…some MBA dipshit realized there was an arbitrage opportunity in cheating both independent hotels and consumers, assuming that you could wear down just enough people to stop asking for refunds such that you’d have a profitable business.
The thing is, whether we get a refund or not, we had to spend time fighting this nonsense. The scammers here are dumping the burden of proof onto consumers and ordinary small business people like these hotel operators, which is a form of social pollution. They may only steal money from a few of us, but they steal time from all of us….
Mental Health Workers Say Algorithmic Triage Is Hurting Patients – The American Prospect
Nick Romeo, August 27, 2026 [The American Prospect]
When Kaiser Permanente triage clinician Harimandir Khalsa began working in the psychiatry department at Kaiser’s Walnut Creek Medical Center in Northern California, she was on a team of nine people. Today, just over three years later, she is one of only three triage clinicians left. Some of the work once handled by employees has shifted to automated and algorithmic tools.
This change has coincided with a sharp increase in the number of patients who are upset by the time they speak to her. On a typical day, as many as a third of her almost two dozen triage calls are with patients who have struggled to access appropriate care.
“What has increased is frustration. Sometimes people are like, ‘I’ve been sent all over the place,’” she said. The decline in triage staffing and the increasing use of artificial intelligence-powered systems at Kaiser have also led to dangerous delays, missed diagnoses and inappropriate treatment decisions, according to multiple Kaiser mental health care workers….
Global power shift
China has caught up in space. And that changes everything, everywhere
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2026]
Germany in talks to help fund Trident
[The Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2026]
Germany is in talks to invest in Britain’s nuclear deterrent, The Telegraph understands. Berlin is considering offering financial support for Trident as it spearheads efforts to reinforce Europe’s nuclear umbrella.
Never Apologize For Being a Class Traitor
Hamilton Nolan
How One Billionaire’s Crusade against Homelessness Became Trump’s Playbook
[WaPo, via Naked Capitalism 08-24-2026]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Gaza Strip: Only 3 percent of Gaza’s cropland remains accessible and undamaged, new assessment finds
[Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, via Naked Capitalism 08-24-2026]
Chris Hedges, Aug 24, 2026
Western media, by employing double standards, censorship, deceptive language, amplifying Israeli lies and dehumanizing Palestinians, facilitates the genocide in Gaza.
Russia / Ukraine
CIA Chief’s Surprise Moscow Trip Was to Warn Russia Not to Attack NATO
[WSJ, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2026]
Oligarchy
How did a British, Rothschilds banker end up running South Africa? Part 1
[Political Economist, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2026]
Felonomics
Gary, Indiana, Is America’s Latest Climate Victim – The American Prospect
Sarah Lazare, August 28, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Functional Unemployment Up for Fourth Consecutive Month, Says Ludwig Institute
[Ludwig Institute, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2026]
All the Massive Public Health Failures Under RFK’s HHS, Ranked
Allegra Kirkland, Emine Yücel and Derick Dirmaier, August 29, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
The Qataris Gave Trump an Airplane. He Crippled Their Country in Return
[The Atlantic), via The Big Picture, August 28, 2026]
Trump-GOP Budget Law Pushes SNAP Enrollment to 17-Year Low as Millions Lose Aid
[Common Dreams, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2026]
Cattle Industry Clashes with Trump Beef Price Plan
[Morning Ag Clips, via Naked Capitalism 08-24-2026]
Louisiana completes massive giveaway of sensitive land to Elon Musk
[Oligarch Watch, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2026]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Dean Baker, Aug 27, 2026 [Beat the Press, via CommonDreams]
No one should be confused: cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits to reduce the deficit is not a moderate position. It’s one that attacks hundreds of millions of ordinary workers to avoid taxing the rich or reducing waste in our health care system….
The major media outlets, which are all controlled by rich people, are pretending to be moderate by saying that we need to both raise taxes and cut spending. But there is nothing moderate about saying that we have to cut programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because Republicans have given big tax breaks to their campaign contributors.
Republicans pushed these tax cuts, knowing they would increase the deficit, but did not make any corresponding cuts in spending because the cuts would be incredibly unpopular. Now they are using their control over the media to insist that these cuts are now absolutely necessary to offset all the lost tax revenue from tax cuts put in place by Reagan, Bush II, and Trump.
The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post gave us a great example of this fake moderate position in its editorial, “To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state.” ….
How Corporate Consolidation Ruins Local Economic Development
[Boondoggle, via Naked Capitalism 08-28-2026]
Predatory finance
The Debt-Equity Distinction: A Century of Policy by Accident
[American Affairs, via The Big Picture, August 25, 2026]
Daniel Peris asks what if much of what we treat as normal is a historical fluke. Modern finance could not exist without widespread debt financing — and the rules that produced it were never really designed.
[Calculated Risk, via The Big Picture, August 25, 2026]
[TW: Struggling to maintain the level of 1994-1997, when USA population was 260-270 million people. Now USA population is 345 million, nearly 28 percent more. Setting the measure to per capita level would make the destruction of the real USA economy unmistakable.]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
The Kissinger-Korshak Connection Sexpionage
[Ann Arbor Library District screen captures of Detroit Sun Sept. 1976 article on connections between FBI and CIA, and organized crime, prominently featuring Sidney Korshak, successor of Meyer Lansky. You should save the web page to your PC because who knows how long this type of material will remain available.]
Restoring balance to the economy
‘Break Up Big Medicine’: Taking On Healthcare Industry Greed Could Save US Families $6,000+ a Year
Jessica Corbett, August 28, 2026 [CommonDreams]
As millions of working-class Americans suffer from President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans’ cuts to the already dysfunctional US healthcare system, a leading anti-monopoly group this week released a report with recommendations to restore “affordability and control to patients, clinicians, and communities across the country.”
“The healthcare crisis didn’t happen by accident, it is the direct result of decades of neoliberal policy choices that handed more power to corporate healthcare giants while families paid the price,” said Morgan Harper, director of policy and advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP)…. Harper and Emma Freer, AELP’s senior policy analyst for healthcare, co-authored the new report, “Break Up Big Medicine,”
Mamdani Takes on Big Grocery – How New York City can make groceries more affordable.
[Economic Liberties, Aug 25, 2026, The Economic Populist]
David Dayen, August 28, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Destruction of East India Company Gives US Lawmakers a Blueprint for Confronting Big Tech: Historian
Brad Reed, Aug 28, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The instruments to take apart entrenched corporate power “still exist,” but current governments are “lacking… the political nerve to use them,” said historian William Dalrymple.
A historian who has written four books about the British East India Company is warning that big technology companies in the US are amassing similar levels of unchecked power and will need to be reined in.
In a New York Times op-ed published on Friday, William Dalrymple described how the British government eventually realized that it had allowed the East India Company—key to the British Empire’s rise in the 18th and 19th centuries—to become too powerful and decided to finally clamp down….
Disrupting mainstream economics
Understanding economics: What is rent?
Richard Murphy, August 29, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Understanding Economics: What is income?
Richard Murphy, August 24, 2026 [Funding the Future]
What is income? It sounds like one of the simplest questions in economics, but the answer matters enormously.
In this episode of Understanding Economics, I argue that income is not simply money received or money spent. At the level of the economy as a whole, income is the real value we can create and use without leaving ourselves and our planet worse off.
That distinction changes how we think about wages, profit, interest and rent. Conventional economics treats all four as forms of income.
But do interest and rent actually create anything, or do they transfer income created by other people?
And how much corporate profit represents genuine enterprise rather than economic rent extracted through ownership, market power or the extraction of value from labour?
There is an even bigger issue. If economic activity depletes natural resources, destroys environmental capital or consumes assets that cannot be replaced, can we really describe what results as income? Or are we mistaking the consumption of capital for a false measure of prosperity?
That question takes us directly to climate change, inequality and the way we measure economic success.
Understanding income means asking where value really comes from, who creates it, who receives it and whether our apparent prosperity can be sustained….
Creating money does not, by itself, cause inflation
Richard Murphy, August 26, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Disrupting mainstream politics
Matt Stoller, Aug 25, 2026 [BIG]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry Into Utter Chaos
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, August 23, 2026]
Spectacular implosions of big deals over suspected AI use — including a multimillion-dollar debut pulled by the author’s own agents, who could no longer verify the book was human-written — are forcing a reckoning over creativity and trust. The spectacular implosions of big deals over suspected AI use are forcing a reckoning over creativity, trust and the future of the industry
Ed Zitron, 25 Aug 2026
The Results of Middle and High School Students Using AI Are Extremely Ominous
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 08-23-2026]
How Much of the Internet Is Written With AI?
[Pew Research, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2026]
How Meta’s Plan To Replace Workers With AI Agents Fell Apart
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2026]
Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2026]
This creepy Israeli spy tech is likely operating in a city near you
[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 08-28-2026]
The Only Kill Switch We’ve Got – Inside Labor’s AI Data Center Split
Ginny Hogan, Aug 26, 2026 [Labor Politics]
The Acemoglu Wars Are All About AI
[Programmable Mutter, via Naked Capitalism 08-28-2026]
Climate and environmental crises
2026: A Climate ‘You Are Here’
Thomas Neuburger, Aug 25, 2026 [God’s Spies]
Last part of the ‘Super El Niño’ series: Simple pictures to show where we are now
The Velocity Hazard – Why the Rate of Warming Trumps Absolute Temperature Thresholds
[Climate Uncovered, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2026]
Solar Has Crossed a Critical Economic Tipping Point
Leon Stille – Aug 29, 2026 [oilprice.com]
Democrats’ political malpractice
The Battle Over Mail-In Ballots
Robert Kuttner, August 28 2026 [The American Prospect]
… How does Trump get to dictate Postal Service meddling in partisan politics? As our colleague David Dayen has been writing for more than a decade, one reason is that the last two Democratic presidents, Biden and Obama, have been asleep at the switch.
Obama did not fill a single vacancy on the Postal Service Board of Governors during his entire eight-year term of office. As Dayen pointed out in a piece for The New Republic in 2014 (long before he joined the Prospect), the inspector general of the Postal Service proposed that the USPS provide basic postal banking, but it never happened—because the Postal Service’s board was still dominated by George W. Bush appointees. And Biden left in place Trump appointee Louis DeJoy as postmaster general because he never bothered to appoint enough board members to fire him….
How Corporate PAC Money Gets to Democrats Who Swore It Off
[NOTUS, via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2026]
Resistance
Christopher Armitage, Aug 28, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
The Existentialist Republic’s First Year: What 60,000 Readers Accomplished
Christopher Armitage, Aug 28, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
The Existentialist Republic is one year old, and in that single year this community grew to 60,000 readers across our platforms, put a disbarment complaint against the Chief Justice of the United States onto the D.C. Bar’s docket, campaigned for the Minneapolis prosecutions that have now charged two federal agents, drafted eight pieces of model state legislation, and began building citizen grand jury petitions in seven states. This is the record of that year, and the credit for every line of it is yours.
In April I filed a disciplinary complaint against Chief Justice John Roberts with the D.C. Bar, documenting 16 years of federal financial disclosures in which Roberts characterized more than $10 million of his wife’s commission income as salary, and the Bar docketed it as complaint No. 2026-U795. The Board on Professional Responsibility meets on it September 10, which means that whatever happens next, the Chief Justice’s conduct is now before the body that licenses him to practice law.
We drafted eight pieces of model state legislation this year and fully packaged four of them with bill text, advocacy guides, and mailing lists, which is everything a legislator needs to introduce them, and then you funded the delivery. With more than $10,000 of your money, the Make Corrupt Politicians Pay Act is being printed and mailed to Democratic legislators in every trifecta state right now, while volunteers email every Democratic state legislator in the country, all 3,224 of them….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Who Pays the Cost When Americans Opt Out of Science?
[Big Think, via The Big Picture, August 28, 2026]
Adam Frank thought science denial would hit a bottom once people experienced the direct consequences of being wrong. It turns out he was wrong. Astrophysicist Adam Frank used to think the consequences of rejecting science would play out on the individual level. He’s since changed his mind.
Greg Abbott just made Texas a sanctuary state for ICE agents who kill people!
Dean Obeidallah, Aug 27, 2026
The Con at the Core of the Republican Party
Lauren Windsor, Aug 26, 2026 [Zeteo]
Civic republicanism
Why ‘We Need To Tax Billionaires
Gabriel Zucman, Aug 25, 2026 [Zeteo]
… As researchers, we stand on the shoulders of giants. The collaborative and cumulative effort to shed light on taxation began nearly a century ago with the work of economists Gerhard Colm and Helen Tarasov.
In the United States in the 1940s, they were the first to attempt to answer a seemingly simple question: Who pays taxes?
Their research aimed to establish the distribution of the tax burden across different income brackets….
In simple terms, it is a fundamental violation of the principle that all citizens are equal before the law – a pillar of the social contract in all democratic nations.
In France, Article 13 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 states that contributions to common expenditure must be divided among members of the community according to their ability to pay.
At the very least, this can be interpreted to mean that taxes cannot be regressive: The wealthiest people should not be allowed to pay a smaller proportion of their income than the less fortunate.
And yet, any way you slice it, this is exactly what is happening today.
The budgetary consequences of this situation, moreover, can no longer be ignored.
In the United Kingdom, the 200 wealthiest families identified by The Sunday Times owned wealth equivalent to nearly 20% of Britain’s GDP in 2025, compared with 6% in 1994.
In the United States, according to Forbes, the wealth of the 400 richest households grew from the equivalent of 2% of U.S. GDP in 1982 to more than 20% in 2025.
In the state of California, where voters will soon vote on a trailblazing billionaire tax – Proposition 40 – the 250 billionaires of the Golden State own wealth equivalent to 50% of GDP.
You read this correctly: 50% of GDP….
Cosmic irony
Milo Yiannopoulos, a Right-Wing Provocateur, Is Arrested by ICE
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 08-29-2026]
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