Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 13, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

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

 Trump loves ICE. Its Workforce Has Never Been So Miserable

[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture July 11, 2025]

Legal Ping-Pong

Joyce Vance, July 11, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

Today was legal ping-pong. Your head had to zing back and forth to keep up with everything that was happening as we went from courts to the Trump administration’s actions to breaking news from investigative reporting. We’ll go through what it all means, so we can stay on top of the most important developments.

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Trump, Epstein and the Deep State

Chris Hedges, July 12, 2025

The Trump administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files and videos is done not only to protect Trump, but the ruling class. They all belong to the same club.

The refusal by the Trump administration to release the files and videos amassed during investigations into the activities of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, should put to rest the absurd idea, embraced by Trump supporters and gullible liberals, that Trump will dismantle the Deep State. Trump is part of, and has long been part of, the repugnant cabal of politicians – Democrat and Republican – billionaires and celebrities who look at us, and often underage girls and boys, as commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure….

There is a lot that remains hidden. But there are some things we know. Epstein installed hidden cameras in his opulent residences and on his private Caribbean island, Little St. James, to capture his high-powered friends engaging in sexual romps and abuse of teenage and underage girls and boys. The recordings were blackmail gold….

Epstein’s videos are in the vaults of the FBI, along with detailed evidence that would rip back the veil on the sexual proclivities and callousness of the powerful….

…was he murdered? Since the cameras recording activity in his cell the night were not functional, we do not know. Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother, who served as the chief medical examiner for New York City and who was present at the autopsy, said he believes Epstein’s autopsy suggests homicide.

The Epstein case is important because it implodes the fiction of deep divisions between Democrats, who had no more interest in releasing the Epstein files than Trump, and the Republicans. They belong to the same club. It exposes how the courts and law enforcement agencies collude to shield powerful figures who engage in crimes. It lays bare the depravity of our exhibitionist ruling class, accountable to no one, free to violate, plunder, loot and prey on the weak and the vulnerable. It is the tawdry record of our oligarchic masters, those who lack the capacity for shame or guilt, whether dressed up as Donald Trump or Joe Biden….

“Jeffrey Epstein’s closest relationship in life was with Donald Trump…these were two guys joined at the hip for a good 15 years. They did everything together,” Wolff told host Joanna Coles on The Daily Beast Podcast. “And this is from sharing, pursuing women, hunting women, sharing at least one girlfriend for at least a year in this kind of rich-guy relationship with each other’s planes, to Epstein advising Trump on how to cheat on his taxes.”

Why MAGA is Right about Jeffrey Epstein

Tina Brown, July 10, 2025 [Fresh Hell]

[TW: Brown was editor of The Daily Beast in 2010 and made the decision to publish the investigative work of Conchita Sarnoff, fully breaking open the Epstein scandal after it had been buried for years.]

…After we ran Sarnoff’s first piece in July 2010, Epstein called me personally to tell me that “she was a well-known nut case and to cease and desist.” When I barreled ahead anyway, I had a creepy encounter with Epstein a few weeks later. I returned from lunch and was startled to find him sitting in a chair in my glass-walled office in Manhattan’s IAC building. It seems he had managed to blow through front desk security and arrive unannounced.

He was morose and menacing, his snake eyes narrowed. “Just stop,” he said heavily as I stared at him from the doorway. “There will be consequences if you don’t.” I asked him to leave and suggested he talk to our lawyer. “You heard me,” he said in a deadly tone. “Stop.” We did not stop. But there were no more legal flurries from Epstein. It seems he had rightly computed that the story would fade if he didn’t fan it….

Conchita Sarnoff reminded me that there have been five fatalities, counting Epstein’s death, all associated with his case and the sad, sordid world that swirled around him.

• May 30, 2017 Leigh ‘Skye’ Patrick, who was 16 when she was sexually abused by Epstein and was one of the first victims to file charges against him in 2008, was found dead at age 29 of an accidental drug overdose in a West Palm Beach motel.
• August 10, 2019 Jeffrey Epstein was discovered hanged in his cell at the MCC.
• February 19, 2022 Jean-Luc Brunel, a close Epstein partner in sleaze whose modeling agency MC2 was a major funnel of trafficked underage girls to Epstein and his circle, apparently hanged himself with knotted bedsheets in his cell while awaiting trial at La Santé prison in Paris for alleged rape of a minor and sexual assault.
• May 23, 2023 Carolyn Andriano, a 36-year-old mother of five, was found unresponsive on the floor of a West Palm Beach hotel room. Andriano was abused by Epstein starting at the age of 14, servicing him at his Palm Beach mansion more than 100 times. Her testimony was key to the conviction of Epstein procuress Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida.
• April 25, 2025 Virginia Giuffre, a 41-year-old mother of three, committed suicide at her family ranch in Neergabby, Australia. Giuffre attained global recognition by winning an unprecedented multimillion-dollar settlement from Queen Elizabeth’s son Prince Andrew, whom she says she was trafficked to at the age of 17 by Epstein and Maxwell for a payment of $15,000. But Giuffre, who became the standard-bearer of other Epstein victims, was unraveling at the end, and in the middle of a divorce from an allegedly physically abusive husband, who won a restraining order against her that banned her from seeing her children for six months. According to her brother, the pain of that loss finally crushed her, but her father, Sky Roberts, said, “Somebody got to her. She was strong. She had too much to live for.”

Jeffrey Epstein Had 1,000+ Victims Ken Klippenstein

The Epstein Client List — Why is Trump Breaking His Promise to Publish? 

Larry Johnson [Son of the New American Revolution, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2025]

Graphic: Jeffrey Epstein Client List by Ryan Dawson — Page 1

Although Donald Trump and Pam Bondi insist that there is no Epstein Client List… there is a list and it is reproduced above with the permission of its author, Ryan Dawson. Ryan compiled the list the old-fashioned way… he combed through court transcripts and charging documents. He only put names on the list if the victims of Epstein’s pedophilia enterprise identified or named a particular individual….

The Real Story of the Epstein Files: An Industry Disguised as Media Dedicated to Buying & Burying the Secrets of the Rich & Criminal

Dougald Lamont.

[TW: Epstein qua Epstein should not be the issue. The issue is the problem with government and the rich that is identified and apparently not yet solved by the philosophy of civic republicanism: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. MAGA is basically correct here in believing Epstein is evidence that “the system is corrupt,” but because their philosophy is based on hatred of “the other” they are nearly frantic in their denial of the reality that Trump is merely another of the many rich degenerates involved (see Chris Hedges, Trump, Epstein and the Deep State).

[Liberalism does not see the corruption of an individual’s morals and behavior as a problem so long as the system of government keeps immorality and misbehavior within acceptable bounds. Civic republicanism does. Conservatives have falsely claimed a mantle of legitimacy by making an issue of civic virtue. But conservatives absolutely refuse to acknowledge and consider that great wealth corrupts as thoroughly as absolute power.

[“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so does great wealth” is the basis on which the entire jurisprudence and legal philosophy of Leaonard Leo, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Anton Scalia, Rehnquist, and the entire reactionary insurgency of the (anti)Federalist Society can be rejected and struck down as malum in se (wrong in itself; something that is inherently wrong, regardless of whether it is defined by law as illegal). But this requires a common understanding of why liberalism is philosophically incapable of defeating conservativism but civic republicanism is able to defeat conservativism.

[One other point: I have not yet seen anyone discuss who and what replaced Epstein and Maxwell. The appetites of Prince Andrew, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and other elites did not disappear entirely after Epstein and Maxwell were imprisoned. MAGA desperately wants to believe that Trump was going to end the entire sordid affair. MAGA is correct that there is a network of degenerate elites who enjoy preying on innocence, but have yet to accept that their own elites are part of the problem simply because human nature is what it is: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and so does great wealth. ]

The Real Story of the Epstein Files: An Industry Disguised as Media Dedicated to Buying & Burying the Secrets of the Rich & Criminal — When is MAGA going to realize the call is coming from inside the building?

Dougald Lamont, July 08, 2025

…I’ve written a piece on the very clear connections between Trump, Epstein and a third individual who knew them both well: Conrad Black, and Black has been accused of interfering to get an Epstein story suppressed.

Here is Black at an event in Alberta, with a who’s-who of cross-border alt-right disinformation merchants. Tucker Carlson, Keean Bexte, Jordan Peterson and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. Trafficking in conspiracies is what they do….

It could be that Black has escaped scrutiny because he never obtained real fame in the U.S. His presence there was in Chicago, not New York, and he was a multi-millionaire, not a billionaire. His media empire at one point was vast – hundreds of daily newspapers around the world, in Canada, the UK, Australia and Israel. He got into trouble with and was charged with self-dealing when it came to his publicly traded company, Hollinger. Black said he had done nothing wrong, since it was all approved by the board – which included Epstein’s major billionaire benefactor, Les Wexner.

One example of one of Black’s more creative schemozzles when he and his business partner David Radler sold themselves a media organization, then paid themselves not to compete with themselves, which upset some shareholders….

Trump and Black were more than acquaintances: they were business partners. Trump was an investor in Hollinger, and they owned the Chicago Sun-Times building. Black wrote a fawning biography of Trump. Trump pardoned Black for the lesser charge of obstruction of justice, and Black has continued to boost Trump from his perch at the National Post. That’s the flagship publication, founded by Black, and owned by Postmedia.

Postmedia is Canada’s largest newspaper network, owning many of the largest newspapers in the country, sometimes two newspapers in a single city. It’s owned by Chatham Asset Management, a U.S. Investment fund, which also owns the National Enquirer….

[TW: My understanding of civic republicanism leads me to the following proposals at this time (not likely to be implemented anytime soon, but to begin a civic discussion on how to save news media from domination by corporations and oligarchs). The reason that a free press was the only non-governmental group mentioned in the Constitution is because a republic is supposed to be governed by a citizenry as truthfully and completely informed as possible. 1. All media organizations must be at least 51% owned by employees, which include the actual journalists. 2. People drawing pay from media organizations are given a large reduction on tax rates. 3. No company or entity is allowed to own more than one media organization in any single metro market or region. 4. This restriction includes hedge funds, trust funds, and investment funds of all kinds, such as State Street, BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity. 5. We want to encourage local ownership, but state and local governments are allowed to own up to some small percent — generally under five or percent — of a media company and are not allowed any shareholder votes, and no government official of any kind is allowed to sit on a board of directors and hold any sort of management position. Investments in media organizations should receive special tax treatments, such as interest from municipal bonds was tax free. 7. All media organizations must participate in a nationwide organization of profit sharing, similar to that used in USA major league baseball, such that some small percentage of profits flow into a national pool, or regional pools, and these pools are used to resuscitate and support smaller, less profitable media organizations in small towns and rural areas. These pools are to be managed and supervised only by media employees elected to these positions by fellow employees. ]

Someone Is Closely Front-Running Trump’s Trade Announcements 

Thomas Neuburger, July 11, 2025 [God’s Spies]

…consider the two pieces below. Naked corruption. Feel free to decide for yourself how the perpetrators below got access to minute-by-minute information, and what that implies….

Men DOGEbags at Work

This Is DOGE 2.0 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 07-12-2025]

…Coristine’s disappearance from government—and sudden reappearance in it—is emblematic of DOGE 2.0, a new iteration of the organization that, post-Musk’s formal participation, is still very much present and continuing its wholesale assault on federal agencies. But without flashy leadership, DOGE technologists are now quietly cycling into federal agencies, spending days or weeks building products and cutting contracts before cycling out once again. This is all done with little oversight from the White House or the United States DOGE Service (USDS), which these technologists purportedly represent….

Inside the staff exodus and tanking morale that threaten Makary’s FDA 

[STAT, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2025]

Strategic Political Economy

Musk’s Perfect World: How would it work? Applying iterative design to Musk’s proposed zero deficit world

Steve Keen, July 12, 2025 [Building a New Economics]

…Musk … is clearly determined to eliminate the deficit and reduce government debt. Since he believes that neither incumbent party will do it, he’s forming his own….

If he succeeds, what sort of world would it be?

In this post, I use my Ravel software (https://patreon.com/ravelation) to imagine such a world: one where all government spending is financed by taxation, and, for good measure, government debt has been eliminated, so that the government isn’t paying any interest on debt either.

…It would be functional, but there is one literally inescapable problem: the non-bank private sector (represented by the bank account “Depositors” in the above table) is necessarily in negative financial equity….  no matter how the economy twists and turns, the non-bank private sector remains in negative financial equity, and it is precisely equal to the positive financial equity of the banking sector….

The non-bank sector of the economy is the sum of government and the non-bank private sector. With the government always running a balanced budget, and having no debt, the government’s financial equity is zero. Therefore, the financial net worth of the non-bank private sector is negative, and precisely equal in magnitude to the positive equity of the banking sector.

In words that someone trained in physics should understand, this is the by-product of a conservation law: since for every financial asset there is a matching financial liability, the sum of all financial net worths is zero. So, if one segment of society is in positive financial equity, the rest of society is in negative financial equity to it, of precisely the same magnitude….

..This means that, effectively, the new debt that borrowers are willing to take on, which accountants call “Credit”, sets the price level for nonfinancial assets. Therefore, the change in credit sets the change in the price level for nonfinancial assets.

Mainstream “Neoclassical” economists deny this, using the fetchingly named “Modigliani-Miller Hypothesis”, but the data makes a mockery of it. A century’s worth of margin debt data shows that changes in margin credit drive changes in share prices; 80 years of mortgage debt data shows that and changes in household credit (which is mainly new mortgages) drives change in house prices.

If this kept on happening, so that asset prices rose forever, this wouldn’t necessarily be bad. But there’s a trap. This process relies upon debt accelerating forever.

…crises caused by negative credit were a regular feature of the “Small Government” 1800s… We can see this in the inflation data for the 19th century as well, when US government spending was a tenth of what it is today, and the government regularly reduced its debt to zero. People think this meant price stability…. But zoom in on the 19th century, and you see that rather than stable prices, there was higher inflation during booms, and sustained deflation during slumps.

Financial crises were also about twice as frequent during the 19th century, when government spending was about 10% of today’s levels (3% of GDP versus 30% of GDP), as they have been since the days of “Big Government” commenced during WWII….

For the private non-bank sector to be in positive financial equity, the government must run sustained deficits.

This would be a hard lesson for Musk to learn. But let’s pretend that he does, and allows the next iteration to include government spending exceeding taxation–but without issuing bonds, and therefore without interest payments. How does this rocket fly?

Global power shift

China able to interfere with and snuff out US military electronics

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2025]

3. The Ghost Ship: 815A and the Sea-Based Information WarIn the recent 12 day war between Israel and Iran, China’s reconnaissance ship 815A quietly entered the Persian Gulf. Some people on X say it’s a shame that the US would laissez faire and do nothing about it. Please know 815A is an old friend of the US aircraft carrier stike group in the South China see and near China’s coast. It has been playing hide and seek with the US marines and the US could do nothing about it. June 2024. The U.S., Japan, Australia, and the Philippines stage a grand Pacific war drill. The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier takes point. F-35s scream off its deck. Aegis destroyers form a lethal web around it. It’s muscle-flexing with a mission: show the Asia-Pacific who’s boss.Days later, satellite images reveal an uninvited guest shadowing the formation from less than 50 nautical miles away—a sleek silhouette tucked just outside the fleet’s blind spot. Zoom in: it’s the 815A. China’s electronic reconnaissance ship. Not just observing—but fully embedded in the battle environment.Here’s the chilling part: not a single radar saw it coming.The U.S. Navy was operating blind. Its radar screens flickered into static. Its comms scrambled. And by the time the public saw the photo, the warships’ crews were sweating. A vessel that size—not seen. Not tracked. Not intercepted. Not asked to leave. It’s there observing the military exercise ostensibly as an uninvited invisible guest. There’s only one explanation: the 815A’s electronic warfare suite is simply overpowering.It doesn’t just collect signals. It distorts them.Its phased array radars, the H/LGQ-36 system, work across multiple frequency bands—from shortwave to ultra-high frequency. Its over-the-horizon radar can monitor targets up to 8000 kilometers away—Guam deployments included. Its infrared-optical sensors and quantum communication nodes can receive, jam, and even mimic enemy systems in real time.But most terrifying? It doesn’t just watch the enemy—it enters their minds.In 2017, an 815A loitered off Alaska during a U.S. missile interception test. It didn’t just record. It interfered. The U.S. Department of Defense later acknowledged: “It got too close, and we couldn’t stop it.”Years later, during a classified U.S. exercise, an F-35 vanished from radar. Its comms dropped. Its onboard navigation drifted off-course. Later analysis pointed to a 815A unit jamming and spoofing the signal chain—cutting the F-35 off from its command link and radar guidance. For all its stealth, it became a $100 million brick flying blind.And then came the punchline.In another test, a U.S. destroyer’s internal comms channel began broadcasting… Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf (喜羊羊与灰太狼), a Chinese children’s cartoon. It wasn’t a glitch. It was a message: you’re not just being watched—you’re being hijacked. Your war capabilities are being nullified. That’s what makes the 815A more than a spy ship. It’s a mobile information warfare factory. It doesn’t need guns or missiles. Its weapon is control. Control over signals. Over your strike capability. Over what you see, hear, and believe.

The collapse of West’s strategy of chaos: Recent clash between India and Pakistan turned out catastrophic for the Western empire, which is why it quickly vanished from the media.

Alex Krainer, July 09, 2025

…The catastrophic failure of Western weapons

…the conflict did not escalate: it died down after only two days of kinetic action. What happened? Domazet provides an important bit of context: over the recent years, India started buying some of their key weapons systems from Western arms manufacturers. One of the most important procurement contracts was India’s $9 billion purchase of 36 Rafale aircraft from France: a staggering $250 million per fighter jet. The strategic objective of that extraordinary splurge was to give India air superiority over Pakistan. It turned out to be a very costly mistake for India.

Pakistan opted for Chinese made weapons systems, including the J-10C fighter jets, which cost about a fifth of French Ravales ($46-$58 million). The J-10Cs can carry 9 missiles and are equipped with a powerful radar that can simultaneously lock on 16 different targets. Pakistani military also relies on Chinese satellites so when India mounted their air attack, Pakistan’s defensive response was almost immediate. India launched six aircraft, at least four of which were the fancy French Rafale fighter jets….

The J-10C, equipped with six Chinese air-to-air PL-15 missiles, identified India’s aircraft from a distance of 200 km. The PL-15s were launched from a distance of 150 km and all six Indian jets were shot down. Pakistan sustained no loss in the encounter. The event caused shock and consternation in India’s and Western military circles. The following day, India attempted an attack using drones. India procured its drones from Israel; Pakistan again used Chinese drones which proved superior and that attack also failed.

This is why that war died as quickly as it did. But beyond just India’s air attacks failing, the episode was a spectacular showdown between Western and Chinese weapons systems. Rather than showcasing the superiority of Western made weapons, it did exactly the opposite, which had extremely important strategic ramifications….

The strategic significance of Pakistan ….

New East Asian Attitude Between China, Japan & South Korea 

Karl Sanchez [via Naked Capitalism 07-07-2025]

Riyadh realigns: Tehran over Tel Aviv 

The Cradle, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2025]

Persian Gulf monarchies are quietly reorienting away from Tel Aviv and Washington toward Tehran and a more promising multipolar-led security order.

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power

Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman and Natan Odenheimer, July 11, 2025 [New York Times, via NYT’s The Morning, July 11, 2025]

Why has the Gaza war lasted so long? In a blockbuster investigative profile published this morning, the Times Magazine explains how Benjamin Netanyahu prolonged it partly for personal political reasons. Our Jerusalem bureau chief, Patrick Kingsley, and his colleagues Ronen Bergman and Natan Odenheimer spent six months interviewing more than 110 people and reviewing scores of military and government documents.

I spoke to Patrick — who is leaving his role this summer after four and a half years in what many have called the hardest job in journalism — about Netanyahu, the war and how they got people to share so many secrets.

Today is the 643rd day since the Oct. 7 attacks. Nobody imagined the war would go on this long. Why is it still going?

The strategic argument was that it gave Israel a better chance of defeating not only Hamas but also Hamas’s regional allies, Hezbollah and Iran. Whether you buy that argument or not, our reporting shows that Netanyahu was clearly often motivated by his personal interest instead of only by these national priorities.

U.S. Spent 8 Years’ Worth of THAAD Interceptors in Under Two Weeks 

[Haaretz, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2025]

‘Like a video game’: Israel enforcing Gaza evacuations with grenade-firing drones 

[972 Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 07-11-2025]

The Israeli military has weaponized a fleet of Chinese-manufactured commercial drones to attack Palestinians in parts of Gaza that it seeks to depopulate, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call can reveal. According to interviews with seven soldiers and officers who served in the Strip, these drones are operated manually by troops on the ground, and are frequently used to bomb Palestinian civilians — including children — in an effort to force them to leave their homes or prevent them from returning to evacuated areas….

“It was clear that they were trying to return to their homes — there’s no question,” he explained. “None of them were armed, and nothing was ever found near their bodies. We never fired warning shots. Not at any point.”

Instigating Murder 

Tarilk Cyril Amar [via Naked Capitalism 07-11-2025]

…America’s massive and unambiguously criminal attack on the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese. And that is, perhaps, the case displaying with greatest clarity that odd, stunning quality of the West’s atrocities and outrages.

The gist of the matter is that the US has sanctioned Albanese as if she were a criminal or even a terrorist. US secretary of state Marco Rubio has claimed that Albanese, an internationally recognized authority on human rights and international law, is waging a “campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel.” In particular, Rubio charged her with having supported the prosecution of Israeli leaders – that is, in reality, genocide perpetrators, also guilty of any other crime in every other book, from war crimes, via crimes against humanity, to apartheid and ethnic cleansing – by the International Criminal Court, another body under heavy sanctions fire from the US.

That, according to Rubio’s non-logic which is, of course, identical with that of the Israeli criminals – amounts to “antisemitism.” As a special highlight of absurdity, Rubio added that Albanese’s activities threaten the US’s “sovereignty.”

The Persecution of Francesca Albanese

Chris Hedges, July 10, 2025 [DefendDemocracy.Press]

The attack against Albanese presages a world without rules, one where rogue states, such as the U.S. and Israel, are permitted to carry out war crimes and genocide without any accountability or restraint. It exposes the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It reveals our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. No one, from now on, will take seriously our stated commitments to democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law or human rights. And who can blame them? We speak exclusively in the language of force, the language of brutes, the language of mass slaughter, the language of genocide.

The National Education Association just voted to cut all ties to the Anti-Defamation League 

[Mondoweiss, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2025]

Russia / Ukraine

War Now Indefinitely Sustainable, as New Reports Prove Russian Armor Production Has Finally Reached Equilibrium 

[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 07-07-2025]

Oligarchy

The Uneasy Oligarchy 

Jamie Merchant, July 8, 2025 [The Baffler, via Naked Capitalism 07-11-2025]

…Billionaire investors like Bill Ackman join multinational corporations like Apple and Walmart in their complaints. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, figurehead for the big banks, has warned that Trump’s erratic policies are going to hurt U.S. growth—that is to say, they will hurt corporate profits.…

…We can trace these tensions by looking at the evolution of finance over the last fifteen years. From the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 to the return of inflation in late 2021, the U.S. Federal Reserve favored a policy of easy money. More than a decade of low to zero percent interest rates and a flood of newly printed dollars made funding cheap and abundant….

Yet, like Trump, he’s mastered the art of failing upward. Ackman embodies a long-term trend in American finance. Over time, more and more money has pooled in the hands of private financiers like him, while the number of publicly listed companies has fallen. Some of that decline came from a spike in corporate mergers and acquisitions. But as a general tendency, fewer investors and owners are opting to take their companies public, while private equity firms convert many thousands of publicly traded companies into privately held assets. This “privatization of the private sector,” as Doug Henwood describes it, has empowered a new generation of financiers who shirk responsibility to shareholders or the regulatory concerns that come with them. It’s little Trumps everywhere.

The “private funds” industry is emblematic. Private funds is a catch-all term for venture capital, hedge funds, and private equity firms—the petty tyrants of finance capital. These interests grew explosively during the Biden years. Assets held by these funds grew 34 percent to nearly $28 trillion, almost matching the $31 trillion held in public mutual funds—historically the much bigger type of ownership. The number of private funds grew at an even faster rate, from about 63,000 in 2020 to almost 101,000 in 2024. Company founders and investment partnerships multiplied by the thousands. They form the financial shock troops of the new American gentry, the upper-class backbone of Trumpism. This base tends to be less complacent than the older financial establishment, which not only wants order and stability in international markets but also—at least for a time—publicly supported the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion….

Likewise, in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” the ovaline venture capitalist Marc Andreessen also identifies sustainability as one of the enemies of progress, “derived from communism.” Andreessen adds monopoly and regulatory capture to his list of enemies. He alludes to the same state-corporate complex that Musk and other radicalized right-wing capitalists see as the real villain: a bureaucracy devoted to central planning, which restricts the “techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.”

A whole financial Freikorps of private investors, fund managers, and activist shareholders see the Trump administration as a battering ram to smash the regulatory walls guarding the big money, i.e., the enormous pools of savings managed by government-connected fund managers and banks. This includes, for example, some $8 trillion in invested retirement accounts, as well as a bigger share in the roughly $6.1 trillion pool of public pension assets. Even Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent complains about alleged central planning under Democratic governments and talks about the need to increase competition and reduce the power of market incumbents—by which he means opening the door to this vault for him and his colleagues. For the financiers backing Trump a raid on big finance could yield a jackpot of billions….

This sets up a vicious political circle: MAGA radicalizes the Republican Party with the support of an insurgent faction of the corporate class, prompting the more status-quo oriented business interests to align with the Democrats; the Democrats are further lobotomized by the influence of these interests, their campaigns made even more torpid, bereft of content; and the working class is left without any representation besides Republican appeals to America First economic warfare and delusions of industrial grandeur. Workers continue to exit mainstream political life. Politics is reduced to a raw corporate battle for spoils, with the state as its terrain. Emptied of democratic or working-class meaning, mass politics evolves into mass conspiracism.

For a tech-entrepreneurial elite out of ideas, Trump arrived just in time. Their reactionary turn was born of desperation. After years littered with failed Next Big Things—web 3.0, the “internet of things,” the Metaverse, NFTs, and now, potentially, AI—Silicon Valley investors threw aside the pretense that they stood for something more noble than the mindless pursuit of profit….

But an even bigger prize awaits. Trump holds the key to the promised land: the federal defense budget….

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

America Has Two Labor Markets Now 

[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 07-08-2025]

Americans live in separate economic realities: Those with a job are likely to stay employed, but those without one are likely to stay unemployed….The labor market surprised in June with a better-than-expected payroll gain of 147,000, the government said on Thursday.

• But a whopping 85% of those job gains came in just two sectors, according to calculations by Mike Konczal, a former Biden economic official: education and health care….
• “Many employers are loath to lay off workers until they see the whites of the eyes of a recession, having had such problems finding suitable workers in the first place,” David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, wrote in a recent note.

The bottom line: If you look only at how many Americans are losing their jobs, this appears to be a pretty terrific labor market. If you look only at how many are being hired for new jobs, it is the weakest in years.

First-Time Home Buyers Are MIA. Landlords Are the Winners

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture July 10, 2025]

America’s renter population has hit a record because fewer people can afford to get on the housing ladder.

Trumpillnomics

The Big Beautiful Bill’s Ugly Choice: Internet or Food?

Sean Gonsalves, July 11, 2025 [The American Prospect]

The Republican budget bill cuts food assistance benefits to households that pay for internet access.

How to Wreck the Nation’s Health, by the Numbers

[New York Times, via The Big Picture July 07, 2025]

After decades as a physician studying the factors that determine our risks of getting sick and how long we live, I am convinced that the actions of the Trump administration will cost lives. Researchers like me know the data. For years we have warned that Americans have shorter life expectancies and higher disease rates than people in other high-income countries. Now, the poor health of Americans is about to get worse.

Who profits most from Medicaid? Employers like Walmart and Amazon, many of whose workers rely on the program

[Los Angeles Times, via The Big Picture July 07, 2025]

These corporations are enormously profitable. Last year, Walmart earned $19.4B on sales of $681B; McDonald’s earned $8.2B billion on sales of $26B, and Amazon earned $59B on sales of $638B. Yet millions of their full time workers rely on public assistance. If the Republican Congress pursues its campaign to strip access to government programs away from more Americans, more of those workers will be trapped in a poverty spiral.

Hardly Workin’ — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on life support, and consumer scam complaints are surging as a result. 

Maureen Tkacik, James Baratta, July 11, 2025 [The American Prospect]

For nearly six months, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s 1,500 or so staffers have been locked out of their offices and agency computers….

Leadership has tried to fire nearly all the employees twice, blocked both times by a court case that is still under review. The Supreme Court’s green light to the Trump administration to attempt mass reductions in force (RIFs) could serve as the final blow for an agency with the singular mission of protecting consumers from being scammed.

In the meantime, formal entries into the CFPB’s consumer complaints database have soared, suggesting that the business of junk fees, predatory terms, and routine swindles is booming just as loudly as the Prospect has been predicting it would since Elon Musk memorably typed out “CFPB RIP” on X. All told, 2.5 million complaints have flooded into the CFPB over the past six months, roughly a quarter of the total complaints the agency has recorded since its inception in 2011, with reports of everything from being shut out of bank accounts after a hurricane to scammers impersonating ICE officials who convince consumers to buy them gift cards in order to help them avoid deportation….

Floods are swallowing their village. But for them and others, the EPA has cut the lifeline. 

[Floodlight, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2025]

[TW: Includes a summary of grant cancellations by the Trump regime, by state.]

Kipnuk’s grant was one of more than 600 that the EPA has canceled since President Donald Trump took office, according to data obtained by Floodlight through a Freedom of Information Act request. Through May 15, the cuts totaled more than $2.7 billion.

Floodlight’s analysis of the data shows:

• Environmental justice grants took by far the biggest hit, with more than $2.4 billion in funding wiped out.
• The EPA has also canceled more than $120 million in grants aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of cement, concrete and other construction materials. Floodlight reported in April that the cement industry’s carbon emissions rival those of some major countries — and that efforts to decarbonize the industry have lost momentum under the Trump administration.
• Blue states bore the brunt. Those states lost nearly $1.6 billion in grant money — or about 57% of the funding cuts.
• The single largest grant canceled: A $95 million award to the Research Triangle Institute, a North Carolina-based scientific research organization that had planned to distribute the money to underserved communities. RTI also lost five other EPA grants, totaling more than $36 million.

US measles cases surge to highest since disease was ‘eliminated’ 

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2025]

Requiem for the Wagner Act

Joseph A. McCartin, July 8, 2025

Signed into law 90 years ago, labor’s onetime ‘magna carta’ is now a very dead letter….

For more than 60 years, organized labor vainly sought legislation that would update the NLRA, streamline its administration, and increase the penalties on those who violated its provisions. In 1965, 1978, 1994, and 2009-2010, efforts to enact labor law reform were blocked by Republican-led Senate filibusters. Like all previous attempts, the most recent effort at reform, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, also failed to come to a vote in the Senate during the Biden presidency.

This long and repetitive history suggests that it is now imperative for unions to abandon the fantasy that labor law reform can open the door to the preservation and resurgence of the labor movement….

Predatory finance

Central Banks Are Ducking the Chance to Tame Hedge Funds 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 07-12-2025]

The “Abundance” Scam

The Anti-Labor Forces Pushing the Abundance Movement 

[In These Times, via Naked Capitalism 07-11-2025]

‘Abundance’ at the fore of Democrats’ new ideas sweepstakes

E.J. Dionne Jr., July 3, 2025

How one book created both excitement and trepidation inside the Democratic Party….

This gets to the broader challenge Abundance advocates face from the left: By placing so much blame for government failure on the accretion of well-intended rules, regulations and reviews imposed over the years by progressives, the new disposition, in the view of its critics, “redirect[s] the public’s rage away from the parasitism of economic elites and toward the regulatory regimes of state and local Democrats,” as Aaron Regunberg, a former Rhode Island state representative, wrote in the Nation.

Other critics on the left see abundance campaigners as blaming government red tape for what are fundamentally private sector failures. Hannah Story Brown of the Revolving Door Project, for example, argued that the crash in home construction owed not to zoning rules but to the collapse of the housing bubble in and after 2008, “driven by the deregulation of housing finance and a securitization machine that broke the market.”

Similarly, Adler-Bell argued that the Abundance vision is “smaller than it purports to be, myopic about power, and flattering to those who have it.”….

The Abundance Plan: Cut Red Tape With More Paperwork

Freddy Brewster, July 11, 2025 [The Lever]

…in California, an abundance-aligned lawmaker and abundance-touting housing proponents are pushing a bill that would add massive red tape for affordable housing funding and other building projects by requiring municipalities to conduct onerous studies before they can even propose ballot measures to raise taxes on property sales.

Critics say the legislation is an example of corporate Democrats touting abundance as a smoke screen to protect the profits of corporate monopolists who are exacerbating the housing crisis in California and beyond by setting the pace and price of new homes…

The bill was introduced by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland-based Democrat with close connections to one of the co-authors of Abundance….

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Hidden cameras in hotels and Airbnbs are more common than you think — 5 ways to protect your privacy 

[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 07-06-2025]

The Political Economy of AI: A Syllabus

Henry Farrell, July 12, 2025 [Programmable Mutter]

[TW: for those interested, Farrell provides a long list of links of readings for a college course on the political economy of artificial intelligence.]

Climate and environmental crises

The science behind Texas’ catastrophic floods 

[Grist, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2025]

The glaciers of Canada, the United States, and Switzerland lost 12% of their volume in just four years 

[Noticias Ambientales, via Naked Capitalism 07-06-2025]

‘WITH WHAT WATER?’ 

[Texas Observer, via Naked Capitalism 07-07-2025]

…Never in the history of Mexican National Water Commission records has La Boquilla plunged to its present levels. The day we motored up to the dam—September 21, 2024—the reservoir had sunk to 16.1 percent of its capacity. This May, the reservoir sat at 14.7 percent.

La Boquilla impounds the water of the Rio Conchos, the largest tributary of the Rio Grande. With a capacity of more than 2.35 million acre-feet—enough, in other words, to submerge 2.35 million acres of land in a foot of water—La Boquilla can be thought of as a gigantic storage tank perched at a high point in a complex binational river system.

If the lake lacks water, the river below it dries. And a dried-up Rio Conchos signals distress and political tensions extending throughout northern Chihuahua and all along Mexico’s border with Texas….

‘Unforgivable’: FEMA Missed Thousands of Calls from Texas Flood Victims After Noem Fired Contractors

‘DISASTERS ARE A HUMAN CHOICE’: TEXAS COUNTIES HAVE LITTLE POWER TO STOP BUILDING IN FLOOD-PRONE AREAS 

[Texas Observer, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2025]

Trump’s ​‘big, beautiful’ law tethers the US to the past

Dan McCarthy, 7 July 2025 [Canary Media, via Clean Power Roundup]

The law takes a sledgehammer to key pieces of American industrial policy, threatening the development of clean energy — a vital 21st century technology….

…It eliminates a set of subsidies that have, over decades, helped solar and wind mature from niche technologies to cornerstones of our power grid. It scraps tax credits for rooftop solar, electric vehicles, and heat pumps, making it more expensive for the average person to buy these cleaner options. It threatens to pull the rug out from under manufacturers who, encouraged by the incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act, had chosen to build new factories to make products like solar panels and lithium-ion batteries in the United States.

Jobs will be lost. Energy will get even more expensive. Billions more tons of carbon dioxide will escape into the atmosphere, needlessly, trapping more and more heat under the lid of a planet that is already boiling over.

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

China’s ‘green great wall’ in Inner Mongolia traps 3 more deserts

Victoria Bela, 9 Jul 2025 [South China Morning Post]

Last straw checkerboard placed at Badain Jaran Desert completes 1,856km green belt that also runs across the Tengger and Ulan Buh deserts

NASA Astronaut Snaps Rare Sprite Flash From Space and It’s Blowing Minds 

[ZME Science, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2025]

Bats replay flight memories in fixed time packets, providing new clues into how memories are stored 

[Medical Xpress, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2025]

In a new study appearing in Nature, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, recorded the activity of hundreds of neurons simultaneously in freely flying bats. It is the first time that an ensemble of neurons—rather than just individual neurons—has been studied in concert in bats as they fly around and behave naturally.

The data provided surprising new insights into neural replay and theta sequences, another phenomenon which is believed to be involved in memory and planning.

“For the past 20 years, we’ve been recording single neurons in bats and asking the question, ‘When animals are doing interesting things, what do individual neurons do?'” said study senior author Michael Yartsev, an associate professor of neuroscience and bioengineering and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at UC Berkeley.

“But in the brain, there are emerging properties that you only see when you’re looking at ensembles of neurons. In this study, we looked at these two phenomena—replay and theta sequences—that are only visible when you track many neurons at the same time.”

A clearer understanding of the role of replay and theta sequences in the brains of animals could shed light on how long-term memories are formed and stored in humans, potentially leading to new treatments for neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.

Democrats’ political malpractice

What I Learned Working for Zohran Mamdani 

Harper O’Connor, [YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2025]

[Timotheusb comments on Naked Capitalism: “I canvassed for Mamdani and found this young guy’s take on the campaign pretty much spot on, including his comments on cold-calling voters. As a grandpa among the 20-something’s, it was an encouraging and inspiring experience.”]

The Most Establishment Paper In The US Wants To Introduce You To The New DLC— As Bad As The Old One: Corporate Sellouts Trying To Hijack The Left’s Momentum…Rebranding The Rot: Status Quo Gets A Makeover

Howie Klein, July 10, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

To the Field First, Comrades! The NYC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America has pulled off another stunning upset through Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. An insider shares DSA’s grassroots strategy.

Michael Thomas Carter, July 12, 2025 [Drop Site News]

…Mamdani’s success, according to mainstream narratives and prominent pundits, is due to a mixture of individual political acumen, social media savvy, a talented video production team, and his appealing message of a more affordable city for all New Yorkers. All of this helped, but the fact that Mamdani secured the most total votes in a primary in New York City’s history marks the culmination of a grassroots political project that began at least back in 2015, when the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) announced a “New Strategy for a New Era,” energized by the early days of Bernie Sanders’s first presidential run

Over the past nine years, NYC-DSA has built a field organizing machine that is arguably the strongest electoral operation in municipal politics nationwide. Through wins and losses in local, state, and federal elections, NYC-DSA has learned strategic lessons, developed significant logistical capacity, created a volunteer base for canvassing and outreach, and nurtured a cadre of experienced electoral campaign workers who work on endorsed campaigns….

Resistance

How We Made Trump Back Down 

[Offensive with Kris Goldsmith, via Naked Capitalism 07-09-2025]

On July 7, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced a major reversal: instead of executing their planned reduction-in-force of 80,000 staff, they’ll now be scaling that number back to 30,000. This isn’t a full reversal—but it’s a strategic retreat. One that wouldn’t have happened without months of sustained pressure from veterans, military families, frontline workers, and allied advocates across the country. For half a year, we’ve been confronting a calculated attempt to dismantle the VA from within. And the reason this reversal happened isn’t because the administration saw the light. It’s because we made them feel the heat.

What to Do When You See ICE in Your Neighborhood

Justin Caffier,  July 12 2025 [The Intercept]

How can you deter the Trump administration’s immigrant deportation machine when it pops up in your community? Follow these steps.

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

Trump’s Ultimate Cure for an Unpopular Budget Bill

Robert Kuttner, July 7, 2025 [The American Prospect]

Republicans are worried that voters will punish them in 2026. What if voters can’t?….

…the Trump Justice Department has begun an effort to intimidate state election officials nationwide.

The New York Times recently reported that senior DOJ officials, presumably in concert with the White House, have directed department lawyers “to examine the ways in which a hypothetical failure by state or local officials to follow security standards for electronic voting could be charged as a crime, appearing to assume a kind of criminally negligent mismanagement of election systems.”

The department has contacted election officials to demand information on voting in at least four states. Colorado is a particular target, since Trump is obsessed with the case of Tina Peters, a former county clerk who is serving nine years in prison for tampering with voting machines in an effort to prove that the machines had been used to rig the 2020 election against Trump. The president has called Peters a “political prisoner.”

In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring all prospective voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship. In April, a district court judge enjoined DHS from carrying out Trump’s order. Since then, however, the Supreme Court has ruled in Trump v. CASA that district court decisions do not apply nationwide. So the Trump order on proof of citizenship in voting could be revived.

Trump is pursuing his characteristic strategy of flooding the zone, in this case demanding voter information, threatening election officials with prosecution for even technical violations, and deterring voting by demanding proof of citizenship, while targeting naturalized citizens on another front.

In 2024, some vigilante Republican county officials and activists tried to overwhelm voting centers and poll workers in blue states. For the most part, it didn’t work, in part because the Biden Justice Department was there to prevent intimidation. This time, Trump will control the Justice Department response.

Trump doesn’t have to depress voting or accurate counting all that much to keep legislative control. That’s how dictators simulate continued democracy….

The Little-Noted Trump-DOJ Move That Should Scare the Hell Out of You

Harry Litman, July 10, 2025 [The New Republic]

The Justice Department is looking at criminal charges against local election officials who don’t “safeguard” their systems. And yes, it’s as bad as it sounds.

Those Dangerous White Christians: How We Got Here, and What Happens Now?

Peter Laarman, June 29, 2024 [LA Progressive]

The rapid rise of a pugilistic and politicized white evangelicalism occurred in direct tandem with the virulent reaction to the advances of the midcentury civil rights movement….

…Berkeley historian David Hollinger knows more about this than any other scholar I know of, and he tells the story well in a recent piece for Religion Dispatches. He notes, first, that a strong reactionary current was always present in 20th century evangelical Christianity. Think of the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925 or of the highly effective midcentury effort by LA’s Rev. James Fifield to give a Christian veneer to efforts by big capital to roll back the New Deal and crush unions. Think of Billy Graham’s response to Dr. King’s dream of Black and white children walking hand-in-hand in Alabama: “Only when Christ comes again.” ….

Money played no small part in arming the evangelicals for battle. Just as with the corporate support given to James Fifield’s “Spiritual Mobilization” campaign of the 1950s, big corporate-friendly players (e.g., the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley foundations) bankrolled a new conservative Christian infrastructure, starting in the late 1970s and cresting during the 1980s and 1990s. With the help of some of these same donors, clever people working on the inside of the religious tent also helped to advance what is now univocal evangelical alignment with the Catholic bishops’ stance on fetal “personhood.” The clever inside operators also got money to craft strategies for muting what was left of the progressive Christian voice, using vehicles like the Institute for Religion and Democracy….

Most Christians say they would never vote for a Democrat, poll finds 

[The Christian Post, via Naked Capitalism 07-06-2025]

Elon Musk Consulted Curtis Yarvin, Right-Wing Thinker, on Third Party 

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 07-11-2025]

Grok 4 decides what it thinks about Israel/Palestine by searching for Elon’s thoughts.

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-11-2025]

Visionaries Without Vision: The small and dreary political imagination of billionaires.

Hamilton Nolan, July 7, 2025 [How Things Work]

…Consider the unspoken value structure concealed beneath these anodyne words. Altman’s primary political priority is—explicitly!—to ensure that we don’t eliminate billionaires. He dresses this up in altruistic clothing by suggesting that, you see, he wants everyone to have the stuff that billionaires have, and we can achieve that if we just unleash capitalism and technology and entrepreneurship. Oh? Should all 340 million Americans become company founders, funded by Y Combinator? Should the teachers and the firefighters and the retail clerks and the restaurant waiters and the sanitation workers and the truck drivers and the security guards all become venture capitalists? …

…As with Musk, what is striking about Altman is not that he is a rich guy who is concerned with increasing the wealth of rich guys. That is to be expected. What leaps out to me is the extent to which these men who fancy themselves visionaries are actually sunk neck-deep in the dreary task of protecting the status quo. Their political imagination begins and ends with accepting the idea that America’s most profound deformations are inevitable: There must a tiny class of ultra-wealthy potentates who wield enormous economic and technological and (by extension) political power, and those people are people too, and how can we arrange society in order to be nicer to them? All of the political fumbling of these tech billionaires reveals them to be babies with guns, utterly lacking in the maturity necessary to wield the power that has been placed in their hands.

Do not be like these pitiful men. Do not let the world as it is seduce you into believing that it is the only world that can be. Think about what a righteous world would look like, and proceed in that direction. In America, fewer than a thousand billionaires hold more than six trillion dollars in wealth. If these guys are so concerned with paying off the national debt and making everyone richer, I can think of an easy place for us to find the money for it.

How the Civil Rights Backlash Planted the Seeds of Resurgent Racism

Sharon Kyle, July 5, 2025 [LA Progressive]

…I write now out of a profound concern: that today’s progressives are, once again, at risk of missing a historic opportunity to build the kind of cross-racial, cross-ethnic coalitions necessary to challenge rising authoritarianism. That opportunity will not be realized unless we center race—not as a peripheral issue, but as the very foundation upon which this country’s structures of power have been built.

Note:  Click here to read the full Powell Memo

The Powell Memo – Written in the Shadow of Black Uprising

In 1971, when Lewis Powell wrote the Powell memo, the Civil Rights Movement had recently secured major legislative victories:

• Brown v. Board (1954) led to massive white resistance to integration.
• The Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) empowered Black Americans and challenged white dominance.
• Urban uprisings, Black Power rhetoric, and affirmative action programs contributed to white anxiety and elite fears of systemic upheaval.

While Powell spoke of a threat to the “American free enterprise system,” he was responding to the wider upheaval of elite, white, male power—which included shifts in race, gender, and youth culture. The memo is best understood as a white-collar counterrevolution to the perceived disorder of the 1960s….

Over the decades, Powell’s blueprint matured:

• Reaganism adopted pro-business, anti-government, and racially coded policies
• Federalist Society created a judicial pipeline (including Scalia, Alito, Gorsuch, etc.)
• ALEC drafted model laws for voter suppression, “stand your ground,” union busting
• Fox News and other outlets provided the cultural armory to normalize these shifts

This infrastructure increasingly fused corporate capitalism with white evangelical nationalism and racial grievance politics….

The Christian Backlash Taking Hold 

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 07-12-2025]

For too long this administration has presented itself as the only defender of Christianity while it engages in merely symbolic gestures like posting Bible verses or publicizing worship services in the White House. Frederick Douglass described this type of performance: “Religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man.” I fail to see how you can shout glory to God one minute and laugh about the harsh conditions of Alligator Alcatraz the next.

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Seven Supreme Court Decisions Brought Fascism to America

Richard W. Behan, July 9, 2025

Trump v. CASA, Inc. was the coup de grace, capping six earlier and toxic SCOTUS decisions which, scattered over two centuries, collectively enabled fascism….

…1803, in the case of Marbury v. Madison….

…Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 83 years later….

…1976. Buckley v. Valeo found unconstitutional the Corrupt Practices Act of 1910….

…Two years later, in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti….

…Citizens United v. FEC in 2010….

…In Trump v. United States, July 1, 2024, the Court declared immunity from prosecution for former presidents….

…Then a year later Trump v. CASA Inc. was the straw that broke democracy’s back….

This article is drawn from a book the author is completing, The Triumph of Corporate Oligarchy: How It Defeated Democracy, Savaged a Thriving Nation, Normalized Fraudulent War, and Brought Forth Donald Trump.

Louisiana Is Bulldozing the Right of Prisoners to Prove Their Innocence After a Conviction 

[Bolts, via Naked Capitalism 07-10-2025]