Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 27, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Fintan O’Toole [The New York Review, July 24, 2025 issue]
What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time….
…the primary goal of Trump’s deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles is not the violent suppression of dissent. It is the remaking of the army itself. Trump is instructing the troops on how they must think of themselves and of the nature of the country they are pledged to defend….
…putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained for loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution….
In this light, it actually suits Trump’s purposes if his federalization of the National Guard is understood to be illegal. His deployment of troops in Los Angeles is intended to dissolve boundaries—between domestic disputes and foreign wars, between reality and performance, and above all between a law-bound democracy and arbitrary rule. Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy.
Alex Woodward, July 17, 2025 [The Independent, via defenddemocracy.press]
Civic republicanism
Jim Stewartson, July 22, 2025 [MIndWar]
…Trump’s ego is in a state of panic. His narcissistic supply is dwindling and he’s grasping for anything to bring him love and praise from his cult. This is causing him to decompensate which is the breakdown of psychological defenses under stress, leading to:
- Loss of coherent functioning
- Emotional dysregulation (rage, paranoia, despair)
- Reversion to more primitive coping mechanisms (denial, projection, magical thinking)
But I think we’re seeing something new here, a uniquely 21st century phenomenon. The Project 2025 purge of the government, and the cast of kakistocratic sycophants Trump has installed, along with true ideological psychopaths like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, have fused Trump’s psychology onto the entire governmental apparatus. In Trump’s first term, he was unsuccessful in fully dismantling the system; there remained a safety zone between his psychological state and the behavior of the federal government. That is deleted now.
To coin a phrase, I think what we’re seeing is governmental decompensation.
The US federal government has lost its coherent functioning. Just this morning, with the explicit purpose of avoiding a vote on revealing the Epstein files, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson shut down Congress, and went on vacation until September. This is similar behavior to the Supreme Court of the United States throwing America to the wolves and going on vacation until October….
So what are the ramifications of governmental decompensation? What happens to a government if it remains completely fused to a malignant narcissist cult leader’s spiraling psychological state? Well, nothing good.
- Collapse of Trust
The public no longer believes institutions can help them.- Militarization of the Executive
Police, intelligence, and military become extensions of the leader’s paranoia.- Normalization of Absurdity
The public is forced to nod along with delusions—or risk punishment.- Reactive Brutality
Repression increases not out of strength, but out of fear of exposure.- Fragmentation or Catastrophic Purge
Eventually, one of two things happens:
- A violent purge consolidates a totalitarian regime.
- Or the state collapses under the weight of its own incoherence and infighting.
[TW: Stewartson irritates some people, but he often finds and identifies a psychological indicator that others miss. Similar, I think to how most people fail to understand how power and wealth corrupts individual souls, as explained in the classics of civic republicanism.]
Jim Stewartson, July 26, 2025 [MIndWar]
…Nevertheless, the media, to the extent it still functions at all, has not changed the way it thinks, and talks, about what’s going in America. They still cannot, or will not, face the facts that this is not a group of rational actors, it is a troop of evil clowns in a hall of mirrors—with guns.
We are not watching 4D chess or “Art of the Deal,” the entire US government, and now the nation along with it, are an unstable formation hastily fashioned onto the disintegrating psyche of a malignant narcissist in collapse.
Donald Trump has, through purges, propaganda, and the elevation of loyal incompetents, effectively fused his own psyche—and all its attendant pathologies—to the machinery of the U.S. government. What now governs America is not a coherent system of policy and process, but a state mirroring the ego, paranoia, cruelty, and collapse of a single man.
If you don’t grasp this foundational truth, everything you observe will be filtered through a lens that distorts rather than clarifies. You will see chaos and mistake it for strategy. You will see sadism and call it policy. You will see collapse and label it politics.
And if you report what you see through that faulty lens, you are not just misleading your audience—you are robbing them of the only framework that makes sense of this collapse. At best, you’re depriving them of clarity. At worst, you’re trafficking in disinformation that could get people killed….
Wealth series 7: The real cost of flaunting it
Richard Murphy, July 26 2025 [taxresearch.org.uk]
This video explores how the wealthy flaunt their wealth—not with numbers, but through displays of power, privilege, and consumption. From gold-plated cars to opera picnics and £50 notes burned in front of beggars, conspicuous consumption defines status in our unequal world. But what damage does that do to the rest of us—and to them?….
All of this is designed for one purpose. It is designed to make us envious. The wealthy want us to be envious of them because that gives them the dopamine hit that they crave, which creates the value in their mind as to who they are.
This is the basis of their self-worth. They’re desperate for attention, and without it, they are nothing.
But this is an enormously damaging process. The resources and talent wasted on producing this pointless luxury, which does nothing more than signal that somebody can afford to buy in, are enormous.
Everybody is being driven into a less-than-zero-sum game of status as a consequence of it, and that is always destructive. In other words, we are being told we are not good enough and can never match what they are, and we know that, and therefore divides are created, and that’s why we’re all worse off. And this harms wellbeing.
It harms our wellbeing because we are being told we’re not good enough, and it harms the wellbeing of the wealthiest as well, because actually they become paranoid about the fact that they might not be wealthy enough to keep up with their neighbours, or those whom they meet, or whatever else it might be. The harm is everywhere to mental health….
Wealth series 6: Wealthy, or worried?
Richard Murphy, July 24, 2025 [taxresearch.org.uk]
…the thing that the wealthy are most worried about is losing their wealth. There is nothing that they probably worry about more than falling down the pecking order in society.
The wealthy think they’re top of the pile.
They aren’t sure they’re worth it. In fact, they suffer very badly from impostor syndrome, which is what we suffer if we’re trying to take on a role we aren’t really sure that we should possess, and as a consequence, losing their wealth is their greatest paranoia of all….
So they use their money to protect that privilege, and that’s why they fight governments. And this matters. There is a real cost to their behaviour, not only in the undermining of regulation and everything else that goes on, and the methods that they use to fight fair taxation and all of that, but there’s also a cost to something else, and that is the cost of their hoarding, because remember, they hoard money. That’s how and why they’re wealthy. If they didn’t have hoarded money and value, then of course they couldn’t be considered to be wealthy, but as I’ve explained in other videos, most of saved money is dead money….
Brian Beutler, July 25, 2025 [Off Message]
…Several exchanges from this debate have made rounds online—when Hasan gets a boy named Connor Estelle to admit he is a fascist, when another says Hasan should “get the hell out” of the country. But, to me, one of the most revealing moments lacked that kind of viral potential. It was when Hasan asked Estelle: if you hate democracy so much, why are you engaged in public debate, a cornerstone of the democratic process?
“It is the means to support an end,” Estelle responded. “The reason we have free speech now is because we want to be openly talking about our opinions so we can get the state that we want. But it doesn’t mean free speech after we win.”….
Thanks to Estelle for his honesty. His means-to-an-end-style of bad faith in discourse is endemic on the right—not just among ascendant fascists—and has been for a long time. It’s just that most conservatives will never break character; to the contrast, they take false umbrage if you question their sincerity. But here Estelle lays out the method plainly: Rightists appeal to whomever they can with whatever false commitments they intend to break, knowing that, once delivered to power, they will pull the rug.
In nonexistential instances, this can look like Trump promising to lower costs, knowing that his tariffs will increase them, and (thus) lying about the incidence of tariffs. But in the final showdown, the promise is freedom, and the ulterior motive is tyranny. When Hasan asked Estelle, What happens when your fantasy autocrat kills your family, Estelle didn’t renounce extrajudicial violence. He replied, “Well, I’m not going to be a part of the group that he kills.”
I mention this exchange for two reasons: First, because it’s important for people to know that this is how right-wing operators pursue their ends. That they view liberal freedoms as loopholes to exploit in their pursuit of power. Second, because it reveals a weakness in liberalism-as-practiced.
The liberal commitment to free speech is inviolable. But it does not follow that liberals must extend the presumption of good faith to everyone engaged in free speech. Right-wing operators in particular are groomed and trained to embrace bad-faith argument as a tactic. And yet even in the Trump era, when the bad faith is so thinly veiled, liberals remain reluctant to treat it as disqualifying. Even when their counterparties have established long track records of bad faith….
Trump Is the Most Dangerous Criminal in US History
Thom Hartmann, July 22, 2025 [Common Dreams]
…But Trump’s shady financial dealings didn’t begin or end with these public scandals. For decades, he was closely associated with New York’s organized crime families. Trump Tower itself was built using concrete provided by mob-linked companies.
Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor and attorney as I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink, was a notorious fixer and lawyer for mob figures such as Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano.
Trump’s casinos also regularly skirted the law, drawing scrutiny from federal investigators for potential money laundering linked to organized crime, and his former casino manager recently revealed to CNN that Trump and Jeffrey Epstein once even showed up together with underage girls in tow (the White House denies the story).
Men DOGEbags at Work
DOGE builds AI tool to cut 50 percent of federal regulations
Hannah Natanson, Jeff Stein, Dan Diamond and Rachel Siegel, July 26, 2025, [Washington Post]
The tool, called the “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool,” is supposed to analyze roughly 200,000 federal regulations to determine which can be eliminated because they are no longer required by law, according to a PowerPoint presentation obtained by The Post that is dated July 1 and outlines DOGE’s plans. Roughly 100,000 of those rules would be deemed worthy of trimming, the PowerPoint estimates — mostly through the automated tool with some staff feedback. The PowerPoint also suggests the AI tool will save the United States trillions of dollars by reducing compliance requirements, slashing the federal budget and unlocking unspecified “external investment.”
The tool has already been used to complete “decisions on 1,083 regulatory sections” at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in under two weeks, according to the PowerPoint, and to write “100% of deregulations” at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Three HUD employees — as well as documents obtained by The Post — confirmed that an AI tool was recently used to review hundreds, if not more than 1,000, lines of regulations at that agency and suggest edits or deletions….
Strategic Political Economy
Social Security recipients set to face an $18,000 benefit cut in just seven years
Emily Peck, July 24, 2025 [Axios, via downwithtyranny.com]
Retirees are facing the prospect of substantial Social Security cuts in just seven years, sooner than projected, due to the “big, beautiful bill,” per an analysis out Thursday from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.Why it matters: If policymakers don’t stop this from happening, it would at least double the poverty rate of America’s seniors, per several estimates.By the numbers: The new analysis projects a 24% cut to benefits by late 2032. That’s equal to an $18,000 annual benefit cut for a dual-earning couple who both retire in 2033.
Global power shift
Will China Attain Technological Supremacy?
[Global Policy Journal, via Naked Capitalism 07-26-2025]
…As things stand today, China excels in areas such as the following:
- Artificial Intelligence, where Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Alibaba are closing the gap with U.S. giants, thanks to lower-cost and open-source models (Lin, Chin and Huang, 2025).
- Quantum technologies, where China has become the world’s leader in the Quantum communication (Information Technology & Innovation Report, 2024).
- 5G Technology, where China leads worldwide with over 2.7 million 5G base stations (LabNews, 2025).
- Electric vehicles, where Chinese automakers like Chery and BYD lead global sales (Financial Times, 2025).
- Electric batteries, where companies like CATL or BYD produce between 60 to 75 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, and where a majority of cobalt and graphite batteries are produced (LabNews, 2025).
- Solar panels, where China accounts for about 70% of global module production (Salitskii and Salitskaya, 2022).
- Computing, where China’s market share in the global computing industry is expected to reach 25% by the end of the decade, against the U.S.’ 18% (Bhardwaj, 2025).
- Drones, where China controls 70% to 80% of the global commercial drone market (Laszlo, 2025).
- Robotics, where the country accounts for 51% of the global installations of industrial robots (Vella, 2024).
- Hypersonic and Defence technologies, where China leads in hypersonics, advanced aircraft engines, electronic warfare, and undersea technologies, dominating in 19 of 23 critical research areas according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Firspost, 2023).
- Space race, where China competes head-to-head with the U.S. in areas such as lunar exploration, satellite infrastructure, military space capabilities and commercialization (Kluger, 2024; Pao, 2025).
- High-Speed Rail, where China holds the world’s leadership in both scale and technological advancement, with more than two thirds of the global network total, and innovations such as the smart train (CGTN, 2025; Chi, 2025).
How China Became the World’s Biggest Shipbuilder
[Construction Physics, via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2025]
China’s bug-inspired tech to detect missiles 20,000x faster than US
[Interesting Engineering, via Naked Capitalism 07-22-2025]
China unveils the largest crystal for high-powered laser weapons
[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 07-25-2025]
What are China’s plans for deep space exploration … and beyond?
Ling Xinin, 12 Jul 2025 [South China Morning Post]
…How serious is China about building a base on the moon?
Very serious.China aims to build a permanent base called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) near the moon’s south pole by 2035, and the planning is already under way.In 2023, more than 100 researchers from universities, laboratories, and space companies gathered in the central city of Wuhan for the first major planning meeting. Since then, a team has worked out how to bake lunar bricks using simulated soil and sent them to China’s Tiangong space station for testing under extreme space conditions.China hopes to make its first real brick on the moon in 2028, during the Chang’e-8 mission. A team in the central province of Anhui has built a 3D printer that uses concentrated sunlight to melt lunar soil into bricks that are strong enough for roads and buildings. They have also developed a prototype to extract water ice, using a bundle of tiny drill needles to heat the lunar soil, release vapour and collect it….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-22-2025]
On July 19, 2025, China killed the silicon wafer. And with it, ASML’s monopoly, TSMC’s moat, and every American chip sanction. You just didn’t hear the explosion. Time to break it down. (1/21)….InSe outperforms silicon in every category that matters:• 5–10x higher electron mobility• Atomic thickness• Tunable bandgap• Lower power leakage• Faster switching (10/21)….
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Washington Takes on the BRICS
[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 07-25-2025]
…For many years after Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa coalesced to form this loose but formidable association, in the last years of the last century, it was as if Washington were trying to will the group and all it represented out of existence.
And now look. The first thing the United States does as it acknowledges the BRICS, whose members currently number 11 and counting, is to announce that it will punish those nations belonging to it for … for belonging to it.
Earlier this month President Donald Trump — always the one to get this kind of nitwittery done — announced that he would impose blanket tariffs of 10 percent on all BRICS members — a threat he reiterated two weeks later, with the promise of more to come should the group’s members determine to exercise their sovereignty in the cause of common interests.
The Trumpster on this question said July 6:
“When I heard about this group from BRICS, six countries [sic], basically, I hit them very, very hard. And if they ever really form in a meaningful way, it will end very quickly. We can never let anyone play games with us.”
How’s that for the statecraft of a self-confident nation?
Russia
The CIA Initiated an Intelligence and Terrorist War on Russia Based on a Lie
Larry Johnson, via Naked Capitalism 07-20-2025]
Barack Obama Now Squarely in Russiagate Crosshairs
Matt Taibbi, via Naked Capitalism 07-20-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Famine Expert: Israel’s Starvation of Gaza Most ‘Minutely Designed and Controlled’ Since WWII
Brett Wilkins, July 22, 2025 [CommonDreams]
A leading global authority on famine on Monday accused Israel of orchestrating a carefully planned campaign of mass starvation in the Gaza Strip, remarks that came amid a steadily rising death toll from malnutrition caused by the 654-day U.S.-backed Israeli siege and obliteration of the Palestinian enclave.
“I’ve been working on this topic for more than four decades, and there is no case since World War II of starvation that is being so minutely designed and controlled,” Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, told Al Jazeera.
SHOCK: Israel Has Killed 20.7% of Gaza’s Population. That’s 434,000 People.
Donziger on Justice, July 22 2025 [via Moon of Alabama, July 25, 2025]
Here is the latest data, updated as of yesterday (July 21): based on a statistical model developed by a prestigious medical journal called The Lancet, Israel has killed roughly 434,800 people in Gaza since the country’s military started to attack the territory on 8 October 2023. That’s 20.7% of Gaza’s entire pre-conflict population dead. Over half are women and children.If the same level of killing and indirect death that took place in Gaza during the 594 days of the conflict happened in the United States proportional to population, roughly 70 million Americans would have been killed.
Chris Hedges, July 26, 2025
[THE HIND RAJAB FOUNDATION, via Naked Capitalism 07-23-2025]
Julia Conley, July 16, 2025 [defenddemocracy.press]
Middle East: Israeli army storms WHO warehouses in Gaza
[DW, via Naked Capitalism 07-23-2025]
Oligarchy
I Called Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book
Leland Nally, October 9, 2020 [Mother Jones, via John Ganz from Unpopular Front]
What I learned about rich people, conspiracy, “genius,” Ghislaine, stand-up comedy, and evil from 2,000 phone calls….
After Epstein’s arrest in 2019, a media narrative coalesced around the question of his strange place in the global elite: Epstein the master salesman, a man who had skillfully conned his way into the world’s most powerful circles, fooling everyone in the process. But after my travels through the book, after hearing more of the petty gossip and childish drama of the people who rule our world, I realized this was obviously incorrect. Built into the premise of Epstein the mastermind scammer is the notion that some kind of legitimate path to a legitimate global aristocracy exists. To call Epstein a grifter is to assume he circumvented some genuine meritocratic world order, where the “real” virtuosos dutifully climb the “real” ranks into the oligarchy, powered by nothing but their native talents.
The truth is that the elite world that Epstein ascended into, the one I tapped into by way of the black book, is populated with hordes of loathsome, boring, untalented people living their bumbling, idiotic lives while just so happening to wield some share of the preposterous global bounty that he and the rest were after. For all the mystery surrounding Epstein’s fortune, its existence is hardly more inscrutable than the wealth of any of his other billionaire peers. He earned it the same way they all did, which is to say precisely not at all.
This wasn’t some masterful hack into the global aristocracy. It’s what everyone does. It’s what the whole thing is. There is no scam here. It’s grifters grifting grifters all the way down..
This urge to make Epstein’s power sophisticated and complex serves a similar purpose as the elites’ insistence on Epstein’s extraordinary genius–both are ways of squaring the evident smallness of the man himself with the vastness of the world he built and the seemingly outsized influence he possessed. Both of them betray a collective lack of imagination when it comes to just how ludicrously rewarded dumbasses can be in this country. Epstein didn’t have to be anything special to become a key player in an evil conspiracy. He had to be rich, and he had to be useful to people richer and more powerful than he was. The very real possibility is that Epstein was both a rich dumbass and a key player in an evil conspiracy, because evil conspiracies require nothing more….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2025]
One of the more startling figures is the fact that more than 70 percent of the
wealth in Silicon Valley is concentrated in just nine households.
Those nine households made $136 million more last year alone than they did the year before.
China and Africa are destroying the DeBeers diamond cartel
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 07-26-2025]
For over a hundred years, DeBeers has dominated and controlled the global diamond trade.
But today, Chinese factories are mass-producing lab-grown diamonds, which are chemically identical to natural stones, and prices are collapsing worldwide for both man-made and natural diamonds.
[TW: Like HSBC (former Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Co.), DeBeers was one of the key institutions in the interlocking network of directorships and corporate officers that actually ran the British empire for over a century. China displacing DeBeers is just one more reason certain British oligarchs hate China with a red hot intensity.]
Global pharmaceutical order is collapsing because China is sane and the west isn’t
William Huo [X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2025]
Big Pharma is collapsing and no one’s telling you why. The real reason isn’t politics or profits. It’s China. And the game is already over. Big Pharma is increasingly reliant on Chinese biotech advances….
Not because of espionage. Because of competence. (1/11)
For decades, Big Pharma thrived under a parasitic model. Outsource everything. Milk patents. Inflate prices. Delay generics. Fund lobbyists to kill reform. It was never about medicine. It was about monopoly rents. (2/11)
China chose a different path. It built biotech capacity from the ground up.Massive state investment. STEM education. Repatriated talent. Infrastructure scaled to a billion people. It wasn’t neoliberal. It was national. And it worked. (3/11)
In 2025, Chinese firms accounted for 18 percent of all global licensing deals. One-third of the total deal value came from China. Pfizer, Merck, and AstraZeneca are now dependent on Chinese partners to refill their pipelines. (4/11)….
Meanwhile, U.S. pharma is a financial zombie. It gutted R&D. It outsourced innovation. It normalized regulatory capture. Its core skill is not science. It is rent-seeking and acquisitions. (6/11)….
This is not just a pharma story. It is a civilizational story. The U.S. let Wall Street take over its science and production base. China built a system to serve its population. That system now dominates. (9/11)
Big Pharma’s collapse reveals something deeper. America chose finance over factories. Intellectual property over real invention. Private equity over public health. China didn’t just catch up. It built a superior model. (10/11)
Big Pharma is finished. Not because China cheated. But because America abandoned the idea of building for the public good. Now the reckoning is here. (11/11)
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 07-26-2025]
…At a conference in Cambridge, UK, at the end of May, academics, think tankers, policymakers, and journalists convened to contemplate this new world “Beyond Neoliberalism.” The gathering was supported by the Hewlett Foundation—a central funder for a range of think tanks and intellectual efforts, many represented at the conference. The event’s stated ambition was to envision an expansive new political order….
…The greatest present threat to the world economy is the GOP’s MAGA policy agenda, and so the Democrats’ future direction represents the only window for the US to stop being a source of disorder in the world….
[TW: A conference of elites scrambling to find a response to the “polycrisis” their policies have created. Not very useful, but an informative survey of what these particular elites are considering, especially the embedded table “The Current Rules / Rewriting the Rules.” Note that there apparently was no discussion of the problem of oligarchy: how the rich in a society marred by extreme economic inequality, create misrule by following their self-interest, because their outsized economic power allows them to buy outsized political power. ]
US Navy and Coast Guard Shipbuilding in Disarray and No US Commercial Shipbuilding
What’s Going on With Shipping, YouTube
Trumpillnomics
Republican tax increase of $335 billion for working families
Heather Cox Richardson, July 24, 2025 [Letters from an American]
In the Washington Post today, Gene Sperling, who served as director of the National Economic Council under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted that while the Republicans insisted that extending the tax cuts should not be counted toward raising the deficit because they were part of “current policy,” they “entirely rejected” the current policy argument when it came to extending the increase in the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credit (PTC) established under Biden. Unlike the tax cuts for the wealthy, Republicans are letting that tax credit die, a change that will mean a tax increase of $335 billion for working families over the next ten years.
The loss of the PTC will not only drive healthcare up more than $18,000 a year for a typical 60-year-old couple making $82,000 a year, Sperling writes, but will also drive healthier Americans out of the market, making healthcare coverage more expensive for those who remain in it.
Trump’s “Homelessness Solution” Isn’t About Help— It’s About Hiding The Problem… Or Worse
Howie Klein, July 26, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…the Trump we’re stuck with now has never hidden his disdain for people experiencing homelessness. But now he’s turning that disgust into official policy. In an executive order signed yesterday, he called on states and cities to “remove vagrant individuals” from public spaces and redirect them into “treatment centers.” The order, which reads like a repackaged Reagan-era crackdown, promises— flimsily— funding for states that comply and subtly encourages a return to institutional warehousing of the poor, addicted, and mentally ill.
If you know anything about Trump, you’re already aware that this isn’t about care, compassion or public health. As always with him, it’s about optics. It’s about sweeping human suffering out of sight before foreign dignitaries drive through Washington or before swing voters in the suburbs head to the polls. It’s about criminalizing poverty again, in the most literal way, and calling it “public safety.”….The Supreme Court’s ruling last year, upholding the right of cities to fine or jail people for camping in public when no shelter beds are available, opened the floodgates. Trump is rushing through them….In Judaism, The Torah and Talmud make care for the poor an obligation, not a choice: “If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself… you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you.” And in the Muslim faith, charity (zakat) is one of the Five Pillars of Islam— a religious duty. Homelessness is seen as a social failing, a collective responsibility ignored. Across all faiths, the consistent message is that the moral measure of a society is how it treats the poor, the unhoused, the sick, and the forgotten. Not only is helping them considered virtuous— failing to do so is viewed as a grave moral failing. Trump’s and MAGA’s approach doesn’t just violate modern human rights standards, it runs counter to the teachings of every major religious tradition….
Jim Stewartson, July 24, 2025 [MindWar]
[Trump’s] latest Executive Order “ENDING CRIME AND DISORDER ON AMERICA’S STREETS” is one of the darkest things I’ve ever read, and yeah, that’s saying a lot. It doesn’t even try to hide its purpose, or its disdain for its targets. It’s not about helping anyone, it’s about “cleaning up the streets.” First sentence:
Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe.
This is the exact type of propaganda that has been used by countless dictators when they want to target a vulnerable group, but this Order has a particular disdain for substance abusers, the unhoused and the mentally ill….
But in reality this is a carbon copy of Aktion T4, the eugenics and “euthanasia” program that represented the initial test for the Holocaust; and Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich a campaign to eliminate the “work-shy” who were among a group of “asocials” classified as “Preventive Criminals.”….
Cory Doctorow [via Naked Capitalism 07-25-2025]
The corollary of “you treasure what you measure,” is “you don’t give a shit about what you stop measuring,” which is why Trump’s FCC has decided to stop measuring the speed of the broadband it subsidizes with billions in public funds:https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/biden_broadband_benchmarks_are_bs/
…In its communique killing broadband measurement, Trump’s FCC says that focusing on broadband speed “risks skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers.” What they mean is that if they insist on measuring broadband speeds before handing out rural broadband subsidies, the only companies that will get those subsidies are the ones that provide fast broadband….
The only way to make [Musk’s] Starlink profitable is to get everyone to use it, and therein lies the problem, because Starlink is cursed with something business professionals call “dogshit unit-economics.” Every time you add a new user to Starlink, everyone nearby gets slower internet:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/18/starlink-internet-satellite-speed-elon-musk/
…It’s funny that Musk styles himself the “Technoking,” because the thing that ushered in the Century of Tech was amazing unit-economics (the internet and computers get better and cheaper as they advance), while everything Musk loves is cursed with dogshit unit-economics.
Take cars: Musk hates public transit….
Biden policies put the U.S. in a strong position, but Trump is destroying the American battery industry and good American jobs.
Monopoly Round-Up: The Incredible Shrinking Trump Antitrust Enforcers
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2025]
Predatory finance
Home Insurance Executives Are Raking It In—at Your Expense
Dan Wagner, Kenny Stancil, July 23, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…It is true that insurance companies have made some large payouts for recent climate disasters, and are choosing to pull out of certain markets entirely. However, it is not true that the industry as a whole is suffering. On the contrary, it is rolling in profits….
The U.S. property and casualty (or P&C) insurance industry, which includes home and auto, had a banner year in 2024. Profits hit an all-time high of nearly $167 billion, up 91 percent from 2023 and 330 percent from 2022. The bulk of the industry’s profits come from investment income, though P&C insurers also cleared more than $25 billion in underwriting profit last year. And that’s a conservative estimate, based on a method of calculating underwriting gains, called a “combined ratio,” that artificially weighs down the metric by adding extra baggage to the “claims paid out” side of the equation. The industry adds in overhead expenses, including office space, advertising, and commissions, with underwriting losses. But if you look strictly at the ratio of claims paid out relative to premiums collected, insurers are coming out on top in the vast majority of the country’s ZIP codes.
Those record profits come at the expense of aspiring homeowners, who are facing unjustified premium hikes, claim denials, and coverage withdrawals. While most borrowers finance their homes for 30 years, insurers reprice risk annually. This temporal imbalance is a major problem. Home insurance is becoming so expensive that a growing number of households, especially first-time homebuyers, are struggling to make their monthly mortgage payments. The dwindling availability and affordability of insurance also hurts renters by making it harder for developers to build.
Inside the Private Equity Scam—and the Livelihoods It Has Destroyed
Molly Osberg, July 27, 2025 [The New Republic]
Financiers have bamboozled the public for years about their expertise in “fixing” companies. Yet they often—and sometimes deliberately—run them into the ground.
Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
by Megan Greenwell
Dey Street Books, 320 pp., $29.00
Adam Tooze, via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2025]
Mike Brock, July 23, 2025 [Notes from the Circus]
There are conspiracies that sound too outrageous to believe, and then there are conspiracies so brazen that they hide in plain sight, documented in government filings and boasted about on podcasts. What I’m about to expose falls into the latter category: a systematic effort by some of America’s most powerful tech billionaires to accelerate the collapse of the American financial system because they believe they’ll profit from the chaos that follows.
This isn’t speculation. This isn’t connecting dots that don’t exist. This is based on direct conversations with people inside this movement, people who have explicitly told me that they view the destruction of the dollar as both inevitable and desirable, who see the suffering of ordinary Americans during financial collapse as an acceptable cost for achieving their vision of a Bitcoin-dominated economy, who have positioned JD Vance as their primary vehicle for implementing policies they know will undermine American monetary stability….
Lever Daily 07-24-2025
Performance-based pay packages have seen home insurance executives showered in lucrative awards at the expense of homeowners, driving premiums sky-high and making the industry more profitable than ever, The American Prospect reports. Homeowners insurers’ profits exploded to $167 billion last year, up 330 percent from 2022. That means C-suite pay is up: At nine of the biggest home insurance companies in the U.S., executives on average were given a 30 percent raise over 2023, collectively earning $310 million in 2024, a Public Citizen and Revolving Door Project analysis finds.
- Home insurance premiums have increased 24 percent since 2022, amounting to a combined $21 billion price hike for homeowners.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Justice Department Told Trump in May That His Name Is Among Many in the Epstein Files
[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2025]
Trump is engaged in a cover up of the Epstein files for this simple reason: Trump is guilty!
Dean Obeidallah, July 24, 2025
The undeniable truth is this: Trump is guilty. Period.
The only question is guilty of what? Will the files show that—as I believe—Trump knew that his close friend Epstein was running a child sex ring and he took zero steps to stop that evil? Will there be evidence Trump procured from Epstein children for other men in politics and power to have sex with? Or could it be even worse—implicating Trump in the rape of children?
No one knows because there has been a cover up of the file by Trump. In fact, not only is Trump engaged in a cover up of the Epstein files—we are now seeing a cover up of the cover up!
There’s Always a Price— A Strongman’s Shadow And Accomplices To Autocracy
Howie Klein, July 24, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Trump’s example has corrupted his administration, his political party and in more ways that are comfortable, the whole country. Just yesterday, Eric Katz reported that Trump’s crooked Budget Director, Russ Vought, has already billed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which he is working to defund, almost $5 million for his security detail. Trump’s party is crawling with opportunists who’ve taken his lead and turned public office into a racket. In Alabama, Tommy Tuberville has been quietly snapping up land near new federal infrastructure projects— projects he publicly opposed— through shell companies tied to his family. Former South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem— now Secretary of Homeland Security— funneled millions in COVID relief funds to political donors through no-bid contracts, calling it “streamlining” while lining her friends’ pockets. Elise Stefanik scored a $1.2 million book advance from a publishing house tied to an oil baron, then tucked a favor into a defense bill that boosted his pipeline investments. Meanwhile, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders used the state plane like her personal Uber, jetting to out-of-state donor retreats under the guise of “official business.” J.D. Vance, who poses as a populist warrior, pocketed nearly $3 million from Big Pharma before championing a deregulation bill ghostwritten by Pfizer lobbyists. And in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton— barely surviving impeachment— was immediately back at it, using a shady “consulting” firm to collect payments from people under investigation by his office. As we’ve been saying for… well, forever, this isn’t just a conservative political party, it’s a protection racket. And that’s without Clarence Thomas and Sammy Alito, two of the most corrupt Supreme Court Justices in history, right up there with Samuel Chase, who was impeached.
Yesterday, Thom Hartmann accused Señor TACO of being the most dangerous criminal in U.S. history….
This Silicon Valley Stuff’ll Get You Killed
Edward Ongweso Jr, July 21, 2025 [The Tech Bubble, via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2025]
Most of my thinking on Silicon Valley—on its firms, its products, its financiers, its ideologues, its boosters, and its projects—rests on a relatively simple understanding: these people will sacrifice us.
My first experience witnessing this came when helping organize ride-hail drivers working for Uber and Lyft as well as talking with taxi drivers struggling to survive the ascent of these firms. These companies, in a desperate scramble for their first profits, brazenly ignored the law, misclassified and immiserated countless workers, pushed drivers into predatory leasing agreements, paid out starvation wages while dodging taxes and ensuring drivers were blocked from dignified working conditions, and countless more abhorrent practices….
Things have only gotten worse as Silicon Valley’s business model has metastasized, with oligarch-intellectuals poised to reorganize wider and wider swaths of our economy, culture, social relations, and politics. To maximize profits and efficiency and productivity, to purge capitalism of its last vestiges of democracy and liberalism, to transform speculative gains into real wealth then into political power that makes this alchemy easier, to discipline consumers and workers and regulators, to foster paranoia (whether by states or communities) and preserve order, to pursue geo-strategic primacy, to summon some artificial superintelligence that will either end history or realize historic profits, anything and everything will be offered up. Something has to give—the situation demands a blood sacrifice.
Some believe the sacrifices will give birth to a stillborn god that will save the world. They insist, as Google’s former chief executive Eric Schmidt does, that “we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway” so now is the time to double down on overbuilding AI infrastructure. Climate change will be staved off only by accelerating the very developments bringing about the collapse of our ecological niche—so consume the water, foul the air, enrich fossil fuel firms, do whatever you must and do it with quick if there is going to be any hope of creating an “infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful” entity capable of saving the world….
Avi Asher-Schapiro and Jeff Ernsthausen, July 25, 2025 [ProPublica]
Disaster Management Group is one contractor behind the nation’s largest detention camp, to be built at Fort Bliss. It’s run by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty to a scheme to hire and conceal undocumented workers.
Restoring balance to the economy
Is it time to replace the bond market with something suited to the 21st century?
Richard Murphy, July 27 2025 [taxresearch.org.uk]
One of the best uses for AI that I currently know is to ask it to summarise the arguments in an article or paper…. I did this with an FT article this morning. The article in question was by someone called Philip Coggan, and was entitled ‘The bond market maths does not add up for governments’….
Philip Coggan’s claims as to the problems of government funding in the FT are deeply misleading. In his article, he ignores the structural failures of the financial system, misrepresents the nature of government finance, and clings to outdated ideas about how public funding should be raised in a modern economy.
First, we are not short of funds. We are awash with them. As Martin Wolf has often pointed out in the FT, we live in a world of persistent and chronic excess saving. This is a vital observation. The financial system is flooded with money looking for a safe home. If governments are struggling to find buyers for their bonds, the problem is not with the amount of debt that they are seeking to fund, or with deficits, but is instead the consequence of financial markets having stopped functioning effectively in their primary role, which is connecting surplus savings to useful investment.
Second, quantitative tightening is a choice, and a damaging one….
7. The problem is structural – not excessive public spending
- Gilt markets and modern finance are based on 19th-century assumptions about money, savings, inflation, and state risk.
- These markets serve speculators, not society.
- The system is no longer designed to deliver long-term capital for public good.
- Blaming governments for the failures of these systems is a fundamental misdiagnosis.
The AI summary of why we need to reform bond markets
Richard Murphy, July 27 2025 [taxresearch.org.uk]
I asked when posting a poll this morning whether a bullet-point summary of my argument for eliminating bond markets, generated by AI, would be beneficial.
This is what ChatGPT made of that article. I asked it to summarise it using numbered headings with bullet-pointed sub-headings….
1. We are not short of funds – we are awash with them
- As Martin Wolf has frequently highlighted in the Financial Times, the world suffers from a chronic savings glut.
- Vast pools of capital are searching for safe and meaningful returns.
- The problem is not excessive government borrowing, but the failure of financial markets to match surplus savings with socially useful investment.
- This is a structural failure of capitalism, not a fiscal crisis….
4. Governments are not like households – they have more tools
- Governments issue currency and are not revenue-constrained in the same way private actors are.
- The UK government can, legally, borrow directly from the Bank of England via the Ways and Means Account.
- This option avoids reliance on private bond markets when those markets are dysfunctional.
5. Wealth taxes are the obvious and fair alternative….
7. The problem is structural – not excessive public spending
- Gilt markets and modern finance are based on 19th-century assumptions about money, savings, inflation, and state risk.
- These markets serve speculators, not society.
- The system is no longer designed to deliver long-term capital for public good.
- Blaming governments for the failures of these systems is a fundamental misdiagnosis….
9. The real crisis is political cowardice, not public debt
- The idea that we have run out of fiscal road is false.
- The road has been narrowed by ideology – not economics.
- We lack courage, not cash.
- We must stop appeasing markets and start designing financial structures that serve people and planet.
- It is time to reimagine government finance for the 21st century.
[TW: I wrote the below over 14 years ago, in December 2009, but the actual postings appear to no longer exist in internet search engines.
There is, in fact, a huge amount of private capital out there, sloshing around the hot money centers of the world, desperately seeking for the highest return. In fact, the dollar equivalent of the entire annual U.S. Gross Domestic Product, about $15 trillion, is traded on the various financial markets in the U.S. – stocks, government bonds, corporate bonds, corporate paper, futures markets, and foreign exchange markets – about once every three days. (Back in the 1960s, it took almost nine months for the financial markets to trade the dollar equivalent of U.S. GDP.)
The great economic theory of the past four decades has been that this massive flow of funds would generate the greatest wealth for society if left to its own devices, with minimum interference and oversight by governments. In other words, that the rich know better how to invest society’s wealth than anyone else. The result has been the creation of a financial oligarchy, the slow collapse of the real economy under the burden of supporting the speculation, usury, and economic rent imposed by that oligarchy, and the “regulatory capture” of government by that oligarchy.]
Experiments in American Unions
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2025]
Health care crisis
Countdown Clock Begins for Giant Health Insurance Premium Increases
David Dayen July 22, 2025 [The American Prospect]
In around 90 days, millions of Americans will learn about out-of-pocket cost hikes of more than 75 percent on average.
Private Equity Wants Your Teeth
Helen Santoro, July 22, 2025 [The Lever]
… In the last decade, private equity firms have been quietly taking control of dental care from behind the scenes, largely through secondary business organizations that push dental practices to cut costs and, in some cases, encourage unnecessary and irreversible dental procedures.
In 2024, the dental industry witnessed 161 private equity deals — the highest number of any health care industry, as tracked by the watchdog organization, Private Equity Stakeholder Project. The data reveals that these investment firms are increasingly acquiring dental practices or inserting themselves into clinic management roles, where they then cut corners on patient care….
According to research published last year, the proportion of dentists affiliated with private equity has nearly doubled from 2015 to 2021, reaching almost 13 percent of all practitioners…. Between 2011 and 2019, private equity firms bought up $4.4 billion worth of dental practices….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble
Ed Zitron, July 21, 2025
…I also dislike the fact that I, and others like me, are held to a remarkably different standard to those who paint themselves as “optimists,” which typically means “people that agree with what the market wishes were true.” Critics are continually badgered, prodded, poked, mocked, and jeered at for not automatically aligning with the idea that generative AI will be this massive industry….
I may not be a contrarian, but I am a hater. I hate the waste, the loss, the destruction, the theft, the damage to our planet and the sheer excitement that some executives and writers have that workers may be replaced by AI — and the bald-faced fucking lie that it’s happening, and that generative AI is capable of doing so.
And so I present to you — the Hater’s Guide to the AI bubble, a comprehensive rundown of arguments I have against the current AI boom’s existence….
Delta Air Lines Tests AI-Powered Personalized Pricing
[PYMNTS, via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2025]
Humans Can Be Tracked With Unique ‘Fingerprint’ Based On How Their Bodies Block Wi-Fi Signals
[The Register, via Naked Capitalism 07-23-2025]
Why Are We Pretending AI Is Going to Take All the Jobs?
Matt Stoller [via Naked Capitalism 07-23-2025]
Leaked Document Reveals Troubling Details About How AI Is Really Being Trained
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 07-22-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
Canceling Colbert Begins the End of Television
David Dayen, July 23, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…Television as we have known it for more than 75 years in America affirmatively is going extinct, and practically nobody has reckoned with the implications of that….
Of the top 68 highest-rated single programs on all television in 2024, broadcast or cable, 65 were sporting events; number 39 was the Sunday Night Football studio show during a weather delay in October. Only two scripted shows, CBS’s Tracker and Young Sheldon (which ended last year), made the top 100. Sports are the last thing keeping the broadcast/cable television apparatus alive, and the gradual movement of sports programming into streaming, most notably Amazon’s grab of a share of the NBA contract for next season, signals that will meet its end, too.
We are in the midst of this giant transition of television from networks into streaming channels that have no fixed lineup. Appointment viewing, other than live sports, is simply a thing of the past. Small armies of staffers that built the model of a television network, thinking hard about lead-ins and demographics and time slots, are no longer needed.
Late-night shows, with their topicality, aren’t all that rewatchable, and therefore are among the more difficult things to shift into a streaming library. And people aren’t interested in waiting up late for conversations they can catch on YouTube. Colbert has been the national leader in late night for close to a decade, though Gutfeld! on Fox News gets about 50 percent more viewers. (Whether they’re awake or just fell asleep during Laura Ingraham is another question.) But even talking about winners and losers in this category obscures the ratings reality. The CBS Late Movie, a rerun it aired against The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in the 1970s and ’80s, had an audience in 1972 of nearly seven million adults per film, nearly three times as many viewers as Colbert’s “top-rated” Late Show a half-century later. The movie cost nothing but library rights. The Late Show costs $100 million a year.
So yes, late night is in free fall. But that reflects, rather than contrasts, the general free fall of all non-sports programming on linear TV. There were 105 million households with cable in 2010 and 68.7 million today, a 34.5 percent drop in a decade and a half at a time when households increased by 12.4 percent. Not even half of American homes subscribe to cable, satellite, or a virtual cable service like YouTube TV, and more people watched streaming content than broadcast and cable combined for the first time ever in May….
First, Kill The News. Then, do whatever you want.
Hamilton Nolan, July 24, 2025 [How Things Work]
… The current crisis of journalism can be seen as the coincidence of macro trends that are technological (the internet), economic (the concentration of wealth in the hands of tech titans), and political (the consolidation of power in the hands of Trump, a man who grows more powerful in direct proportion to the decline of the power of the traditional media). Even though the roots of this are deep, the speed with which decades of accumulated journalistic credibility have been crumpled up and thrown away is really something to behold. One billionaire bought, and wrecked, the LA Times. Another, even richer billionaire bought, and is now wrecking, the Washington Post. This is not a matter of being wedded to the old-timey form of the newspaper, but rather a matter of “there are only so many places where news reporters exist.” There are 75% fewer local journalists working in America today than there were in 2002.
The online media, where I spent much of my career, is shell of itself, gutted by layoffs caused by tech companies’ monopolization of online ad revenue. CBS, the home of 60 Minutes, paid Trump a bribe in a frivolous lawsuit, then canceled the show of the late night host who got on Trump’s nerves, all so that Trump will tell his minions to approve a merger that will make a tiny number of Hollywood wastrels very rich….
Who is ascendant in this terrifying new world of Zombie Journalism? People like Bari Weiss, the replacement-level former NYT blogger who has made herself a ton of money by launching a website that exists to reaffirm the political instincts of wealthy, center-right people: All of our problems are a result of Wokeness run amok. (Her site is now home to official Former NPR Office Asshole Uri Berliner, who is headed to the special hell reserved for those who sit in a safe new perch and taunt their former colleagues who are about to be laid off.) Those same wealthy people have poured in funding to Bari’s site, allowing it to reach the point that she is now in talks to sell it for a reported $200 million. To who? To our friend David Ellison, who now seeks to remold all of CBS in Bari’s soothing image….
Adam Johnson [The Column, via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2025]
EXPOSING THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Paper of Zionist Record
[The New York War Crimes, via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2025]
The struggle over AI in journalism is escalating
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2025]
Who’s watching city hall? Nobody—and that should scare you
[Bleeding Heartland, via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
Inter-American Court of Human Rights Delivers Landmark Opinion on Climate Emergency
[Just Security, via Naked Capitalism 07-23-2025]
The climate crisis is an “emergency,” which can only be “adequately addressed through urgent, effective, and coordinated actions,” the Inter-American Court of Human Rights declared on July 3. The international court, established by the Organization of American States in 1979, made this pronouncement in its Advisory Opinion on Human Rights and the Climate Emergency, legal analysis requested by Chile and Colombia. It offers authoritative guidance on the scope of countries’ obligations to address climate change and is the most comprehensive overview of the intersection between human rights law and climate change in the Americas.
The advisory opinion represents a landmark moment for the climate justice movement, following similar initiatives before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights….
Mapped: 16 times extreme weather drove higher food prices since 2022
[Carbon Brief, via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2025]
Wind Power: The Most Environmentally Destructive Form of Energy?
[Racing to Extinction, via Naked Capitalism 07-26-2025]
Why the Southern jet stream is shifting – and what it means
[Earth.com, via Naked Capitalism 07-22-2025]
I’m a microplastics researcher. Here’s how I limit the plastic in my life.
Tracey Woodruff, July 23, 2025 [Washington Post]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Democrats’ Project 2029 Is Doubling Down on Failure
Branko Marcetic [Jacobin, via downwithtyranny.com, July 22, 2025]
For anyone hoping Kamala Harris’s disastrous 2024 loss would make the Democratic Party drastically change direction, the bad news can be summed up in two words: Project 2029.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that Democrats are planning their own version of the right-wing policy blueprint that is the driving engine of Donald Trump’s presidency, which they’ll roll out piecemeal each quarter for the next two years in one of the party’s intellectual organs, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The man leading the effort is also that journal’s founder and coeditor: Andrei Cherny, a New Democrat wunderkind and (briefly) former Arizona Democratic party chair, who claims to have put together a team that’s “the Avengers of public policy.”….
The Project 2029 brain trust now tasked with saving the Democratic Party is quite literally composed of the same line-up of people who brought the party to its knees in the first place, handing Donald Trump power not once, but twice.
The Democratic Party’s defeat was born of a combination of a decades-long rejection of working-class politics, corporate influence that has captured the party, and a foreign policy hawkishness out of step with a war-weary American public. But it seems Project 2029 is less about reckoning with this reality and more, as Semafor’s Dave Weigel put it, putting out “a Dem[ocratic] message disconnected from left-wing groups,” with one person who’s involved texting him that “the groups are the Achilles Heel of the Deomcratic Party [sic].”
In other words, rather than any change of course, this is a team assembled to double down on failure….
That starts at the very top with Cherny himself, whose most recent project before this was a scandal-ridden corporate venture. For nine years, Cherny was the chief executive of celebrity-backed fintech firm Aspiration, which claimed to be democratizing investing by making it affordable for ordinary people and, in the process, being “in the business of fighting the climate crisis.”….
Cherny is a loud and proud evangelist for, and former member of, the Bill Clinton administration that laid much of the groundwork for the rise of Trump and the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, as well as an alum of the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council, which was maybe best known for its enthusiasm for privatizing Social Security.
Cherny first showed up on Clinton’s radar as a Harvard senior, when he wrote that the United States needed “government humble enough not to try to solve all our problems for us but strong enough to give us the tools to solve our problems for ourselves.” Clinton loved the line so much, he made his entire Cabinet read it, put it in one of his speeches, and hired Cherny as a speechwriter….
The New York mayor’s race shows just how desperate America’s power brokers are to keep that power
Hunter Lazzaro, June 20, 2025 [unchartedblue.com]
…if you’ve been paying any attention to national politics of late you know that the power-holders in this nation would rather burn the whole place down than risk any weakening of their own power…..
if you’ve been paying any attention to national politics of late you know that the power-holders in this nation would rather burn the whole place down than risk any weakening of their own power.
“Nora Reed (they/them ze/hir)@nora.zonewe are literally living in fascism and they are completely unwilling to let go of power even if that power is being eroded constantly by attacks they will not counter and being diminished by their own misconduct”….“Karl Bode
@karlbode.comwealth and power are absolutely terrified because they know the broader path out of authoritarianism involves genuine progressive populist reform, not reheated corporatist centrism”….
It really doesn’t matter whether Cuomo himself remains scandal-plagued and unreformed. The point is to thwart any larger left-of-center reform that might harm the possible influence of current powerbrokers. We can all agree that fascism is bad, to be sure—but curbing the lobbying power of the ultrarich, or moving to cleaner energy sources against the wishes of oil oligarchs, or holding even terribly important men accountable for criminal or amoral acts: Don’t all of those things sound just as alarming? ….
It is difficult to convey just how much the Me Too movement absolutely unraveled some of the most powerful figures and organizations in America. For the first time, serial rapists, abusers, harassers and general scumbags in actual positions of influence faced potentially career-ending consequences after decades of being entirely above such things. Corporate heads, powerful Hollywood figures, and longtime kingpins of the news desks all found themselves thrown out of their offices as companies scrambled to respond to literal decades of allegations from women finally emboldened to come forward. Roger Ailes; Harvey Weinstein; John Conyers: all of them fell.
I imagine that most of us, not being serial sexual predators with cash and influence oozing out our ears, can’t really grasp how traumatic our elite classes found these developments to be. It is in almost all cases a given that the wealthy and connected in America simply aren’t bound by the same laws as the rest of us, and the combination of money and threats has long been the preferred, and fabulously successful, means by which such figures cover up the non-criminal stuff. The idea that a Roger Ailes or an Andrew Cuomo could and would lose their careers for doing things that most other American workers could never have themselves gotten away with—it broke these people. It broke their brains, and in Andrew Cuomo’s brief repentance followed by his own reimagining of himself as the victim we get a good look at just how warped and resentful the upper classes became after their comeuppance….
So that is my interpretation of events. The new support for Andrew Cuomo, of all people, is part and parcel of the right-wing revolt against societal expectations of decency; it’s the “centrist” and more elitist version of racism and sexism that asserts a pompous middle ground of “Well no, you shouldn’t sexually assault your coworkers or send legal immigrants to foreign torture prisons, but we really oughtn’t sweat it too much if it happens every once in a while. Doling out consequences for these things is just as disruptive to society as the things themselves, right?”
Howie Klein, July 22, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Yesterday, John McCormick and Anthony DeBarros reported that even decentDemocrats in desperate need of campaign cash— they used Marcy Kaptur (OH)— as an example, are having a hard time raising funds. She will need millions to defend her Toledo-centered seat against the GOP next year, which is likely to try too gerrymander her out of a job. So far, she’s raised just $678,667.
Meanwhile, AOC, who has no serious reelection challenge, “has raised almost 23 times as much for her campaign committee. The $15.4 million she has collected makes her the biggest House fundraiser this year, nearly doubling the total of the chamber’s most powerful member, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)….Democratic candidates who take contributions from the AIPAC/DMFI genocide caucus— like Beth Davidson and Jessica Reinmann in NY-17 (a heavily Jewish district) and DCCC faves like Janelle Stelson (PA-10) and Yadira Caraveo (CO-08) are being passed over by small dollar donors, who are gravitating towards anti-genocide candidates like Donavan McKinney (MI), Saikat Chakrabarti (CA), Elijah Manley (FL) and Oliver Larkin (FL)….
Rahm Emanuel’s Disgusting Trump-Like Play For Attention: Mocking The Marginalized
Howie Klein, July 22, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Why No One Wants To Give Money To The DCCC— The Dems Are Bleeding Out & They Don’t Even Know It
Howie Klein, July 22, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
…Completely delusional, the DCCC claims to have “the better message, stronger candidates, and necessary resources” to win back the House next year. ‘Republicans are running scared because they know they are poised to be rejected by the American people next year,” said DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene (D-WA)….
Suzan DelBene is a clueless tech multimillionaire with not a glimmer of an idea about what working class voters need. If the Democrats had the “stronger candidates” she claims, they’d be kicking the GOP’s ass in fundraising. Instead the DCCC has been recruiting the regular shit-show of anti-progressive careerists, candidates with nothing whatsoever to offer except the hope that voters might see them as fractionally better than their Republican opponents. Many already proven losers like Rebecca Cooke (WI), Christina Bohannan (IA), Janelle Stelson (PA), Marlene Galán-Woods and Amish Shah (AZ), Jonathan Nez (AZ) and Yadira Caraveo (CO) can only hope the anti-red wave is substantial enough to sweep them into power next year. Basically, the lot of them are worthless and have nothing to offer at all beyond being “not Republicans,”— except for Janelle Stelson, Marlene Galán-Woods and perhaps Amish Shah, who are Republicans pretending to be Democrats for the sake of a nice job in Congress.
But on top of them, the DCCC is recruiting awful new candidates as well to prevent progressives from winning seats, like conservative Assemblywoman Jasmeet Bains with whom they hope to beat Randy Villegas in Calfornia’s Central Valley….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2025]
It’s amazing that we have video of Epstein pleading the fifth on him and Trump socializing “in the presence of females under the age of 18” and it was never used during the 2016, 2020, or 2024 elections
Organizing to Beat Voter Suppression — A conversation with veteran organizer Michael Ansara
Robert Kuttner, July 22, 2025 [The American Prospect]
“The Democratic Party is a hollow shell. It is primarily about moving money and consultants and trying to dictate which consultants the campaigns use. But it’s not a party. It can’t deliver votes. Its leaders aren’t held accountable by anybody. The people that are elected aren’t held accountable by their voters.
“The second tragedy of the Democratic Party is that for the last 40-some years it has been enthralled with elites. Now our elites are, you know, include some university presidents and some charming actors and a few sports players, but they’re still elites, and there’s still an awful lot of hedge fund managers and tech billionaires who have been in the elite of the Democratic Party and who the Democratic Party has pandered to. I don’t see either of those changing, and so I think the renewal will have to come from candidates and insurgent organizations.”
Robert Kuttner, July 21, 2025 [The American Prospect]
A new poll finds that most people who voted for Biden in 2020 but stayed home in 2024 are economic progressives who were looking for leadership but didn’t find it.
“What a Democrat Could Do With Trump’s Power,”
Paul Rosenzweig, July 23, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Resistance
Hamilton Nolan, July 26, 2025 [How Things Work]
…Modern history shows us that aspiring authoritarians on both the left and the right have always taken care to neuter the independent power of organized labor as they try to consolidate power for themselves. This is common sense. Any powerful, well-developed labor movement is a grassroots army that can be mobilized in opposition to the will of a dictatorship. Eroding democracy, the rule of law, the separation of powers, free elections—all of these tasks require, first, weakening any form of organized popular opposition. Labor movements are always an obvious potential source of pushback.…
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
‘Founders Films’ aims to remake Hollywood with patriotism, Palantir and Ayn Rand
Max Tani, July 21, 2025 [Semafor]
…Shifting the liberal tilt of the studios and creative culture that shapes America’s image of itself has long been a goal for the right: The late media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart popularized the notion that politics is “downstream” from culture, and acolytes from Steve Bannon to Ben Shapiro have sought to inject their politics into the movie business, with limited success….
Now a set of prominent figures close to the software firm Palantir are pitching a new project to shake up streaming TV and film with a portfolio ranging from feature films about daring Israeli and American military operations to a three-part treatment of an Ayn Rand tome.
In a pitch deck circulated to investors in recent months, Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, early Palantir employee Ryan Podolsky, and investor Christian Garrett are raising money for Founders Films, a new production company based in Dallas that aims to push for films with a nationalistic bent and unsubtle political overtones. The company said its projects would adhere to a set of rules: “Say yes to projects about American exceptionalism, name America’s enemies, back artists unconditionally, take risk on novel IP.”….
…First, of course, is the hierarchical nature of conservatism. Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind seeks to find a common thread running through the many different strands of “conservative” thought. “Conservatives” include libertarians; monarchists; Christian Dominionists; white nationalists; Hindu nationalists; Zionist genocidiers; eugenicists; Men’s Rights Activists; etc:
https://coreyrobin.com/books/the-reactionary-mind/
Robin says the thing that all these groups share is a belief that there is a natural hierarchy in the world, and that the world is best when the born leaders are on top, and that social movements that seek to elevate inferior people over their social betters commit civilizational suicide (think of the reflex to blame everything from tanker ships colliding with bridges to Boeing jets falling out of the sky on “DEI”). Different conservative factions disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism
The belief that some people are simply better than others makes conservatives easy marks for arguments from authority (think of Trump’s insistence that “I alone can fix America”). It also presents an irresistible temptation to the people at the top: if you know your followers believe you are better (smarter, more righteous) than they are, then you can be pretty sure that they’ll buy the things you sell them, from a “prayer cloth” to “miracle water”:
https://dustoffthebible.com/Blog-archive/2012/07/25/the-worst-tbn-product-scams-of-all-time/….
Understanding MAGA’s Obsession With Pedophilia and No Other Sex Crimes
Josh Marshall, July 24, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
One of the most telling aspects of this MAGA obsession is the focus on the punishment of the “elites” who are behind it. At a basic level, the victims never really take center stage. And that is the heart of it. In the MAGA world, pedophilia isn’t a crime or abuse that needs to be stopped. It is more a legitimating tool which provides a license for cleansing acts of retributive violence and revenge. This is what’s at the end of the story in every far-right/MAGA conspiracy: a wave of eliminationist, cleansing violence led by someone like Trump in which the bad guys, the liberals, the Democrats, the globalist elites, etc etc are wiped out. And that’s why whether it’s Pizzagate, QAnon or the more outlandish versions of the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, they always keep coming back to pedophilia. Because pedophilia summons a level of disgust, anger and revulsion that makes the perpetrators seem uniquely inhuman, less than human, people against whom total violence is acceptable and necessary. In other words, these conspiracy theories are systems of thought that provide sanction and legitimation for what you want to do to your enemies.
David M. Drucker, July 23, 2025 [The Dispatch]
…the morning after Speaker Mike Johnson won the gavel and took the reins of the House of Representatives in October 2023, the Louisiana Republican found himself in a new office in the Capitol, attempting furiously to get up to speed….“One of the people that came in was Byron Donalds who is a good, close friend and ally and he came in and said: ‘You need to go to Las Vegas.’ ….A few days later, the speaker was in Las Vegas attending his first-ever Republican Jewish Coalition gathering, the group’s annual leadership conference, frequented by some of the party’s most prolific campaign donors and connected political activists. His appearance was punctuated by an efficient 15-minute address to the roughly 1,000 RJC members and guests who packed a convention center ballroom adjacent to the Venetian Resort….If there was a driving force behind the formation of the group that would eventually become the Republican Jewish Coalition, George Klein, the last living co-founder, believes it was Max Fisher, a wealthy Detroit businessman who died in 2005 at age 96. “Max was never stale,” Klein, 87, told The Dispatch. “He was vibrant.”
Fisher made a fortune in energy and real estate and was a prolific Republican donor. But he also held leadership positions in the major nonpartisan organizations of his day that advocated for American Jews and Israel’s security. Klein described Fisher in a lengthy telephone interview as more or less the singular liaison to Republicans and conservative policymakers in Washington on behalf of Jewish interests, all the way up to the White House, beginning at least with President Richard Nixon….
…The venue was a hat-tip to the now late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a Republican megadonor who developed and owned the gambling resorts and was for years—along with wife Miriam Adelson—a consequential RJC figure particularly generous with his checkbook. Miriam Adelson, 79, continues to be an active Republican donor and still attends the Las Vegas conference, where she is something of a celebrity among ambitious GOP politicians….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Supreme Court conservatives hide behind their own masks as they upend the law
[Law Dork, via Naked Capitalism 07-26-2025]
The Trade Deal Coup — America’s Descent into Constitutional Corruption
Mike Brock, July 26, 2025 [Notes from the Circus]
…the Trump Administration continues to negotiate so-called trade deals, which are negotiated and implemented using pure executive fiat, under emergency powers, under an emergency declaration which has no rational basis, while everyone pretends this isn’t an example of a constitutional coup. It’s actually an exercise in sedition, if one were to avoid putting a finer point on it.
The mechanism is breathtakingly brazen: declare a fake national emergency, invoke emergency trade powers designed for genuine crises, bypass Congress entirely, and conduct billions of dollars in international agreements through personal presidential decree. When Japan agrees to invest $550 billion based on Trump’s “Strategic Trade Agreement,” they’re being asked to legitimize constitutional fraud that exists only through Trump’s personal authority rather than constitutional process.
Our allies aren’t stupid. They understand perfectly that what Trump is doing is illegal. The Constitution explicitly grants Congress the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”—not the president. Foreign governments have constitutional lawyers who can read Article I, Section 8 as clearly as anyone. They know there is no emergency, no “unusual and extraordinary threat” that justifies bypassing Congress to negotiate trade policy through executive decree. They must be horrified by how few Americans seem to care that their government operates through systematic constitutional violation.
They’re also not holding out hope that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, with its expansive view of executive authority, will do much to stop this constitutional arson. Foreign leaders understand that when courts create doctrines of presidential immunity and presumptive constitutionality, they’re watching American institutions actively eliminate their own constraints rather than enforce them….
Mike Brock, July 21, 2025 [Notes from the Circus]
Peter Shane’s devastating analysis in The Atlantic has performed the invaluable service of documenting what many suspected but few could prove: that Chief Justice John Roberts has systematically dismantled American constitutional government while claiming to restore it. But Shane’s meticulous account of Roberts’s “proto-authoritarian canon” reveals something even more damning—the entire Unitary Executive Theory project is essentially an exercise in motivated reasoning designed to render the New Deal’s democratically popular reforms conveniently unconstitutional on behalf of oligarchic wealth.
The timeline makes the con obvious. This “ancient constitutional wisdom” mysteriously emerged in the 1980s—Shane notes Roberts was clerking for Rehnquist when Reagan won in 1980, then joined the administration that accelerated this theory’s mainstreaming alongside the founding of the Federalist Society. But why did American intergenerational wealth suddenly need a constitutional theory that could dismantle regulatory agencies without the messy business of democratic politics?
Simple: the New Deal had created institutions that could actually constrain oligarchic power—agencies that could regulate business, tax wealth, and impose democratic accountability on concentrated capital. These programs remained politically popular, making them difficult to eliminate through normal democratic processes. So oligarchs funded a decades-long legal project to declare them constitutionally illegitimate instead….
The genius of this project lies not in its intellectual rigor—Shane shows there is none—but in its systematic audacity. Every opinion Roberts reserves for himself (Shane notes the senior justice assigns opinions, and Roberts kept the transformative ones), every piece of precedent he casually discards, every historical “fact” he cheerfully invents serves the same ultimate purpose: ensuring that democratic institutions can never again meaningfully constrain concentrated wealth….
The tragedy isn’t just that American democracy is being systematically dismantled by people who swore to protect it. The tragedy is that future generations will inherit the legal precedents created by this exercise in constitutional fraud, long after the oligarchs who commissioned it have achieved their goal of making democratic accountability constitutionally impossible….
This Is the Presidency John Roberts Has Built
Peter M. Shane [The Atlantic, July 21, 2025]
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