Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 15, 2025

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 15, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

 

 

 

Trump not violating any law

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

 

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

 

Why is Kristi Noem’s bone-chilling pledge of a “regime change” in Calif not getting media coverage?!  Trump wants to remove Democrats from office

Dean Obeidallah, June 13, 2025

But what has been largely ignored in the reporting was the bone-chilling comment that sparked Padilla to interrupt Noem during her press conference. In prepared remarks, Noem delivered a message from Trump that the military occupation of Los Angeles and beyond will not end until both Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass are removed from office.

I’m not exaggerating. In language that echoes justifications for war, Noem began her speech by talking about federal forces, the state National Guard Trump and US Marines being deployed in California. That is when she stated: “We are not going away,” adding, “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

“Liberate the city from the socialist leadership!” No longer is the Trump regime planning to have the troops remain in California to occupy parts of the city until calm can be restored. Nor until arrests are made of undocumented immigrants who have criminal records, etc.

No, the new condition for ending the military occupation is regime change. As Noem told us point blank: the troops will remain until Trump can “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor.” To Trump, if he labels an elected official a “socialist,” they should be removed from office. (And we know the MAGA base would cheer it and Fox News would defend it.)….

Backing this up was the ominous threat by Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi who Wednesday threatened even more action to take control of California. Bondi told reporters that she fully backed “bringing in the National Guard” and “bringing in the Marine…to protect our federal buildings, to protect highways, to protect the citizens.”

AG Bondi then alarmingly added, “We’re not scared to go further. We’re not frightened to do something else if we need to.”

What is go further then deploying warfighters of the US Marine corps on the streets of the United States?! The answer is keeping them there until Newsom and Bass either surrender to Trump or are removed.

I know this may sound outrageous. But again, Noem was delivering the Trump regime message that the troops are staying until the city is “liberated” from Newsom and Bass. Ignore that threat at your peril.

 

Judge Breyer’s Decision About Trump & The National Guard

Joyce Vance, June 13, 2025

 

Trump endorses arrest of Gavin Newsom 

[KTLA, via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2025]

 

Heather Cox Richardson, June 12, 2025

The assault on Padilla comes days after the Department of Justice under Trump indicted Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) on federal charges saying she impeded immigration officers outside a New Jersey detention center.

While Democratic senators and representatives are outraged, they are having little success getting their Republican colleagues to join them. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) suggested that Padilla had charged Noem—the videos show no such thing—and suggested the Senate should censure Padilla for “wildly inappropriate” behavior.

While much focus has been on the assault itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.

 

The McIver Indictment Explained

Joyce Vance, June 12, 2025

US troops make first detentions in Trump border military zones 

[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

 

‘A complete sea change’: Trump’s immigration crackdown goes into hyperdrive 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 06-08-2025]

 

You’re a Bunch of Cowards!

Hamilton Nolan, June 10, 2025 [How Things Work]

…The Wall Street Journal reported on a meeting last month where Stephen Miller summoned ICE’s leadership to a meeting where he demanded that federal agents lower their standards and “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” outside of 7-11 or wherever. “‘Who here thinks they can do it?’ Miller said, asking for a show of hands.” The outcome of that demand can be seen in the ongoing terrorization of immigrants happening across the country.

Now, Stephen Miller is a little rat-faced Nazi bitch. Since his youth just about everyone around him has despised him because he has always been a miserable racist little shit whose evil heart is manifested in his detestable rodent-like visage. Knowing that, I like to imagine all those big, bad, ICE agents, manly men, so macho, shifting uncomfortably around a conference room table as they are harangued by that psychotic little bureaucrat, and then rushing out to kidnap working men from a Home Depot parking lot in order to demonstrate to their master, Stephen Bitch Ass Miller, how good they are at being America’s new gestapo.

“Oh, Mister Miller, sir! I put on 40 pounds of tactical gear and tackled a 55-year-old partially disabled day laborer! I prevented him from doing some drywall work and feeding his family, for you, sir! I yearn for your approval!”….

 

Funding The War on Yourselves

Josh Marshall, June 11, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]

Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he will begin “winding down” FEMA after this year’s Hurricane season and, perhaps the more significant statement, that he will begin distributing disaster aid directly from the President’s office. In other words, disaster assistance will be the President’s personal gift, an assist for friends and those who display loyalty. It’s part of the broader pattern we can see across the horizon: Trump takes the policing and military powers of the United States and the national tax revenues (drawn disproportionately from the blue states) and uses it to make war on states he considers enemies.

This has always been the centerpiece of Trumpism even more than authoritarianism, a kind of fiscal warlordism. Disaster relief dollars are a relatively minor expenditure. But we see it aimed at universities, the cut off of funds generally to California and the forced deployment of National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles. The blue states essentially fund the war against themselves.

 

American Concentration Camps

Chris Hedges and Eunice Wong, June 10, 2025

Our offshore concentration camps, for now, are in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But don’t expect them to remain there. Once they are normalized, not only for U.S.-deported immigrants and residents, but U.S. citizens, they will migrate to the homeland. It is a very short leap from our prisons, already rife with abuse and mistreatment, to concentration camps, where those held are cut off from the outside world — “disappeared” — denied legal representation and crammed into fetid, overcrowded cells.

Prisoners in the camps in El Salvador are forced to sleep on the floor or in solitary confinement in the dark. Many suffer from tuberculosis, fungal infections, scabies, severe malnutrition and chronic digestive illnesses. The inmates, including over 3,000 children, are fed rancid food. They endure beatings. They are tortured, including by water-boarding or being forced naked into barrels of ice-cold water, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2023, the State Department described imprisonment as “life-threatening,” and that was before the Salvadoran government declared a “state of exception” in March 2022. The situation has been greatly “exacerbated,” the State Department notes, by the “addition of 72,000 detainees under the state of exception.” Some 375 people have died in the camps since the state of exception was established, part of El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs,” according to the local human rights group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario….

 

There’s no wrong way to protest fascism: The conversation around the invasion of LA gets it wrong

Jordan Zakarin, June 10, 2025

…Kristi Noem calls Los Angeles a “city of criminals”: “They are not city of immigrants, they are a city of criminals”….

The destruction of a few driverless taxis has received far more attention and condemnation than efforts by plainclothes federal agents to seize children from elementary schools by lying about having parental consent….

Americans have been drilled into reflexively siding with law enforcement and demanding perfection of the oppressed, so married to the sanctity of individual property rights that preservation of private wealth becomes the litmus test for righteousness, not the underlying cause at the heart of the protest….

The enforced disdain is also why Politico can run anonymous quotes from Republicans convinced that they’ve scored a political victory by unleashing the military on Americans.

“We couldn’t script this any better,” one gleeful person close to the White House tells my Playbook colleague Dasha Burns. “Democrats are again on the ‘20’ side of an 80-20 issue. … It’s the same thing that won [Trump] the election.”

In the eyes of the White House, Trump already had a clear mandate from voters for the mass deportation effort that was driving those ICE raids in LA. And aides believe the chaotic scenes that followed — masked protesters pelting police with rocks, setting fire to cars and waving Mexican flags on abandoned freeways — will only bolster public support for Trump’s hard-line approach. Indeed, every time a Dem speaks out against the president’s actions in LA, the White House is happier still.

Publishing the smug boasts of a fascistic regime celebrating is how insulated outlets like Politico and its journalists are from the peril facing everyday Americans — or at least how insulated they think they are from the application of autocracy.

The gloating Trump officials were at least in part reacting to the first set of poll numbers on the protests, which showed a plurality of the public registering disapproval of the protests. It’s little wonder why — public opinion in cases like this is shaped almost entirely by news coverage — and for reporters used to soulless reactionary political strategy, it amounted to a final judgment on the worthiness of the protests….

 

The Imperial Boomerang Lands in Los Angeles (Director’s Cut)

Spencer Ackerman, 10 Jun 2025

…check out this excellent Brian Merchant piece on the LA protesters summoning and burning driverless Waymo cars. In addition to all of his insightful points about “weaponizing the accountability sink” of autonomous vehicles—and see this 404 Media media piece from Jason Koebler about Waymo as a surveillance wellspring for police—it strikes me that we’re seeing a glimpse of the future of innovative urban unrest. If the LA protesters didn’t deliberately turn Waymos into flaming improvised barricades, those who come after them will. And I suspect the scolds who hate seeing property burn more than they hate seeing people kidnapped would applaud if the Hong Kong demonstrators set autonomous vehicles alight…..

 

Men DOGEbags at Work

DOGE Is on a Recruiting Spree 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 06-09-2025]

 

Strategic Political Economy

Amid Trump’s Immigration Onslaught, There Is No Sanctuary

Evelyn Quartz, June 12, 2025 [The Lever]

Amid the fear, chaos, and violence playing out on the streets, the protections promised by neoliberalism are nowhere to be found….

The Power To Punish Without The Capacity To Care

To understand why this is happening, it’s important to look at what neoliberalism did to American life. Over the past four decades, both parties helped hollow out the idea that the government should provide meaningful material goods for the public. Public housing was gutted. Health care was privatized. Social services were fragmented and offloaded to nonprofits. Immigrant defense was no exception — it was left to overwhelmed legal clinics, volunteer networks, and civil society groups running on grants and burnout.

Sanctuary laws were passed into this vacuum. Such efforts tried to draw a moral line in a system that had already been dismantled — one where the tools of enforcement remained fully funded, but the tools of protection were nowhere to be found. Now, as raids unfold, that gap is laid bare. The state has no rapid legal defense plan. The city has no coordinated response. There is no visible apparatus of care.

That’s what neoliberalism leaves behind: a government that can still surveil, police, and deport, but can no longer house, heal, or shield its people. A state that retains the power to punish, but not the capacity to care.

So when Trump reasserts that power to punish, as he’s doing now, there is nothing in place to stop him. And worse: Democratic officials, still clinging to a playbook of statements and symbolism, offer little more than moral condemnation. Instead of addressing or even acknowledging a political status quo that has not only gotten us here but that no longer commands legitimacy, Democrats are doubling down on what’s broken….

 

The Ten Warning Signs of The Collapse of the Knowledge System

[Honest Broker, via The Big Picture June 8, 2025]

A huge change is coming. Would you believe me if I told you that the biggest news story of our century is happening right now—but is never mentioned in the press? That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But that is often the case when a bold new worldview appears.

 

The big, bad bond market could derail Trump’s big, beautiful bill

[Vox, via The Big Picture June 8, 2025]

Trump wants to blow a $3 trillion hole in the budget. The bond market is saying “no way.”

 

Global power shift

How Xi Jinping lost control – A timeline

[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

 

China’s Chokehold on This Obscure Mineral Threatens the West’s Militaries

[New York Times, via The Big Picture June 14, 2025]

China produces the entire world’s supply of samarium, a rare earth metal that the United States and its allies need to rebuild inventories of fighter jets, missiles and other hardware.

 

Top U.S. General in Africa Paints Grim Picture of U.S. Military Failures in Africa

Nick Turse, June 8 2025 [The Intercept]]

After two decades, and many failed counterterrorism efforts, the Trump administration is considering shuttering U.S. Africa Command.

 

World Bank Data On India And Pakistan Shows Massive Contrast Over Poverty 

[NDTV, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

 

Russia Seeks ‘Asymmetrical’ Response For Strike On Its Nuclear Assets 

[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

 

Full Event: Lavrov Brutally Takes Down UK, Rips NATO Over Ukraine, Then Drops Iran & China Shocker 

[Hindustan Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

 

Secret British plans to ‘defeat entire Russian Black Fleet’ revealed in leaks 

[The Grayzone, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

 

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Israel and Iran: Where Are We Now?

Thomas Neuburger, Jun 13, 2025

 

Iran Claims Historic Espionage Coup Against Israel. Is It a Bluff or Is It Real? 

Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain, June 11, 2025 [Drop Site]

 

Oligarchy

Rituals of humiliation 

[The Anti-Empire Project, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

How does one join the dizzying heights of the elite? Not the 10%, the 2%, or the 1% of professional or business success, but the billionaire class, the House of Representatives, Governor of a major state or mayor of New York City? Is it by proving your merit in school, a bit of good luck, perhaps a grinding mindset as aspirants are taught to hope? Or by family connection and bloodline, as those doomed to fail may fear?

Certainly it’s the latter. But there is a missing ingredient that aspirants should know before they set out to try to join this genocidal Western club.

In the book Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, Italian political scientist Diego Gambetta talks about how in certain circumstances it is rational for subordinates (say, enforcers who are collecting extortion money from businesses) to display to their superiors how incompetent they are (at, for example, actually running a business). This is a display of loyalty: an incompetent subordinate can only survive at the boss’s whim, and is therefore going to be loyal. Taking some irreversible action can also show loyalty: the importance of tattoos to criminal organizations is an example. Getting a specific tattoo permanently affiliates a criminal with others in the group, a valuable display of loyalty.

The codes of the underworld help answer the question: why did the whole elite, Republicans and Democrats, Hollywood and Wall Street and Silicon Valley, go to the private island of convicted-then-assassinated child abuser Jeffrey Epstein?

Epstein’s activities were the proclivity of some, others were ensnared through the normal methods spies use, but for others it was probably understood as the equivalent of getting a tattoo: one must make oneself reputationally destroyable as a condition of getting into the elite. When this kind of thing blows up, with members accusing one another and people like Epstein or his mentor Robert Maxwell meeting with fatal accidents, it reveals the pattern in sufficient detail for researchers like Whitney Webb to document them (in the two-volume One Nation Under Blackmail). Neither sexual abuse nor blackmail are the point: the point is to undergo rituals that prove your subordination is absolute, and that you can therefore be trusted to exercise your power according to (genocidal) principles.

The greater the power sought, the greater the display of submission required….

 

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Capital’s Regime Change and the Neoliberal Monetary Debate

[History & Political Economy Project, via Naked Capitalism 06-09-2025]

 

Wealth inequality’s deep roots in human prehistory 

[Science Daily, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

 

Millions of student-loan borrowers are getting a ‘financial scarlet letter’ that could risk their home purchases and job prospects, Elizabeth Warren says 

[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

 

Trumpillnomics

RFK Jr. ousts entire CDC vaccine advisory committee

Associated Press, June 09, 2025 DK

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday removed every member of a scientific committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to use vaccines and pledged to replace them with his own picks.

 

American doctors are moving to Canada to escape the Trump administration

KFF Health News, June 09, 2025 [DailyKos]

Earlier this year, as President Donald Trump was beginning to reshape the American government, Michael, an emergency room doctor who was born, raised, and trained in the United States, packed up his family and got out.

Michael now works in a small-town hospital in Canada. KFF Health News and NPR granted him anonymity because of fears he might face reprisal from the Trump administration if he returns to the U.S. He said he feels some guilt that he did not stay to resist the Trump agenda but is assured in his decision to leave. Too much of America has simply grown too comfortable with violence and cruelty, he said.

“Part of being a physician is being kind to people who are in their weakest place,” Michael said. “And I feel like our country is devolving to really step on people who are weak and vulnerable.”

Michael is among a new wave of doctors who are leaving the United States to escape the Trump administration…. The Medical Council of Canada said in an email statement that the number of American doctors creating accounts on physiciansapply.ca, which is “typically the first step” to being licensed in Canada, has increased more than 750% over the past seven months compared with the same time period last year — from 71 applicants to 615.

 

[X-Twitter, via Heather Cox Richardson, June 11, 2025]

Justin Wolfers
@JustinWolfers
The US & Chinese trade negotiators have negotiated a handshake agreement to seek signoff  to agree that a previously-agreed agreement is still their agreed upon agreement. (That agreement is not an agreement but a framework for seeking future agreements.)

 

Predatory finance

Do tax havens still matter?

Richard Murphy, June 14 2025

 

BlackRock, Goldman Scale Up Tax Trades in $3 Trillion SMA Boom

[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture June 13, 2025]

BlackRock Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley are among firms scaling up a strategy known as tax-loss harvesting, typically offered through customized portfolios called separately managed accounts.

 

Yale Is Rushing to Sell Billions in Private Equity Investments

[New York Times, via The Big Picture June 13, 2025]

The university is selling multiple stakes in private equity funds as the industry struggles and President Trump targets Ivy League institutions.

 

Health care crisis

Private Equity, UnitedHealth Take a Huge Loss as Oregon Bans Corporate Control of Doctors 

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

 

‘So Much Evil Had To Happen for this Bill To Pass’ Oregon just made corporate medicine illegal, again. Here’s how it happened.

Maureen Tkacik June 13, 2025 [The American Prospect]

 

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America’s UFO Mythology

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture June 14, 2025]

U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs.

 

GitHub is Leaking Trump’s Plans to ‘Accelerate’ AI Across Government 

[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

 

Getty Images and Stability AI face off in British copyright trial that will test AI industry 

[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2025]

 

News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools

[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture June 13, 2025]

Chatbots are replacing Google’s traditional search, devastating traffic for some publishers.

 

Collapse of independent news media

Journalists and Their Shadows (w/ Patrick Lawrence) | The Chris Hedges Report

Chris Hedges, Jun 12, 2025

Patrick Lawrence and Chris Hedges chronicle the decline of mainstream media and the craft of journalism, and the dark psychological reality behind media complicity in schemes of the powerful….

Lawrence points to psychological disruptions within journalists as a result of the nature of their work as part of the reason why the press has deteriorated. “The corruptions in the press begin with the corruptions of the personalities who want to get paid, want to be promoted, and so on,” he says.

Instead of employing the Socratic process of reasoning, mainstream journalists today have agendas they must serve….

Climate and environmental crises

Kabul at risk of becoming first modern city to run out of water, report warns 

[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

 

Democrats’ political malpractice

Schumer’s Iran Position Is Stupid  

Bill Scher, June 6, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

 

Resistance

Going Out to a Protest? Here’s How Not to Get Arrested.

Laura Flynn, June 14 2025 [The Intercept]

Lawyer Isabella Salomão Nascimento on knowing your rights — and getting the cops to respect them.

 

How to Stay Safe Protesting ICE — and What to Expect From Cops in Your City

Akela Lacy, June 14 2025 [The Intercept]

Do police in your city use tear gas or rubber bullets? Repression tactics from Seattle to Chicago, plus how to prepare.

 

‘IAM Max’: Machinists Rally for Member Detained by ICE 

[Labor Notes, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

 

Trump Has Put a Target on SEIU, and the Labor Movement Is Fighting Back 

[In These Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]

 

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

Some Republicans Opposed Using Troops Against Protests in 2020. Now They’re Marching in Lockstep.

Matt Sledge, June 13 2025 [The Intercept]

 

A long hot summer

Thomas Mills, June 11, 2025

The United States is in the midst of the biggest backlash we’ve seen in decades. Resentment against immigrants is driving the narrative today, but anger at various minority groups and those seen as supporting them is fueling an attempt at reordering American society. The animus is driven by predominantly White Christian hostility to darker-skinned people and other religions, but it includes a class element that attracts working class people of color who feel left behind in an evolving society and economy.

Liberals should be prepared to find themselves on the wrong side of most Americans, even if they believe they are on the side of the angels, on deportations. People approve of Trump’s immigration actions. They believe that most immigrants need to go back to where they came from. They believe Trump is making the country safer by deporting criminals and terrorists. They will tolerate a lot of ugly behavior from ICE and the administration if they think immigrants are getting the boot.

Joe Biden’s immigration policy was a political disaster for Democrats. He ignored the demand of a majority of citizens to get a handle on the Southern border and reduce the flow of immigrants into the country. Most people won’t make much of a distinction between those who are here legally and those who aren’t. They just want a lot of them gone. Snatching people off the street, cutting off their communication with loved ones, and detaining them in unknown locations may be cruel and inhumane, but most Americans will look away, believing ICE is doing unpleasant but necessary work to rid our country of “illegals.”

Trump understands this American zeitgeist and is baiting progressives. He wants outrage and protests. He sent ICE into places where he knew he would get a reaction. He wanted protests and riots and he got them. He’ll use them as an excuse to expand his power.

Early polls show people supporting Trump’s decision to send the National Guard to LA by large margins. They won’t make much distinction between federalizing the National Guard and sending in the Marines. They’ll just see the moves as efforts to restore peace in cities plagued by burning and looting. The images of masked men standing on burning Waymos waving Mexican flags and groups of brown-skinned men burning American flags reinforces their sense that the country is being inundated by criminals from foreign countries….

We’re in the early stages of an attempt to divide America fueled by a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, marriage equality, immigration, the negative impacts of trade deals, and the technological revolution. Trump is trying to normalize a heavy-handed response by the federal government. Right now, people are sympathetic, but their tolerance will eventually run out. If crack downs become too harsh or the unrest lasts too long, he may pay a political price. It’s probably going to be a long, hot summer.

[TW: But Les Leopold writes that deportations do not have working-class support:]

Does Trump Have White Working-Class Support for Deporting Undocumented Workers?

Les Leopold, June 11, 2025

…Does the public at large endorse these arrests? Don’t working-class people in general want these undocumented workers deported to alleviate job competition? That apparently reasonable commonsense claim turns out to be wrong. according to recent survey data.

I reviewed this data in a recent Substack, but it bears repeating because it is so important to clearly understand what working people actually support.

The Cooperative Election Study (CES), with more than 500,000 respondents, asked the following question repeatedly from 2010 to 2020.

“Are you in favor of granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes.”….

 

Civic republicanism

How Do You Measure Corporate Power? Count the Marines in LA 

[America’s Undoing, via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2025]

[TW: Yglesias demanding people show their “measure” of corporate power is like telling Sam Adams, Ben Franklin, and the Committees of Correspondence that their list of grievances was irrelevant unless they could somehow measure the power of the Board of Trade in London.

[But more to the point, measures of corporate power have been published for decades, and Yglesias ignoring them amounts to a bald faced lie. Corporate market domination are well known measures of corporate power used by anti-trust enforcers for decades — well known to anyone but Yglesias, that is. Similarly, many economists have argued that the skew of share of profits from labor to corporations in the national income accounts shows not just corporate power, but the emergence of an economy domination by rentier extraction. Yglesias is such a shameless whore.]

 

Politics Without Purpose. 

Aurelien [Trying to Understand the World, via Naked Capitalism 06-12-2025]