Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 21, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
US Finally Capitulates with ‘Memorandum’ of Surrender
Simplicius [via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
Iran Enlisted “Senior Psychologists” to Help Craft Messages to Trump Ahead of Agreement
[Jeremy Scahill, June 15, 2026 [DropSite]
… “We added two senior psychologists to the negotiations’ advisory circle so that we can shape messages intended for President Trump from the perspective of managing what we regard as psychopathic behavior pattern,” an Iranian official told Drop Site. He said the psychologists began assisting Iranian negotiators following the initial round of bilateral talks in Islamabad in April as the two sides began exchanging proposed terms for a potential Memorandum of Understanding.
“[Trump’s] reactions have improved noticeably since we began incorporating the recommendations of these advisers into our messages and written communications,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
“Because the exchanged texts will ultimately become part of the historical record, we conduct our negotiations in a manner that ensures the relative weight and sophistication of each party’s negotiating techniques will be evident should these communications be made public in the years ahead,” the official added….
The Race for Hypersonic Missiles
[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]
The Future of Warfare is Coming Faster Than Most Think
Karl Sanchez [via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2026]
Ukraine’s Naval Drone Program: Origins, Development, and the Organizations Behind It
[Black Mountain Analysis, via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2026]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Trump says there are ‘no limits’ to his power
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 06-20-2026]
Frustrated by Courts, Trump Weighed Suspending a Constitutional Right
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan [The New York Times, via scotusblog.com, June 16, 2026]
Citing “a secret memo” written by the White House staff secretary, The New York Times reported on Monday that the Trump administration last year seriously considered suspending habeas rights for unauthorized immigrants as part of a broader deportation push. “The suspension of habeas corpus has occurred just a handful of times in U.S. history, and always under the most dire circumstances of war or invasion. Yet to a greater degree than previously known, administration officials, encouraged by Mr. Trump, actively weighed taking that step in the early months of his second term.” In his memo to the White House chief of staff, Will Scharf counseled against that move, noting that it would “likely precipitate hazardous legal and constitutional battles.” “Even where Congress has explicitly suspended habeas corpus rights, the Supreme Court has held that some alternative process must be provided to defendants, with procedural safeguards akin to a habeas corpus action,” Scharf wrote.
Joyce Vance, June 15, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
…The reporting clarifies that Miller’s role extended to advocating for the suspension of basic rights, and that he was narrowly run off. The same appears to be true for the Vice President. The risk is not over. It is a warning for what could be coming, one that cannot be ignored….
Why Does Trump Want the Save America Act? The Answer Should Worry Us.
[Balkinization, via Naked Capitalism 06-18-2026]
… That leaves a fifth reading, and it is the most disquieting one. The Act has virtually no prospect of passing the Senate in its current form. If the President convinces the public that the Act is necessary, and Congress refuses to enact it, he can claim that the integrity of the next election is in doubt and that an executive remedy is justified.
By this interpretation, the President’s campaign for the Act builds the predicate for unilateral action: the suspension or federally supervised disruption of the midterm elections, sufficient to secure continued Republican control of the House. This is not as speculative as we would hope. Federal troops and law enforcement agents have been deployed to Los Angeles, Washington, Portland, and Chicago under contested theories of executive authority. A draft executive order circulated among Trump allies would declare a national emergency to ban mail-in ballots and voting machines. And recently, the President issued a different executive order attempting to grant his Postal Service unprecedented federal control over who is eligible to vote by mail….
Trump Is Threatening To ‘Take Back’ DC Based On Who Wins Mayoral Primary
[Huffington Post]
…Janeese Lewis George, a city council member who has led in the polls, is a democratic socialist who’s campaigned on delivering universal childcare and ceasing the D.C. police department’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Trump said last week he “wouldn’t like it” if she won.
“Maybe we’d take back Washington, run it on the federal basis,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question at the White House. “We won’t put up with it. We’re not going to lose our businesses.” ….
There’s no question he can meddle in the city’s affairs. Trump has direct control over D.C.’s National Guard, and the Home Rule Act gives him the power to use the D.C. police force for federal purposes if he decides there are “special conditions of an emergency nature.” He took advantage of those authorities last year, when he briefly took over the police department and deployed the National Guard in response to a supposed crime crisis. Groups of guardsmen, mostly from GOP-controlled states, still roam the city’s streets….
Why Aren’t There More Whistleblowers Against Trump?
Christopher Armitage, June 20, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
What you’re about to read covers why so few people have blown the whistle on this administration, what happened to the insiders who did, and how the people who lied to protect those in power came out ahead instead. It then turns to the fix: this country has protected whistleblowers before, the programs that protect them still work, and states can build them now. It ends with the specific law worth asking your state to pass and the offices to call….
So now that we have outlined the problem and it’s source, we can look for an example of a successful whistleblower program. In the middle of the American Revolution, ten sailors aboard the USS Warren reported that the most powerful officer in the Continental Navy, Commodore Esek Hopkins, had tortured British prisoners. Hopkins dragged two of them into court. The Continental Congress addressed the misconduct, they knew this wasn’t the sort of activity they wanted their nation to engage in. On July 30, 1778, Congress declared that every American had a duty to report misconduct by people in power, and it voted to cover the sailors’ legal defense. The first thing this country ever did about whistleblowers was protect them and pay their legal bills.
And when this country has wanted information badly enough, it has paid cash for it. Lincoln signed the False Claims Act in 1863 to catch war profiteers, and the law still lets an ordinary person sue on the government’s behalf and keep a cut of what comes back. Since Congress put real teeth in it in 1986, whistleblowers have helped recover more than $85 billion, and the people who came forward keep 15 to 30 percent of it….
A state can give a person who exposes wrongdoing in the federal government two things: protection and a reward. The protection does not require the state to recover any money, and it applies no matter what the person exposed. Keep their name secret: let them report through a lawyer to the governor and state attorney general rather than to the official they are reporting on. Punish retaliation: give a state, local, or private worker in the state the right to sue, legal representation to fight for the return of their job, recover double their lost wages, and make the employer pay their attorney fees. Fund their defense: pay the legal costs of a whistleblower who faces a lawsuit or a prosecution, so those costs do not bankrupt them….
‘Just Do It Anyway’: Inside Trump’s Plans to Pay His Allies, Slush Fund or Not
Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez, June 18, 2026 [Zeteo]
Shortly after Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund of taxpayer money was announced by the Justice Department last month, it triggered such furious backlash that the administration was forced to at least pretend it was pausing the project, with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claiming that his department was “not moving forward with the fund, period.”
Right around that time, three sources familiar with the situation tell Zeteo, senior Trump officials immediately got to work on alternate plans for delivering public funds to the president’s allies – even if the new “fund” didn’t technically exist on paper.
According to two of the sources, Trump himself had a succinct reply, when the topic of political or legal roadblocks to his slush fund came up in recent conversations with close advisers: “Just do it anyway.” ….
Letters from an American, June 20, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, June 21, 2026
[Begins with a useful summary of the corruption and incompetence of Trump filling the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool with green slime.]
Friday night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.” By this evening, he was blaming “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll [sic]. Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”
[TW: Make Algae Great Again.]
E. Tammy Kim, June 20, 2026 [The New Yorker]
Inside the Ludicrous, Deadly Serious Plan to Take Over Greenland
Ben Taub, June 15, 2026 [The New Yorker]
Robert Kuttner, June 17, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Strategic Political Economy
The (real) dead economy theory: Vibes and memestocks, all the way down.
Cory Doctorow, June 17, 2026 [Pluralistic]
Here’s a fun fact about Elon Musk: in 2020, his (nominal) net worth was $20b, and today it’s $1t (nominally). But that’s not the fun fact; this is: everything he’s done since 2020 was a flop.
As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world’s hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called “XAI”:
https://crookedtimber.org/2026/06/15/one-big-grift/
Quiggin declares that this is the era in which “financial markets fail in the task of valuing assets accurately,” and “the institutional structures that are supposed to make them work have given up trying.” Nor did this start with the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, Bitcoin and other cryptos were once shunned by nominally sober financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, but today, not only do all the big banks offer crypto services, people have largely stopped calling it cryptocurrency because no one is even pretending that it’s a form of money….
Spacex is just a continuation of the logic of crypto, in which something is valuable because some people think other people will pay more for it in the future, and not because it does useful things:
https://johnquiggin.com/2018/02/09/bitcoin-kills-the-efficient-market-hypothesis/
That’s the logic of the whole market today. AI – the world’s money-losingest technology – attracts investment at the expense of everything else. When horrified NIH lifers begged the DOGE boys not to shut down long-running medical research projects, Musk’s broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in their faces, saying we don’t need cancer research because “GAI” is almost here and it will cure cancer. You could hardly ask for a better example of investing in vibes over value than shutting down real cancer research to free up money for teaching more words to the word-guessing machine because it’s about to become God and cure cancer.
Today, Goldman Sachs isn’t merely all-in on crypto – it’s all-in on the Spacex IPO. As Quiggin writes, the bank has signed off on Musk’s claim that “Musk’s ragbag of assets” will grow one hundredfold in the next 40 months….
The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.
We could do “AI cancer research” by producing tools that automate gnarly multivariant analysis problems for cancer researchers. But what we’re actually doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into “systemic” cancer because studying systemic things is “woke”) to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire.
That’s not just a dead economy – it’s one that’ll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.
Global power shift
China has a powerful new oil price weapon
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 06-18-2026]
Oligarchy
Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel’s Secretive ‘Dialog’ Society
Dell Cameron, Yulia Almazova, June 16, 2026 [Wired]
Matthew Ehret, June 18, 2026
Palantir was not born in a garage. Like Space X, Paypal, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, it was commissioned by military intelligence agencies seeking to create a civilian branding for an insidious Orwellian control grid. In Palantir’s case, you will discover how Thiel and his Stanford school chum Alex Karp were introduced to CIA director George Tenet, and Total Information Awareness architect John Poindexter by neocon grand strategist Richard Perle.
In this episode, you will discover what Palantir actually is, who built it, who it serves, and why a company that named itself after the all-seeing eye of Sauron now manages the intelligence, policing, banking, and military systems of most of the Western world. Palantir’s ambition to generate “predictive crime” is also an open goal of this burgeoning new hand of a Minority Report dystopia.
By the end of the show, I examine Thiel’s Straussian gnostic teaching and ‘secret doctrine’, Thiel’s belief that freedom and democracy are incompatible, his obsession with the same antichrist which he claims to fear but appears to be building, and the influence of Rene Girard’s sick ideas of human nature on the young Transhumanist.
From Bilderberg to Dialog: How Peter Thiel’s ‘Secret Society’ Signals a New Elite
Curro Jimenez, June 18, 2026 [Naked Capitalism]
Nothing seems to entice those in positions of power as much as secret societies. Nothing seems to reek of corruption more than secret societies. And nothing seems to capture public attention like secret societies. That is why Peter Thiel’s “secret society” leak is a confirmation that there’s a new class in the upper echelons of the system. Not because the “secret society” exists, but because it has been “leaked” that it does….
And that is the telling sign. I have argued that many of the events that we are seeing happen, from geopolitical moves to financial decisions, are being directed to protect and promote the interests of a new class that has arrived at the upper echelons of systemic power. They are reshaping finance, war, surveillance, industry, entertainment, academia, and the State. The combined valuation of the US stock market sits at between 75 and 80 trillion dollars. The ten largest US companies are all tech companies and represent around a third of the total US market valuation, or 28 trillion dollars. For reference, that is more than the GDP of China, EU or Russia.
And I have argued that this tightly-knit oligarchy knows each other, talks to each other, and fights or helps each other. The fact that Dialog has been made public is an indication that they are already comfortably occupying their seats and that, far from fearing public scrutiny, they crave it.
The Pope and a Silicon Valley Trillionaire Fight Over God
Matt Stoller, June 14, 2026 [BIG]
Elon Musk is a trans-humanist, the ultimate expression of the Chicago School philosophy. The Pope offers a different vision about how limits make us human.
Man who hates paying taxes loves government handouts
[Boing Boing, via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]
The Oligarch-on-Oligarch Fight That Defines Politics in 2026
David Dayen, June 18, 2026 [The American Prospect]
[media lawyer McClain Delaney vs. Total Wine boss Rep. David Trone, in Maryland US Senate race]
Felonomics
‘Elon Musk Should Have to Pay For This’: Trump Admin Says It Needs $1 Billion to Combat Screwworm
[Common Dreams]
Nicole Santa Cruz, , June 17, 2026 [ProPublica]
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2026]
How an Addictive Gas Station Drug Found Allies in Trump’s Cabinet
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
The OMB and the Politicization of Science
[New England Journal of Medicine, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
… For decades, the Soviet Union promoted the unorthodox views of Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist who used his close ties to the political leadership to spread misinformation denying Mendelian genetics. What followed was a disaster: many years of poor harvests based on unsupported science and suppression of the teaching and practice of modern genetics throughout the Soviet bloc. A similar threat now hangs over U.S. science.
First, a review of where we are now. Proposals for scientific research are submitted to various federal agencies (we will use the National Institutes of Health [NIH] as an example), where they undergo an initial administrative review (to ensure adherence to all the rules) followed by peer review by a panel of experts in the field. These experts assess the proposal and assign it a priority score. Priority scores are based on the value of the science and are determined by peer reviewers who are shielded from politics. The appropriate NIH institute determines how many grants can be funded, depending on its budget, and then — with rare exceptions — funds strictly by priority score. The NIH leadership and Congress can influence funding by, for example, changing broad budgets or issuing “requests for applications.” However, the decisions are almost entirely driven by science. Once funded, the proposed work proceeds, unless the grantee fails to perform it, for the period designated at the time of the funding decision.The rule changes that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently proposed to the Health and Human Services (HHS) grant process would drastically change this process. There are too many objectionable aspects of these proposals to discuss here. But three are particularly striking….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Nearly 1 in 4 US tenants fell behind on rent in 2025
Stephen Semler [via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
There are 46 million renter households in the US. The share behind on rent has more than doubled since 2019…. Nearly one in four tenants fell behind on rent in 2025, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest report on household economic well-being. At 23%, the share who fell behind on rent last year was two percentage points higher than in 2024, six points above 2022, and 13 points above 2019.1 That’s as far back as the Fed’s survey data goes….
Real Estate Merger Poised to Create Several Local Apartment Monopolies
Rebecca Burns, June 17, 2026 [The American Prospect]
A combination between AvalonBay and Equity Residential would put close to 200,000 apartments in the hands of one company.
Health care crisis
[Sky, via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]
Congo reports large daily jump in Ebola cases a month after outbreak was declared
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Private equity dismantled West Suburban Medical Center and other area hospitals
[Chicago Sun-Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
[TW: Private equity should be treated as a conspiracy to commit murder. But here’s a symptom of our current problem: the next article does not even mention to role of private equity.]
Illinois hospital fully closes after last elevator fails
[Becker’s Hospital Review, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
Restoring balance to the economy
Can We Automate the Safety Net?
[Can We Still Govern?, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
…Psychologists and behavioral economists have long observed that default rules—rules that determine how a person is treated if they don’t make an active choice—tend to have major effects on program enrollment. One recent study found that suspending health insurance auto-enrollment in Massachusetts caused new enrollments to decline by 33 percent, an effect that is an order of magnitude greater than the effects of softer “nudges” such as providing information and assistance and up to twice as large as the impact of Massachusetts’ mandate penalty.
Programs like Medicare Part B and Social Security, which come close to automatically enrolling everyone who is eligible, unsurprisingly boast take-up rates of nearly 100 percent….
David Lingelbach and Valentina Rodríguez Guerra, June 18, 2026 [Washington Monthly]
Rule by the rich may look inevitable, but history shows it’s not. From ancient Greece to New Deal America to today’s Hungary, democracies have found ways to separate private fortunes from public power.
Art Cullen [via Naked Capitalism 06-16-2026]
The Most Powerful Political Office You’ve Never Heard Of
David Sirota, Natalie Bettendorf, June 19, 2026 [the Lever]
One elected official quietly controls a $300 billion fund and holds the power to move financial markets. Why is no one watching?
Today, we’re sharing David Sirota’s exclusive interview with Goyle, a progressive running for New York State comptroller, a job that single-handedly controls nearly $300 billion and has the power to sway financial markets in ways that can take on President Donald Trump and corporate interests.
“This is a job that has more singular power than a U.S. senator… all of Wall Street is watching what happens in a job like this,” Sirota said.
You’ll hear Goyle explain why he’s challenging the longtime incumbent, promising to leverage the office’s enormous power …. And why Democrats around the country in these financial officer roles should join forces….
Disrupting mainstream economics
Economic Calculation Problem….. Debunked
[historic.ly, 19 Jun 2026]
According to libertarians, the Economic Calculation Problem is the ultimate kryptonite against socialism — a decisive argument that no one has ever refuted. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises presented it as a logical proof that socialism is inherently irrational….
Mises maintained that the information necessary for economic calculation cannot be directly derived from physical quantities alone. Steel, labor, coal, machinery, and land are qualitatively different inputs that cannot be compared through simple measurement. Market exchange generates prices that reduce these heterogeneous goods to a common monetary denominator, allowing alternative production plans to be compared. Millions of exchanges produce prices that summarize dispersed information about relative scarcity and demand. In his view, the market functions as a mechanism for coordinating information that no individual planner could assemble independently.(Mises 1949, 92–97; 1920; 1922).
Without price-based calculation, Mises concluded, socialist planning must be arbitrary, leading to waste, inefficiency, and eventual collapse….
A central assumption in Mises’s argument is that profitability indicates that resources are being used more effectively. If a producer cannot compete profitably, Mises argues that others have found a better use for the resources involved (Mises 1949, pp. 300–302, 334–336; see also 1920)
Yet profitability in this system often comes not from genuine improvements or feeding more people, but from engineered scarcity and the quiet destruction of life….
Prices embed existing inequalities and power relations rather than revealing objective scarcity or true societal value.For example, in order to mine cobalt (a critical input for electric vehicle batteries and other high-tech goods), children between the ages of 3–17 in the mining communities of the copper-cobalt belt in the Democratic Republic of Congo are heavily involved in the labor. According to a 2017 UC Berkeley CEGA white paper, 11% of children aged 3–17 work outside the household in these artisanal mining areas, while an additional 57% perform domestic household tasks that support the mining economy.Even when prices exist, they reflect the current structure of power and property relations, not moral value or labor input….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI digital sovereignty risk doesn’t exist
Cory Doctorow, June 18, 2026 [Pluralistic]
You see, blockchain weirdos kept insisting that they could solve problems related to trust and institutional design with “smart contracts.” Rather than having to trust a board of directors to steer an organization, you could just have a self-executing institution, the “distributed autonomous organization” or DAO.
So for example, if you want to buy a copy of the US Constitution at a Sotheby’s auction, you could set up a DAO to raise and pool the funds, eliminating the need to find trustworthy people to receive, hold and deploy these funds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConstitutionDAO
However – and here’s where the palmed card comes in – the DAO can’t go to Sotheby’s and place a bid on the Constitution. Instead, the members of the DAO have to elect a guy to receive all that cash, walk into Sotheby’s, get one of those little ping-pong paddles last seen at the State of the Union in Chuck Schumer’s withered claw (emblazoned with the brave slogan “You’re hurting my fee-fees”) and raise the paddle during the bidding.
That guy doesn’t have to go to Sotheby’s. That guy can simply walk away with all the money. Members of the DAO are trusting this guy with their entire collective treasury. Indeed, since the DAO has no corresponding legal entity, it might even be that members of the DAO can’t sue this guy if he steals all their money – and even worse, without a limited liability structure, it might mean that everyone in the DAO can be sued for anything bad this guy does with the money.
Which raises the question: what’s the point of building this insanely complex hairball of blockchain-based smart contracts to raise and hold the money if you’re just going to hand it to this guy and trust him without limit? ….
Thomas Neuburger, June 16, 2026 [God’s Spies]
The US Government Is Letting a Key Data Center Regulation Expire
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
Climate and environmental crises
The Merchants of Doubt are coming for Extreme Event Attribution science
[The Climate Brink, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
… For those unfamiliar with it, extreme event attribution attempts to quantify the contribution of climate change to an extreme event. For example, several groups analyzed the impact of climate change on Hurricane Harvey’s enormous rainfall totals over Houston, Texas and they found that climate change increased rainfall by 15 to 38%.
One thing that came up again and again was how terrified fossil-fuel interests are of extreme event attribution science. They are acutely aware that this research could land them in court. And losing those cases would leave them legally liable for billions of dollars in climate damages.
Because the legal stakes are so high, the blowback has turned ugly. I spoke with several scientists at the meeting who are facing ongoing harassment over their work.
This blowback is a coordinated campaign to make the entire field look suspect. The goal is to create the impression that attribution science is too uncertain, too political, or too conflicted to be useful in court or in public policy. The strategy is not based on actual science or evidence of misconduct, but on the generation of doubt….
[TW: One of the few hopes I have is that as a new generation of legal officials and prosecutors rise to positions of power, the idea that climate deniers are engaged in a conspiracy to murder and even commit genocide, will become more and more acceptable – and actionable.]
Democrats’ political malpractice
Why Cities Go Socialist – Here comes a generation of DSA big-city mayors.
Harold Meyerson, June 19, 2026 [The American Prospect]
… Which is why the future of most American big cities—most certainly, those that attract younger residents—is likely to be social democratic and often run by avowed socialists. The Bernies, Mamdanis, and AOCs won’t be the Democratic Party’s lonesome ends; they’ll be the party’s urban wing. The sooner the Democrats understand that—and the sooner they embrace many of that wing’s policies, however they choose to label them (and themselves)—the better.
Why Is Newsom Fighting California’s Billionaire Tax?
David Sirota, Natalie Bettendorf, June 18, 2026 [The Lever]
California voters are poised to vote on a one-time billionaire tax that would fund schools, food assistance, and Medicaid. Silicon Valley is spending big to keep the precedent-setting initiative off the November ballot, but the campaign’s most powerful opponent isn’t a tech oligarch — it’s California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Democratic power broker and potential presidential candidate.
Today on Lever Time, David Sirota sits down with Dave Regan, the union leader who engineered the billionaire tax, to find out why Newsom and his allies are racing to kill the measure — and what this fight reveals about oligarchs’ control of the Democratic Party.
The Obama Center is a Monument to the More Effective Evil
[Black Agenda Report, via Naked Capitalism 06-15-2026]
Obama library dedication turns presidency of war, Wall Street bailouts into Democratic Camelot
[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 06-19-2026]
The Democrats’ 2024 “Autopsy” and the Party’s Refusal to Halt Weapons to Israel
[Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 06-14-2026]
Resistance
Which Crimes Could Trump and His Allies *Actually* Be Prosecuted For? Legal Expert Explains
John Harwood, Joyce Vance, and Team Zeteo, June 17, 2026 [Zeteo]
Is Trump immune from the law? And after he’s gone, will his enablers face the consequences? Ex-federal prosecutor Joyce Vance weighs in with Zeteo’s John Harwood.
We Can Start Deterring Election Lies Right Now
Brian Beutler and Andrew Weissmann, June 18, 2026
I had the opportunity on Wednesday to chat live with Andrew Weissmann, the former federal prosecutor and legal-affairs commentator, whose new book Liar’s Kingdom proposes ideas, inspired by foreign democracies, for amending our own laws to impose civil or criminal consequences on political candidates who tell Trump-like lies about elections.
Andrew crafted his proposals carefully to pass muster under our Constitution. They are thus meant to serve both as actionable responses to Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign of post-2020 lies, and as realistic prescriptions for discouraging copycats in the future. But the book hit the shelves just a couple weeks before Republicans in California and across the country asserted new false claims of fraud, in the vain hope of overturning the results of the Los Angeles mayoral primary, and installing a defeated GOP candidate on the general election ballot.
I was reading Liar’s Kingdom as that happened, and borrowed from it heavily in writing this piece, which argues California Democrats should pass a law that would effectively disqualify these election liars from seeking office in the state on future ballots….
Chris Hedges, June 19, 2026
There are two forms of satire. That of the educated elites, which dominates the commercial media, ridicules the foibles and pretensions of Trump and his hapless followers. This satire does not attack corporations or the war industry. It ignores the decay and rot within our political institutions, including the Democratic Party, which created Trump. It pretends we live in a democracy. It breeds cynicism, not resistance. It is characterized by a repugnant moral and intellectual superiority and heartless demeaning of the underclass. It fosters the social divisions and alienation that feeds fascism.
[Project Salt Box, via Naked Capitalism 06-17-2026]
What Spies, Saboteurs, and Abolitionists Can Teach Us About Effectively Influencing Politics
Christopher Armitage, June 17, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Minneapolis Is The Way – Why fascists hate the labor movement.
Hamilton Nolan, June 17, 2026 [How Things Work]
… There are hundreds of panel discussions and workshops at Labor Notes, and no one can go to more than a small fraction of them. But I want to discuss one of them, which focused on what is, to my mind, the most important union action of the past year: the long and ultimately successful struggle by the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul against ICE’s militaristic occupation of their cities.
I got to moderate a panel that included both elected union leaders and rank and file members from the Twin Cities, who talked about the nuts and bolts experience of the ICE surge, the rapid resistance to it, the enormous citywide march against ICE on January 23, and the aftermath. It was fascinating and inspiring and it helped to show us all not just what unions are, but what they can be.
These were unions representing teachers and hotel workers, service workers and janitors and telecom technicians. Regular working people. They spoke about the brutality of ICE’s operations, and how they sprung into action. The teachers made plans to protect their students and schools. The unions all plunged themselves into mutual aid and protection for their immigrant members. And, after an initial phase of figuring out how to safeguard their own people, they threw themselves into a staggering citywide effort to resist ICE in every way possible.
The Minneapolis area has one of the most impressive citywide labor movements in America. It has a rich history of strikes. The leaders of the city’s unions today have had the benefit of going through both the George Floyd protests of 2020, and of planning and executing a multi-union, multi-industry coordinated citywide contract fight in 2024. They have practice working together—like a real movement, rather than an atomized collection of interest groups. When ICE came to town, they were able to exercise those muscles immediately. When they decided, with only a couple of weeks’ notice, to have a huge march and shut down the city on January 23, they were able to pull it off….
Elon Musk keeps refusing to pay his bills. In California, that is felony theft by false pretenses.
Christopher Armitage, June 14, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
OMB FISCAL YEAR 2025 MEMOS PART 1: THE FIRST TEN MEMOS
Joshua Lawrenc, Juan Hanes [Notes on the Crises]
… It is no coincidence that the man who headed up “Project 2025”, Russell Vought, actively sought the head OMB position in order to implement his radical agenda. To understand why the leader of project 2025 would choose this perch over all others, we have to understand what exactly the OMB does….
“I would gladly give up my right to vote to have a more conservative country.”
Joyce Vance, June 16, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
If you haven’t actually listened to these women express their views, this five-minute clip compiled by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is worth your time.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Corporate America’s Secret Courts Are Stealing Your Rights
[Economic Liberties, June 17, 2026 The Economic Populist]
If you’ve ever signed up for a credit card, clicked “accept” on a website’s terms and conditions, or started a new job, you’ve almost certainly agreed to forced arbitration, a private system for resolving disputes that keeps companies out of public courts, away from class actions, and largely beyond the reach of the law. In When Companies Run the Courts: How Forced Arbitration Became America’s Secret Justice System, Brendan Ballou traces how this hidden architecture came to be, why it has quietly gutted whole areas of consumer and employment law, and what regular people might do to claw some power back.
Justice Scalia’s Jiggery-Pokery in Federal Arbitration Law
David S. Schwartz [Minnesota Law Review Headnotes, 2016]
Jill I. Gross [Brooklyn Law Review, Vol. 81, Iss. 1 (2015)]
Erwin Chemerinsky [via scotusblog.com, June 17, 2026]
In his Courtly Observations column, Erwin Chemerinsky revisited what he believes to be “the most extraordinary June in the modern Supreme Court,” examining a nine-day period in June 2022 during which “the court overruled Roe v. Wade, greatly expanded the scope of gun rights, dramatically weakened the wall separating church and state, and imposed a significant new limit on the power of federal administrative agencies.”
Civic republicanism
Letters from an American, June 16, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, June 17, 2026
In Chicago, a case against six protesters for interfering with a federal agent and conspiring to interfere with a federal agent at a detention facility protest fell apart in May when the judge discovered that prosecutors had talked to individual grand jurors outside the courtroom and removed those jurors who refused to indict, as well as apparently overstating the strength of the evidence against the defendants. Then the prosecutors tried to hide evidence of their misconduct by redacting the transcripts from the grand jury.
As Julie Bosman of the New York Times reported, U.S. District Judge April Perry dismissed the case against the “Broadview Six,” saying: “I have read hundreds—if not thousands—of grand jury transcripts involving prosecutors who are the most junior of prosecutors to several U.S. attorneys who appeared before the grand jury. I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.”
[TW: The Trump regime’s disdain for following legal norms, precedents, and procedures is a direct manifestation of the conservative mindset. Recall this harks back to Nixon and Reagan. It is why conservatives so easily support authoritarianism: the leaders are the fount of authority, not the government. “If the president does it, that means it’s legal.”]
And Trump’s renovation of the Reflecting Pool by the Lincoln Memorial is having the effect experts warned of. Because of the dark paint on the floor of the pool, the sun heats the water up even faster than it did before, and the resulting algae bloom has turned the pool bright green. Today, workers poured hydrogen peroxide into the pool to try to kill the algae.
[TW: The absurdity of the conservative mind is captured by the fable of an authoritarian king attempting to command the ocean tides. Here is Trump attempting to command the appearance of a basin of water.]
Alex Krainer, June 19, 2026
[TW: I peg Krainer as a libertarian attracted to conspiracy theories, but he often has good information. And arguments, as in this post.]
… Reframing the debate might start with the idea that healthcare ought to be a social obligation. This would be more consistent with human nature, because this is how we naturally approach illness and care for the ill. If someone in the family or in our community is unwell, we feel obligated to help. It’s a hardwired impulse, it does not require an accounting ledger, an economic theory, or a University medical ethics department.
People naturally go quite out of their way to help those in need. I believe we’ve all seen countless videos online where ordinary individuals risk their lives and wellbeing to rescue a child fallen down a well, a dog that fell through the ice in a river, or an elephant stuck in the mud. Nobody stops to ask how much that costs, whether the rescuee has the money or insurance to compensate us, or whether they have the human (or elephant) right to deserve our effort in helping them.
If this is the way people relate to one another in families and in communities, why shouldn’t this be the case at the national level? Why shouldn’t every nation treat healthcare as a social obligation? ….
spud
the race for hyper sonics is going to be tough for the west, after all, bill clinton and tony blair and other assorted cranks, gutted the west’s ability to R&D, have skilled labor, and manufacture. the west is loaded with paper manipulators, and that’s about it.
however, there are a few left in the west left, that might, that just might, over come the paper manipulators, and get a missile made, or something as deadly, or even deadlier.
and that’s what Iran, and really, what russia does not understand, same with china.
in the modern world, from 1890-today, the military advantage you have, that window is getting ever shorter by the minute.
if all three get a deadly surprise in the near future, might not be missiles, but something else. they will have blown a once in a lifetime advantage to remain free. and then the real bloodbath and fight for life begins. and it was almost all avoidable.
history will not deal lightly with the naive.
Mark Level
Thanks to Tony for great curation as usual.
I wanted to read the Greenland piece, but unfortunately the Surveillance Vampires at the New Yorker want my email to monitor me, so I will make like Bartelby the Scrivener and state, “I would prefer not to.” Still 9-10 days in the month, so I will go to the local Barnes and Noble and see if the New Yorker’s still on the newsstand, a better way to read for people my age anyhow.
Yeah, the Peter Thiel Secret Society thing is quite creepy, and the link to Naked Capitalism covers the topic well. Due Dissidence did a clip on this in the last week, went into granular detail on the sleaze. They don’t even Tyle the Lodge, hide their infamy, they are too arrogant to bother.
(PS: I haven’t seen any Spell Check on this site in months, suddenly it works again. Must be the current Mercury Retrograde. It doesn’t like the name Thiel, nor the Masonic verb from British English, tyle!! Interesting.
sidd
Mr. Wikrent, thanks for the weekly wrap-ups and commentary.
sidd
Mark Level
The Game is Up!! Massive Anti-NATO Manifestion in Brussels, Belgium, beating Heart of the Genocidal Beast. Fuck NAFO, Fuck NATO, Fuck Endless War. & Starmer’s gone, thrown to the curb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2HyQt69VK8
different clue
If one gave the Surveillance Vampires a fake email, would they know the difference?
Mark Level
Speaking of Vampires, DC, Due Dissidence just did a great segment yesterday about the Obama Library Inauguration in Chicago, a hideous Brutalist building straight out of Star Wars, not quite the Death Star, Square and Blocky, but has that vibe. Cost $8.5 billion, lots from the people who he bailed out after they crashed the Market in 08-09, but the Shit Libs were partying hearty, & smarmy like they always do. Bruce Springsteen there for music, a bunch of 20-teens musical royalty, and David Letterman had his heart overfilled with joy at Obama’s Stentorial Genius. Gagg!!
So the Royalty of the recent Looter Presidents & First Ladies all there, Obama and Michelle, and their pretty Royal Children, Chimpy George Bush and Laura the Librarian (so offended when real poets didn’t come to her Invites only confab, they didn’t want to hang out with the wife of a war criminal, and a moronic one as well.) Bill and Hills. That’s the Vampire connection!! She wears a heavy blue fabric thing over her neck. Bill loved parties on Little St. James, went 11 times, and of course at Epstein’s NYC Mansion as well. So, has he learned to suck blood, she has to cover up the neck like Mina Harker in the Dracula tales? Okay it could just be wattles, as mago noted recently, “What a Drag it is getting Old.” The Stones sang that when they were still young of course.
What a shame their anti-Trump pal Mouth-Rictus Dick Cheney, “Fuck you all!” when called out by other Nobility, shoots his Dem “friend” in the Face with buckshot, burning in hell couldn’t make it. If the wonderful Liz Cheney, fuck my gay sister those Gheys are evil, was there, she wasn’t included in the clip. And last and very least, “Dr. Jill” and Joe Biden, his diapers stinking. They actually left him alone on the stage (I will share the clip if they do one) and he hallucinated “There’s my granddaughter,” the last dribble-drivel, you’d think after George Clooney admitted he didn’t know where he was 2 years ago, you’d think Dr. Jill would’ve walked him off? He shuffled off alone after the rest had exited stage right, an abandoned child. The segregationist all his life man who so kindly (condescendingly) called Obama “clean and articulate”, whitewashed the half-Negro (a term from Joe’s youth) so his Segregationist base would vote for him after crazy Gramps McCain.
“But at least they’re not Trump!!” Well, I can’t swallow much of that. Hillary created Slave Markets in Libya that are still in business. Hillary & Bill horribly racist to Obama when he ran against her in the primary, he’s practically a “Super Predator” in Hills’ eyes in 2008, but that’s all water under the Bridge now, as he chose his Cabinet from the list provided to him by Citigroup, brought the Hills in to be a murderous Secretary of State (“keep your friends close, your enemies closer”), drone bombed Anwar al-Alwaki’s 16 year old son in Yemen, an American citizen, to death. Child of a Terrorist by Transitive property is a Terrorist, no trial needed. “We tortured some folks.”
I could dilate more on this, but will leave it for spud, more knowledgable than me. But will close with his greatest Legacy, shivving Bernie during the Monday-Night-Massacre in Iowa and giving Donald J. Trump a 2nd turn, Hills gave DJT a first term via theft of that nomination from Bernie. A bit of trivia, shared in the clip– Margot Kidder a Democrat activist, and a full year before the 2016 election, shared in a long column how Hillary had stolen the nomination in advance. Someone wrote a great piece soon after Hillary lost, a DNC insider, name’s in the clip. But who knew that the woman who played Lois Lane was an actual Leftie and a whistleblower? Kudos to Ms. Kidder.
All the fake Moral Posturing by the Lib Elites against the Fat Orange Orangutan (which I would call him, and he loves to watch Gorillas fighting on the Gorilla Channel, his handlers share) rings kind of hollow given that they installed him in power, not just once, but TWICE! And Bill and Donald Golf buddies and Epstein buddies for many years as well.
different clue
More good news about SpaceX.
From the wallstreetbets subreddit . . .
“SpaceX stock tumbles 16.4%, shaving off most IPO gains since debut”
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1uczcdz/spacex_stock_tumbles_164_shaving_off_most_ipo/
And now we turn to our economic analyst Nelson Muntz for some commentary . . .
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=you+tube+nelson+muntz+ha+ha&mid=81EE3D532DD12BFA2AD081EE3D532DD12BFA2AD0&churl=https%3a%2f%2fwww.youtube.com%2fchannel%2fUCooifnuiwdAtODnhTVjcc-g&FORM=VIRE
different clue
Here’s a very sad report from someone who’s boss has AI psychosis and has come to believe, truly believe , that his AI is a Living Being who Must be aPPEASED.
From the antiwork subreddit, ” My boss has ai psychosis and we’re fucked. ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1ucmycc/my_boss_has_ai_psychosis_and_were_fucked/
( This is different than being a ‘bad boss’).
different clue
From the technology subreddit:
” SpaceX Investors Are Losing a Colossal Amount of Money ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1ucohl7/spacex_investors_are_losing_a_colossal_amount_of/
Yayyy!
different clue
As I read deeper into the thread connected to the linked-article just above, I discovered some thing that indicate that this news is not as good as my naive layman self wanted to believe.
Several people in the thread have suggested that this new generation of IPO-bros has learned that if they set for themselves a “secret” valuation they truly wish to achieve, they only have to set a wildly higher public evaluation to lure major piles of ‘dumm money’ into the IPO buyup, and then let the IPO-shares value crash back to what they secretly hoped for. They still harvest more money than they had before the IPO.
And a lot of the ‘dumm money’ is not really ‘dumm’. It is helpless hostage money in various investment and 401K and etc. type funds. And the faceless millions of little people whose aggregated little bits of money have their money partway dumped into these IPO pump-and-semi-dumps. Such little peoples’s only defense would be if they are able to find funds which rigidly refuse to buy any IPO offerings. I don’t know enough about the field to know if such funds exist, if the Prisoners of 401K would be allowed to pick them, etc.
The best investment for those who have anything to invest at all would be in personal and micro-community survival and survivalism, in all its forms. People with ideas about that could submit them every Open Thread and Weekend Wrap.
different clue
I looked into “applying” to the New Yorker to see if a fake email would work and it looks more complicated than other places which just say ” do this to create a free account”. So I didn’t give it a try.
I read somewhere recently that if the TrumpAdmin tries to conquer either Greenland or Cuba, it will decide to try Greenland next because it is more ‘valuable’ than Cuba.
I myself think that if the TrumpAdmin tries either, it will try Cuba next because Rubio wants to be the Great Hero who ‘liberates’ Cuba. If he has real influence over the mind of Trump, they will try Cuba next. But that’s just my intuitive thinkfeel.
I have long wanted a campaign to humiliate Trump in a way he feels it so much that his brain goes Full Metal Chernobyl on Live TV. But I don’t want to see the Iran War Outcome exploited for that noble purpose. I would prefer to take a manageable surrender now rather than a less manageable surrender after more pain and loss later.
So I find the Republicanfederate Senators’s attitude on Iran to be regretable and unfortunate. And the Democrats will run on ” Who lost Iran?” which I will also find to be regretable and unfortunate.
different clue
I have offered links to videos about the FBAmerican boycott of Asian-owned businesses in FBAmerican neighborhoods. So why would I offer another link? Isn’t that just being redundant and repetitious?
I will offer this link because a certain sub-chunk of talk within this video addresses the issue of differential costs and the problem of differential costs arbitrage. The talker explains in detail WHY Asian business owners are structurally gifted with lower costs than what FBAmerican business wannabe-founders are forced to pay. And the talker explains that since that is just the current fact of the matter, Black Americans will have to accept the idea of paying higher prices in Black owned businesses than they would have to pay in Asian-owned businesses . . . beauty and nail businesses in her specific example. And she poses the challenge to any Black video-watchers . . . are they committed enough to the concept of Black support for Black business that they will pay the higher price which will have to be charged, each and every time, for the Black business to STAY in business? Well . . . are they?
That particular relevant talk-chunk begins at timepoint 6:19 and runs till timepoint
10:15. She lays out the problem in granular detail. And it sounds like a microcosm of the larger problem facing any “American” economy which people wish to preserve within “America”. If you want to support the survival of “American” business in “America”, you will have to accept that you will have to pay “always the higher price, always”. Are enough “Americans” prepared to do that to where they can help preserve some viable stubs of “American” business in “America” till such time as the underlying and overlaying forcefield-matrix changes in favor of “American” business in “America”? Well . . . . are we? Or at least . . . enough of us?
different clue
My goodness . . . I forgot to leave the title and link to the video I talked about just above which had the talk-chunk in it about “differential costs and differential cost arbitrage in the context of Black-owned versus Asian-owned businesses. And given how You Tube videos disappear never to be findable again, I am glad I was able to find this one again. So I will offer title and link just to be sure. The timepoints I gave for the differential costs talk-chunk are still exactly correct and valid.
” ASIAN BUSINESSES ARE SHUTTING DOWN—THE BOYCOTT IS GETTING INTENSE ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXp3DX1HFGk
On to something else. If I were living in Texas, I would have voted for Crockett in the Crockett versus Talarico primary. But I would go on to vote for Talarico in the election regardless, because of “harm reduction” and a hope of attriting and degrading the Republicanfederate Majority in the Senate.
That said, here is a video which illustrates some of the difficulty that the Talarico campaign will have earning Black Texamerican votes. I live a thousand miles from Texas and have zero ability to predict what “will happen” in that election. But this video and its aggregation of Texamerican Black content creators’s content could shed some light on what the problems are going to be. The Talarico camp might be advised to run some numbers on how many Latino voters and Republican defector voters it will have to get to make up for a near zero number of Black Texamerican voters if it should end up being that way. I don’t know that it will, but it could. And these content creators say why. ( Just as Phillip Scott warned in one of his podcasts shortly after the primary itself).
” W🤍 Texans & B🖤 People CLASH After B🖤 People Refuse to Support Their Political Candidate ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqREleAaDHI
Mark Level
“So I find the Republicanfederate Senators’s attitude on Iran to be regrettable and unfortunate. And the Democrats will run on ” Who lost Iran?” which I will also find to be regrettable and unfortunate.” Great call, Diff Clue. This just showed how ancient and ossified our Political Whores’ Playbook is, that goes back to Ghina. Wikipedia notes the Truman Admin took the blame for this, the mighty Kuomintang on Taiwan were supposed to be the “real” Ghina for decades, even though Truman himself joked about the 100% corrupt “Cash My Check”/ Chang Kai-Shek & his drug-dealing wife, Wikipedia goes back further than Truman, FDR fucked that one up, a shell of himself in his final term, the same time the Deep State sidelined the Lefty, pro-black Civil Rights Southerner Henry Wallace, replaced with the Pendergast Machine’s sleazy Harry S. Truman. FDR also set the stage for Truman to turn the state called “Palestine” into Greater Israel. Clip of him in front of the map of Palestine, well there ain’t no Palestine anymore, Jerry Seinfeld echoes Golda Meir, there was never a Palestine, “there are no Palestinian people,” they’re just Sand-Niggers to be exterminated, as are the Lebanese, northern 1/3 of Saudi Arabia, all of Syria (thanks Obama) etc., when Harry collaborated with the Brits and the Rothschild family to ethnically cleanse the region & hand it over to Turkic Khazar imposters from Poland, Russia, Lithuania, etc. Part of the Cradle of Civilization, “No One in the Bible was White,” but make Palestine White, like the slogan “Keep Poland White” used when the Law and Justice Party was in power, they revived the spirit of Auschwitz and the Death Camps.
The original Anti-Semite was that horrid Herodotus, when Wikipedia isn’t foaming at the mouth that Max Blumenthal is a Russian-owned “Conspiracy Theorist” and Disinformation-spreader, they can be truthful and accurate. A small slice on Herodotus, + Palestine: “The term Peleset is found in five inscriptions referring to a neighboring people, starting from c. 1150 BCE during the Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt. The word is transliterated from hieroglyphs as P-r-s-t-w, as Egyptians did not use the consonant “l” in writing, substituting it with “r” instead, and it is generally accepted that this is an ethnonym referring to the Philistines.[2] The Assyrians used the terms “Palashtu/Palastu” or “Pilistu,” beginning in c. 800 BCE through to refer to the region inhabited by the Philistines.[3][4] Neither the Egyptian nor the Assyrian sources provided clear regional boundaries for the term.[5] The terms used in these inscriptions are considered cognates of the Biblical term Pəlīštīm, i.e. Philistines,[6] used in the Hebrew Bible.[7][8] The 10 uses in the Torah neither define the boundaries of the region, nor provide any meaningful description.[9][10]”
The ancient Greek term that forms the basis for the term Palestine first appears in the 5th century BCE when the historian Herodotus wrote of a “district of Syria, called Palaistinê” between Phoenicia and Egypt in The Histories.[11] Herodotus provides the first historical reference clearly denoting a wide region for Philistia, extending beyond the coast to the inland regions such as the Judean Mountains and the Jordan Rift Valley.[12][13][14][15] Later Greek writers such as Aristotle, Polemon and Pausanias also used the word, which was followed by Roman writers such as Ovid, Tibullus, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Elder, Dio Chrysostom, Statius, Plutarch as well as Roman Judean writers Philo of Alexandria and Josephus,[16] these examples covering every century from the 4th BCE to the 1st CE. There is, however, no evidence of official use of the name in the Hellenistic period on any coin or inscription and it is from absent from the New Testament.[17]
In the early 2nd century CE, the Roman province called Judaea was renamed Syria Palaestina[a] following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE), the last of the major Jewish–Roman wars.[18][19]” (Hey, spell-check working again, cool!!) So Palestine 13 centuries old, mas o menos, good to know, Jerry knows neither history nor geography. Older even than Iran, not older than Egypt of course. Josephus the Jewish writer- historian who wrote about Christ a few decades after his martyrdom knew that Palestine was real. Herodotus lived c. 484-c.425 bce, the Zionist movement implies that he is the original Hitler for discussion of Palestine.
Make Palestine Philistine again, please!! Well, bought-off Machmoud Abbas says no, I work for the Ubermenschen Khazars.
Anyway, the feint that as in Taiwan v. Asian China, 25x as big as the island and 30x as populated by the 1940s, 8 decades ago, was the “real” China anticipates Karl Rove, “We’re an Empire now and we create our own Reality,” hey, it worked for Emperor Norton in post-1849 San Francisco, always worth a try.
And to Diff Clue’s very good point, yes, the DimmieCraps will feast off the “Trump lost Iran” buffet table, just incoherent. It was never OURS to rule, I’m with KT Chong on this issue at least. Sad thing for them, though, the ‘Murican Public isn’t buying this swill (though the stupidest of the Dimmie base will, my fellow Boomers need to die off quicker, they are fucking the young so hard and bad they’re honorary Epstein Class wannabes.) Trump war for Zionism, he’s no longer the “Peace President” an Epic Epstein fail, polled underwater by the day after he launched it and clearly failed.
Even the Shit-Libs over at NPR’s “The Conversation” sitting at the NeoCon Table admit that it was a clusterfuck from the get-go. Trump did it coz the real ‘Murican President Bibi told him too, waved some of the Epstein Pics, no casus belli given, okay the thread of “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon,” just like “Palestinians can never have food or homes in their homeland” is assumed by the Duopoly Lizard People.
Rest of World knows who the real Axis of Evil is, the Mask has come off. 2 weeks until there’s no gas in US, a failed state? Most likely outcome, especially if Trump manages to murder the 3 Iranians in Switzerland who refused, rightly, to sit at a table with No Chance Vance, Witkoff and Gum Golem Kushner. Lebanese slaughter for Lebensraum will continue unchecked, though Israeli military falling apart, draftees not showing up, 92% of Zionist Transplants polled say they know they lost in Iran currently. Oh well, escape through Egypt to Cyprus or the Bronx with your dual Passport for the best and brightest. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Oh, and DC I corrected the single-ts in “regrettable.” Don’t accidentally omit a letter that way, the Spelling Nazi LAS will as he did with spud denounce you as a moron if one letter mistyped!! I’ve never seen anyone lose an argument with LAS since he’s blessed this site, but one never knows, Hope springs eternal.
Mark Level
A footnote to my appreciation of DC’s raising the “Who lost Iran?” bullshit which the Dimmies will campaign on, ‘coz of course these people never learn anything, recycle 8-decades’ old Dogshit in a shiny new package.
Enjoying the Stanford College radio station during my breaking of the fast, the DJ played The Kinks’ now 50 year-old song, “Gallon of Gas.” I was 16 and had just gotten a License during the OPEC blockade, back when the mideast Arabs knew to protect their own people– well mostly, Nixon had let them have power due to making a Petro-Dollar commitment, Carter changed not a period or comma, Gas Crisis presaged Carter destroying his Presidency with a failed “Hostage Rescue Mission”, defunct in the Iranian Sands. Lyrics here, coming soon to USA and entire RoW nearly. (Not Russia, not China, likely not Canada.)
I’ve been waiting for years to buy a brand new Cadillac
But now I’ve got one, I want to send it right back
I can’t afford the gas to fill my luxury limousine
But even if I had the dough no one’s got no gasoline
I went to my local dealer to see if he could set me straight
He said there’s a little gas going but I’d have to wait
But he offered some red hot speed and some really high grade hash
But a gallon of gas can’t be purchased anywhere
For any amount of cash
I can score you some coke and some grade one grass
But I can’t get a gallon of gas
I’ve got some downers some speed all the drugs that you need
But I can’t get a gallon of gas
There’s no more left to buy or sell
There’s no more oil left in the well
A gallon of gas can’t be purchased anywhere
For any amount of cash
Who needs a car and a seven forty seven
When you can’t buy a gallon of gas
Who needs a highway, an airport or a jet
When you can’t get a gallon of gas
There’s no more left to buy or sell
There’s no more oil left in the well
A gallon of gas can’t be purchased anywhere
For any amount of cash
You can’t buy a gallon of gas
Amen!! We’re 3-4 weeks away, maybe a bit longer, from gas riots, Donnie has an imaginary belief that “We’ve got more gas out of there in the last week than ever before in history,” uhhm no, no evidence found.
Ray Davies still alive at age 83, retiring from music. But the Universe is generous today, the odious Allen Greenspan dead at age 100!! Burning in the hottest Hell just next to his buddy Cheney if the Christian Hell is real.
Yves at Naked Capitalism has a great piece up today at NC celebrating. Who knew Volker was slightly better than Greenspan, I learn something new every day. The Ghoulish Zionist Spokesmodel Andrea Mitchell was his famous wife, reporting objectively (not) on his greatness, on NBC if memory serves. I always referred to the 08-09 Crash as the Greenspan-Larry Summers Crash, Slick Willie hovering in the background having used Summers to gut Glass-Steagall. Created a money windfall for his student, Obama, who bailed out the crooks & just got his horrible Library for all his graft and corruption.
As Hillary liked to say, “America is already great!!” Nothing fundamentally will change, as Brain-Bleed Joe shared.
different clue
@Mark Level,
You’ve been awfully nice to me lately. I am thinking of writing something I believe to be correct and the correct way of viewing something. That’s all I can say until I finally discipline myself to get it done.
It may get you upset, but try to remember that will not be the point of it, just an unfortunate side-effect if it happens.
As to misspeling, if sumwun wantz to cawlz me a moe-ron for misspeling someting, dey can cawlz me a moe-ron, and dats okay.
different clue
Hmmm . . . fascinating news if true. Even more so if it stays true.
“Tucker Carlson GOP Exit”
https://scout.yahoo.com/chat/019ef6b0-31d8-71d6-a533-1461b0e20560-a?fr=sfp-tts&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Asfp%2Cm%3Atn%2Cct%3Aall%2Cpg%3A1%2Cstl%3Atxt%2Ckt%3Aorg%2Cb%3A
I think Tucker wants a cleaner purer form of what he thought MAGA was really supposed to be, and I suppose he has decided the time has come to say the quiet part out loud.
MAWA –> Make America White Again
MAWPA –> Make America White Power Again
MAWSA –> Make America White Suprematist Again
and most specifically –> MAWCSA –> Make America White Christian Suprematist
Again
Perhaps he wants to find others to join him in founding an overtly named Christian Nationalist Party. Would he be so bold as to say Heritage American Christian Nationalist Party ? Time will tell.
or however one wants to express that.
Mark Level
Diff Clue, we have our Diff-erences, but you are doing better than back when you were Vote Blue No Matter Who, or even worse doing the posts 2 years back about I want Leopards to Tear Off the Faces of Anyone who Won’t Vote For Genocide Kop Kamala.
I respect you, you clearly mean well even when you go off track. The troll just trolls for attention, has the occasional valuable post but that’s a fluke, not a feature. I can be allies with people without agreeing with them about everything.
At this time I see you as an ally; not maybe on the level of Ian, bruce wilder, spud, cc, mago or some others, but you are on the Camino de Santiago (St. James Holy Road in Spain for pilgrimages.) You are not on the Highway to Hell like some others, e.g. KT Chong, a patriarchal, tribalist, Hobbesian worshiping servant of the State fanatical Ethno-Supremacist like Stephen Miller. Fascists will never and can never be my allies.
I think your KlanMAGA hyperbolic excesses are a bit much at times; but better an excess of passion than an excess of indifference (the opposite of Love is not Hate, the opposite of Love is Indifference.) We can disagree without being disagreeable.
different clue
Well, I am still blue no matter who with certain exceptions in this emergency period. I don’t keep linking to Black Culture Singers singing about Leopards Eating Face because I have already done that and don’t need to repeat it.
I still support the concept of ” have the day you voted for”. I may just be a for-the-moment fellow-traveler of convenience till the my-own-path I am on diverges again. In which case, we can enjoy the good feeling while it lasts, in the meantime.
And I am sure some of the things I will write will not be well recieved. They are not going to be written with that intent, that would just be a side-effect or an outcome.
different clue
Here is a video from one of those liberal sites I usually avoid, but the title was so delightfully clickbaity that I clicked on it.
IF it is true, and I HOPE that it IS true, then this is delightful news, both to hear about and to contemplate. It presents the appearance of Jabba the Trump’s brain going half-metal chernobyl inside the skull, and in a privately public setting ( with a bunch of senior Republican Senators). The problem with these liberal websites is you never know if they merely tailor the narrative to soothe their need for copium . . . . self-supplying the supply they need to get high on.
But here, just in case, is . . . ” All HELL BREAKS LOOSE in Capitol as Trump SCREAMS AT GOP!! ” If it is true, the Democrats will swoon with delight, the Republicans will grit their teeth and soldier grimly on because Project 2025 must not be delayed or denied, and all the hot sweaty millions of Trump’s MAGAnon Retardate supporters in the field will be chanting ” Drane! Thuh! Swawmp! Drane! Thuh! Swawmp! ” and etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkaxC7OkRX0
Even if it IS true, Trump will NOT be impeached and he will NOT be Article 25’d. The ongoing Gilead KlanMAGA Christianazification of America is too important to the Republicanfederates for them to let a silly little thing like this get in the way. Perhaps he will be ushered into a hospital and quietly kevorked and not re-emerge. That is the only way I can imagine an Inner Circle of Power ridding itself of this turbulent President.
But he is very sensitive to his image. Apparently toxic malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder persons are like that. And people should continue to mock and satirize and insult him in every public venue that he might be seeing or hearing just in case that has helped destabilize the very stable genius-brain to this point.
Perhaps thousands of ” I did that!” Trump stickers could be stuck onto the fence around the Reflecting Pool. Perhaps those people who make the amazing Resin Sculptures for the Hare Krishna movement can make a huge portable( on wheels) sculpture of Jabba the Trump. Jabba the Hut’s face and body with the face changed just enough so that everybody who sees it, especially Trump himself, can clearly see the smooth morphing of the features of Jabba and Donald.
Make him go crazy enough that he mistakes his own fingers for hotdogs and bites them off to satisfy his hunger before he can use them to ‘push the button . . . the beautiful shiny red button . . . the jolly candy-like button’.
different clue
I have seen a couple more interesting content offerings on the Talarico vs Paxton race in Texas and the parallel issue of White Liberal and White Leftist actions and interactions with Jasmine Crockett and with Foundational Black Texamericans in the context of this election.
I will lead off by re-offering this aggregated-content video offered by Cimnanya. The title is very misleading as are most of the titles to these African-made content aggregator re-offeriser videos. But the material is interesting and on point. So here again is that first video.
“W🤍 Texans & B🖤 People CLASH After B🖤 People Refuse to Support Their Political Candidate”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqREleAaDHI
And now I will offer what further videos I can re-find in the un-indexed tornado of videos which is You Tube.
The first of the subsequent chain of videos is also severely mislabeled and mistitled, as so many are. But it contains some very on-point video-chunks, beginning with a very short bit from Ron Bishop, then a section of Hawk’s painfully long and sad apology-response video after Well Read Black Girl’s video and comments thereon and therefrom. And then some other interesting bits of stuff.
“W🤍 Texans Are PANICKING Over Fears Of A B🖤 Boycott & Issue An Apology For Wanting FREE B🖤 LABOR”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86wCRU100bU
Here is a smallish TabithaSpeaksPolitics initial response to Hawk’s condemnation video against Jasmine Crockett, and why in her opinion it will not win any votes for Talarico in Black Texamerica. She will advise the Talarico camp to start upgrading its campaign and working harder and smarter to hopefully win . . . . because she herself from her position of distant observation in Atlanta would rather see Talarico elected than to see Paxton elected.
“Dear White Democrats In Texas… This Will Not Win Black Votes For James Talarico!!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_hobjCSetU
Tabitha also made a longer more in-depth and exhaustive video about various aspects of the commentary around this rising situation. It is worth watching. The last few minutes of it are an appendix-addendum where she offers a list with some printed readable mini-screenshots of various things she disapproves of and/or condemns which were done by certain possibly free-lancing self-motivated people allied with the Talarico campaign.
“Responding To Comments Regarding James Talarico and Problematic White Leftists!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL7o_lzmUAY
At the end of it all is this little video by Black American podcaster TabithaSpeaksPolitics her own self. It is her final response to Content Creator Hawk’s release of an apology video after recieving the fallout and blowback from his own initial statement on the matter . . . which set off this little chain of further videos. She talks about what is so distasteful about Hawk’s video, about the White Liberal and White Leftist harassment of Jasmine Crockett and apparent self-granted license to lecture Black Texamericans about what or whom they have a duty to vote for. She ends by saying she is not against the concept of Black Texamericans voting for Talarico if that becomes their ultimate choice, and she gives the Talarico campaign people some advice on how to create a chance of that happening.
“No, I Didn’t See Nor Do I Care About His Apology Video!!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-rTBiOPYzc
It takes way more time to watch videos than to read print. Unfortunately, some info-dense videos are simply not transcribed into print at all. And the video lets one see gestures, tones of voice, etc. which convey all kinds of meta-information beyond and around the strictly literal context of the spoken words themselves.
Together, these videos add up to more than the sum of their parts . . . at least in my opinion.
If Talarico wins, these videos will be of some interest just for political culture’s sake.
If Talarico loses, and if that loss can be undeniably attributed to a “largely missing Black Texamerican vote” , then these videos will be part of what is studied by political scientists and real-time as-it-happens political historians. Whether Democratic operatives would study them or even look at them would remain to be seen.
Again, it is Black Texamericans who are saying that after what has happened and has been done and has been said, they will not vote for Talarico. Tabitha way over in Atlanta is saying she hopes Talarico wins but she doubts he will unless he and his campaign correct some major errors and deficiences going forward. Which she hopes it/they do correct, because she would rather see Talarico win.
different clue
More on the Black Boycott of Asian-owned businesses . . .
Lately Black content creators have begun clarifying that they are focusing the boycott on Asian owned stores in Black neighborhoods and majority-Black areas. And some of them are saying that this is not a “boycott”, it is a “blackout”. ( I have coined the word ‘extermicott’ for this sort of ‘eliminate-the-target’ boycotting). The point is to bankrupt those businesses into physical extinction and take their place with Black owned businesses, so that Black money can be used to benefit Black people . . . instead of further subsidizing antiblackitic racist antiblackite-owned businesses occupying Black Spaces. ( This leads me to wonder whether Black customers in multi-racial neutral zones are continuing to randomly patronize Asian owned businesses in these multi-racial neutral zone areas. The answer would be interesting either way).
So here is a video highlighting the successful redirection of Black -owned money towards Black-owned businesses.
“Asians Furious As BLACK STORES Make Huge Sales EVER…….. Boycott Is WORKING 100%”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqpfhKtIpEU
Only an antiblackitic racist antiblackite could find any fault with this.
different clue
Here is an example of deceitful clickbait titles.
“Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 faces fresh humiliation as Vanilla Ice concert canceled”
https://www.themirror.com/entertainment/breaking-vanilla-ice-trump-canceled-1908287
The article itself notes that Vanilla Ice was rained out by heavy rainstorms. Nothing about “decision not to perform” as implied in the article.
Decietful clickbait titles are always a risk and a hazard.
different clue
Another NanyaCim video bearing on the coming Senate election in Texas and how some Black Texamericans are feeling about that, about Talarico specifically, and other related things and stuff.
A content-creator in particular named Well Read Black Girl notes in very slow spoken detail some things about Talarico having worked for Teach For America in past years and she says things I never heard a thing about regarding how destructive Teach For America was and is against the education of Black schoolchildren. She says Black people have been trying to warn us all about the threat and menace posed by Teach For America for decades, but I never heard a thing about them saying it. That just shows what a powerful Cone Of Silence was dropped over Black people for all this time on that subject. Her particular talk-segment goes from timepoint 9:44 to timepoint 13:44.
Now the one negative thing I remember hearing/reading about Teach For America is that it was a clever ploy to pretend that young people with a few weeks of “training” could go into classrooms and teach children. The purpose of this was to create the carefully engineered impression that teaching is not a real skill, does not require real education and extensive training, and that “teachers” are not real professionals who deserved to be paid for doing a real job. After all, if college kids or other volunteers can do “teaching” with a few weeks of derisory training, what do we even need “teachers” for at all? That was the fake question that Teach For America was designed to fake and hype up and trick people into considering seriously. Given that, what exactly was Talarico’s involvement in Teach For America, and how does he feel about that involvement now? Separately, I wonder why Well Read Black Girl feels Teach For America was designed to destroy education for Black schoolchildren in particular, and how far it went towards advancing that goal. I wonder what information I have been deprived of, here in my little silo, in that regard.
Anyway, she says she considers Talarico a deadly menace to the survival of her personal children in particular and Black children in general, and so she will never vote for Talarico. I assume she will try to get as many of her fellow Black Texamericans to feel the same way and take the same action. Will she and others like her succeed? I have no idea. Stay tuned, I guess.
“B🖤 People Send A Direct & Crystal-Clear Warning To W🤍 Texans As Demands For B🖤 Labor Continue”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thj_Bl6ZKIU