Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 8, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
National Guard to be sent to L.A. amid clashes; Newsom calls Hegseth’s threat of Marines ‘deranged’
[Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2025]
ZACK STANTON, 06/08/2025 [politico.com/playbook]
Trump: “If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can’t do their jobs, which everyone knows they can’t, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”
….
What Trump is doing is incredibly rare: “It is the first time since 1965 that a president has activated a state’s National Guard force without a request from that state’s governor,” NYT’s Shawn Hubler and Laurel Rosenhall report, citing Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center. “The last time was when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators in 1965, she said.”
Also worth flagging: The National Guard “has nearly non-existent law enforcement training or doctrine despite it always being talked about as a domestic force,” as Military.com’s Steve Beynon notes.
What’s the basis of the legal authority here? The Times notes that “the directive signed by Mr. Trump cites ‘10 U.S.C. 12406,’ referring to a specific provision within Title 10 of the U.S. Code on Armed Services. Part of that provision allows the federal deployment of National Guard forces if ‘there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.’” Naturally, then, language from the administration aims to underscore the threat of rebellion, danger or invasion.
The Trump Family’s Money-Making Machine
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture June 1, 2025]
…no modern American president has positioned his family to make so much money while in the White House. Already, since the early days of his reelection campaign, he’s more than doubled his net worth to about $5.4 billion.
In that time, the Trump name has powered more than $10 billion of real estate projects, a multibillion-dollar valuation for his money-losing social-media company, more than $500 million in sales from just one of his crypto ventures and millions of dollars more from stakes in companies that offer financial services, guns and drone parts. Family members have also scored an array of corporate positions — at least seven new roles as an adviser or executive for his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., alone.
[Military Religious Freedom Foundation, via DailyKos 06-05-2025]
Trump Makes NPR’s Legal Case Extra Easy By Admitting Retaliatory Motives In Executive Order Title
[techdirt, via Naked Capitalism 06-01-2025]
‘This Is What Fascism Looks Like’: Beloved Labor Leader David Huerta Arrested
Jon Queally, June 07, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Unions and allies in California and across the United States on Saturday are demanding the immediate release of David Huerta, president of SEIU California and SEIU-United Service Workers West, after the highly regarded labor leader was injured and then arrested while witnessing a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on Friday.
Judge Uses 26 Exclamation Points to Strike Down Trump’s Terrible Order
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, May 28, 2025 [The New Republic]
U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Richard Leon struck down Donald Trump’s executive order targeting law firm WilmerHale Tuesday, describing the entire directive as “unconstitutional.” In a 73-page opinion, Leon took the time to explain the principles of democracy to the president, illustrating how his political retribution campaign is quintessentially antithetical to the foundational principles of the U.S. government.
The Real Reason Trump Has Created This Autopen Scandal
Matt Ford, June 6, 2025 [The New Republic]
The latest in manufactured controversies has less to do with legal victories over the Biden administration than it does with creating content for the president’s media allies.
Men DOGEbags at Work
Elon Musk’s Government Legacy Was Enacting Project 2025. His Ties Go Back Years
Joe Fassler [DeSmogBlog, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2025]
A DeSmog analysis found that DOGE’s explosive tactics under Musk represented the culmination of a years-long strategy to remake American governance, one developed by a small, influential network of conservative and far-right groups whose influence on Trump may tilt the U.S. toward autocracy. While ranging in focus, these groups generally mix an authoritarian brand of Christian Nationalist politics with free-market libertarianism — an ideology that tends to favor restrictive laws for citizens and leniency for corporations. Many also cast doubt on the dangers of climate change and work to undermine the federal government’s ability to respond to rapid warming. And Musk — contrary to his reputation as an ungovernable outsider with his own big ideas — was carrying out their vision to a T.
But it was more than that: Musk’s arrival on the scene helped to launder the reputation of an enormously unpopular playbook, putting techno-utopian lipstick on the Project 2025 pig. By September 2024, Project 2025 was polling at just 4 percent approval, according to NBC News; shared hatred for the Heritage Foundation-backed initiative seemed to be the one thing most Americans agreed on. Musk fundamentally changed the perception of what was essentially the same vision, implemented by the same people. It didn’t take long for the media coverage and public outcry to shift away from Project 2025 and focus on one person above all: Elon Musk. America followed the shiny object….
In June 2022, Miller’s America First Legal — with Vought serving as the board’s treasurer — started Citizens for Sanity, a new 501(c)(4) advocacy arm staffed by former Trump administration officials. Their stated mission: to “defeat ‘wokeism.’” That fall, across American cities, the group ran billboards with fake slogans intended to mock the ultra-progressive left. “Mother Nature is RACIST. End environmental racism now,” one sign read. Another: “Demand transportation equity for pansexuals NOW.” To commuters passing through the well-trafficked byways, it was unclear if the signs were parody or a reflection of some constituency’s genuine ideals. What was also unclear, by design, was that Musk was the campaign’s central funder.
From there, the group began to release a flood of violent, inflammatory, and misleading video ads that accused Democrats of raising the price of energy, “helping killers kill again” with its stance on immigration, and conducting a “war on biology” for supporting policies that would help provide gender-affirming care to transgender people.
It wasn’t until October 2024, just a month before the election, that the Wall Street Journal revealed Musk’s connection. He’d secretly funneled at least $43 million to Citizens for Sanity through a nonprofit called Building America’s Future….
On June 12, 2024, ABC News reported that Miller had requested that Heritage remove America First Legal, the organization he founded and directed, from Project 2025’s advisory board.
“I have zero involvement with Project 2025. Zero. None,” Miller told ABC News. “I have no involvement with the project whatsoever.”….
Due to Project 2025’s toxic public perception, Vought was not reportedly under consideration to resume his post at OMB, the Times reported. But only a little more than a week after he won Musk’s enthusiasm, Trump had announced that he intended to nominate Vought to the position. Musk apparently liked that Vought was willing to “take the most extreme action possible,” according to the Times.
“The Department of Government Efficiency will . . . partner with the White House and Office of Management & Budget to drive large scale structural reform, and create an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before,” Trump wrote, in a November 12 statement from the transition team — making Musk and Vought’s partnership official.
Yet, press coverage still tended to report on DOGE like a wholly separate effort from what the Heritage Foundation and its allies had proposed. And public anger and outcry about the cuts focused on Musk more often than Vought and the other Project 2025 allies Trump had disavowed. But that framing failed to capture the reality of the moment. As Trump took power, it could be hard to tell where Vought’s OMB ended and Musk’s DOGE began. The two teams have closely collaborated on a range of slash-and-burn efforts.
Former Trump administration officials described the dynamic to Politico in a March 2025 piece: Musk would use his DOGE army to look for spending to cut, while publicizing the efforts on X. Then Vought’s OMB would use its policy know-how to actually implement them….
Another member of Musk’s team also had close connections to the groups backing Project 2025. James Burnham, DOGE’s general counsel — who has been helping Musk’s team with legal matters since before the inauguration — is closely linked to Vought’s Center for Renewing America. Last April, he served as counsel on an amicus brief filed by CRA in Molak v. FCC, where plaintiffs argued that the government had overstepped its bounds by allowing WiFi on public school buses….
Trump also appointed Mark Paoletta, then a senior fellow at Vought’s Center for Renewing America, to return as General Counsel at the Office of Management and Budget. Paoletta had served in that post during the first Trump administration, but this time, he was formally aligning himself with DOGE….
MAPPED: 70 Percent of Trump’s Cabinet Tied to Project 2025 Groups
[DeSmog, via Naked Capitalism 06-07-2025]
DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts
Brandon Roberts, Vernal Coleman and Eric Umansky, June 6, 2025 [propublica.org]
As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care or government experience to guide them.
The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts “MUNCHABLE.”
The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000….
ProPublica obtained the code and the contracts it flagged from a source and shared them with a half dozen AI and procurement experts. All said the script was flawed. Many criticized the concept of using AI to guide budgetary cuts at the VA, with one calling it “deeply problematic.”
Warren Report: Musk Leveraged Government Access for Personal Gain
Eloise Goldsmith, June 03, 2025 [CommonDreams]
“Since Election Day, Musk’s staggering net worth has increased by over $100 billion,” the report states.
The real reason Musk left the White House
[Musk Watch, via Naked Capitalism 06-3-2025]
The shrewd startup founder who led DOGE’s cost-cutting at HHS
[STAT, via Naked Capitalism 06-05-2025]
‘Dangerous Power Grab’ as Supreme Court Sides With DOGE on Social Security Data
Jon Queally, June 07, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Strategic Political Economy
Trump’s Beautiful Bill Will Kick 11 Million People Off Their Health Insurance
Ryan Cooper, June 05, 2025 [The American Prospect]
It will also increase the national debt by $2.4 trillion.
Cullen Murphy, June 3, 2025 [The Atlantic]
… One man I think about often is the late Ramsay MacMullen, a historian at Yale and the author of the classic 1988 study Corruption and the Decline of Rome—a book whose lessons retain their grip….
What interested him, he explained, were the mechanisms that kept the Roman empire functioning, and how grit worked its way inexorably into the cogs. Rome never had an administrative state as developed as anything we know today, but when it worked, it worked pretty well….
And then it came undone. MacMullen described the problem: Over time, layers of divergent interests came between command and execution, causing the train of power to break. The breakage could come in the form of simple venality—somewhere along the way, someone found it profitable to ignore distant authority. Or it could occur because a public task was put into private hands, and those private hands had their own interests to protect. The military was largely farmed out to barbarian contractors—foederati, they were called—who did not always prove reliable, to put it mildly. In many places, the legal system was left to the marketplace: A bronze plaque survives from a public building in Numidia listing how much a litigant needed to pay, and to whom, to ensure that a lawsuit went forward. MacMullen had many examples of such breakage—a whole book of them…
.
Global power shift
The Defeat of The West And Its Dislocation
[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2025]
John Mearsheimer | Liberal Hegemony & the Present Crisis in U.S. Foreign Policy [YouTube video]
[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 06-03-2025]
Alexander Yakovenko: “Why the U.S. Is Powerless Against China”
Karl Sanchez [via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2025]
Wang Wen: China is Building a New World Order
Glenn Diesen, via Naked Capitalism 06-03-2025]
Desperate companies are smuggling critical metals out of China as export rules tighten
[Inside China / Business, via Naked Capitalism 06-05-2025]
China’s rare earth restrictions halt first auto industry production lines
Dominic Preston, June 5, 2025 [TheVerge, via Naked Capitalism 06-07-2025]
Biden said ‘Russia should be destroyed’ – Brazil’s Lula
[RT, via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
‘Another Aid Massacre’: Israeli Military Kills Dozens More Near Privatized Gaza Food Site
Jake Johnson, June 3, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Aid massacre: Israeli forces kill 75 Palestinians at U.S.-run aid distribution center
[Mondoweiss, via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2025]
Siege Starvation: A War Crime of Societal Torture
[Chicago Journal of International Law, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2025]
Israel destroys north Gaza’s sole kidney dialysis facility
[Middle East Eye, via Naked Capitalism 06-03-2025]
Inside the TV Network Pumping ‘Genocide’ Into Israeli Homes
[Zeteo, via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2025]
… a coalition of Israeli groups had asked the attorney general to investigate the network for inciting war crimes and genocide and to prevent the channel, as much as it still can, from becoming a “modern Israeli version” of the infamous Rwandan genocide-inciting RTLM radio station.
With no action taken and the rhetoric continuing, the coalition – which includes Zulat for Equality and Human Rights, the Democratic Bloc, and the Association for Fair Regulation – last month escalated their complaint to Israel’s highest court….
It wasn’t until Netanyahu’s 2023 announcement of policies to overhaul the judiciary, however, that the channel’s popularity began to spike, analysts say.
“After being caught lying on live television on several occasions, and after meddling with other news organizations with limited success” for which he is facing trial right now, “Netanyahu decided he wanted a Fox News-style channel that would not dare challenge him,” said Yuval Katz, an Israeli communications and media lecturer at Loughborough University in the UK. “Many of the people working on the channel currently are essentially Netanyahu’s cronies; they are briefed by Netanyahu, who is obsessed with controlling the news media, and promote his agenda.”
That has appeared to earn the channel several exemptions and benefits not given to competing outlets, helping to expand its reach and cover its overhead – with the government even exempting it from certain broadcast fees. Channel 14’s controlling shareholder is Russian-born Israeli investor Yitzchak Mirilashvili, the co-founder of Russia’s largest social network, VK. Mirilashvili, who is the son of Israeli billionaire Mikhael, grew up in Israel, and Netanyahu has in the past boosted the tech company owned by Mikhael – including at an AIPAC conference and the United Nations.
Oligarchy
The Elon-Trump Feud Is Oligarchy in Action
Ryan Cooper, June 6, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…fundamentally, this is an object lesson in how government works when demagogues and oligarchs have all the power. Both Trump and Musk are aspiring autocrats, one with a propaganda death grip on a critical mass of disgruntled low-information voters, the other the richest man on Earth who also owns an important communications platform. Unlike, say, a union leader or political boss who represents and is therefore accountable to some organized constituency, they both have wide latitude to indulge their deeply erratic whims. Outside of a tiny minority of unhinged ideologues, nobody voting for Trump wanted to obliterate America’s scientific dominance, or to destroy America’s international reputation by killing millions of Africans, or to start a nonsensical trade war with every country simultaneously. There is no large organic constituency for any of this….
That is government by ultra-billionaire and reality TV charlatan. Terrible, idiotic policies nobody asked for might only be stopped because two world-historical megalomaniacs could not sit down and hash out their differences.
Chris Hedges, June 06, 2025
The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable….
These idiots, who promise to recapture lost glory and power, do not create. They only destroy. They accelerate the collapse. Limited in intellectual ability, lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs. They make war on universities, banish scientific research, peddle quack theories about vaccines as a pretext to expand mass surveillance and data sharing, strip legal residents of their rights and empower armies of goons, which is what the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become, to spread fear and ensure passivity. Reality, whether the climate crisis or the immiseration of the working class, does not impinge on their fantasies. The worse it gets, the more idiotic they become….
When a society, as Plato notes, abandons the common good, it always unleashes amoral lusts — violence, greed and sexual exploitation — and fosters magical thinking, the focus of my book “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
The Corporate Fear Campaign to Keep Workers Locked Into Their Jobs
[Boondoggle, via Naked Capitalism 06-06-2025]
Ukraine / Russia
Ukraine’s ‘Unprecedented’ Operation Spiderweb: Russia’s ‘Pearl Harbor’? Or Just More Soggy Silk?
[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2025]
Ukraine’s unprecedented drone strike on Russia offers glimpse into the future of war
[Semafor, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2025]
Trumpillnomics
The Real Reason for the Trump-Musk Feud is Uglier Than You Think
Greg Sargent, June 6, 2025 [The New Republic]
Strip away the ego contest, and what you really see here is a competition about how to screw over poor and working people more effectively.
[Notes on the Crises, via Naked Capitalism 06-06-2025]
Predatory finance
Shareholder Payouts, Underinvestment and the Productivity Slowdown
[Policy Tensor, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2025]
Hamilton Nolan, June 3, 2025 [How Things Work]
Six years ago, Megan Greenwell was ensconced in a fulfilling job as the editor of the popular sports and culture site Deadspin. Then, a private equity firm bought the company…. the experience opened her eyes to the predations of private equity on American workers—not just in media, but everywhere. Next week, her deeply reported new book “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream” will be published by HarperCollins. I spoke to Megan about what she’s learned about the bloodsucking industry that is coming for all of us, and what we can do about it….
University Endowments Are Breaking Up With Private Equity. It’s Hard to Do.
[Barron’s, via The Big Picture June 6, 2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Eric Salzman, June 05, 2025 [Racket News]
…Goldman Sachs seems to defy reputation risk time and time again. The story of the 1MDB (Malaysian Development Berhad) scandal shows beyond much doubt, Goldman can pretty much do whatever the hell it wants. If Goldman gets caught, it enters a deferred prosecution agreement, — as was the case with 1MDB — or pays a fine and then goes on its way as if nothing happened.
In the case of 1MDB, Goldman reached a deferred prosecution agreement with the feds in 2020, but until last week, its former partner and Southeast Asia chairman, Tim Leissner, stubbornly stuck around as annoying residue from the scandal.
Leissner pleaded guilty in 2018 to money laundering and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by arranging over $1 billion in bribes to officials in Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates to obtain lucrative underwriting mandates for Goldman.
Those mandates earned Goldman Sachs at least $600 million in underwriting fees….
Barry Ritholtz [via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2025]
A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to [refinance US debt at low interest rates and] put America on the soundest financial footing possible was missed. Whether it was ideology, economic innumeracy, or simply idiocy does not matter. What matters are the costs that will follow many generations after the 2010s Congresses for decades, if not longer…
[Yves Smith: …the chart is a good addition. Confirms that Jacob Lew and Steve Mnuchin were complete idiots.]
Restoring balance to the economy
Eric Blanc, June 3, 2015 [laborpolitics@substack.com]
Disrupting mainstream economics
The House Bill is Neither Big Nor Beautiful
Stephanie Kelton [via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2025]
Health care crisis
Spillovers from Public Health Policies in Schools: Evidence from COVID Mask Mandates
[National Bureau of Economic Research, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2025]
Estimates that the removal of school mask mandates following the CDC rescinding guidance recommending masking in schools contributed to 21,800 COVID deaths through the rest of 2022, 9% of the U.S. total that year.
Wall Street To Insurers: Keep Denying Care
Katya Schwenk, June 6, 2015 [The Lever]
UnitedHealth Group’s investors were profiting from its high denial rates. Now, they’re suing to ensure that doesn’t change.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Amazon Programmers Say What Happened After Turn to AI Was Dark
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 06-01-2025]
Richard Murphy Gets ChatGPT to Describe How It Inherently Makes Shit Up
Richard Murphy [Funding the Future, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2025]
“Learn to Code” Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 06-03-2025]
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 06-03-2025]
AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs “have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching.”
Collapse of independent news media
The Washington Post Is Secretly Planning to Start Publishing Articles Created Using AI
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 06-05-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
Family Seeks Big Oil Accountability in Wrongful Death Lawsuit for Climate Related Death
[Public Citizen, May 29, 2025, via CommonDreams]
Can We Afford Large-scale Solar PV?
[Construction Physics, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2025]
Democrats’ political malpractice
“What it means to be a partisan centrist”: At WelcomeFest, a billionaire-backed vision for Democrats
Russell Payne, June 5, 2025 [Salon, via MSN]
The bulk of the PAC’s money came from a handful of donors with familiar names, like James Murdoch, the liberal-leaning son of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Combined, James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn Murdoch, donated $2.5 million to the Welcome PAC in 2024, according to FEC filings.
Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn founder and critic of former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, donated $671,000 to Welcome PAC in 2024.
Samuel Walton, the grandson of Walmart founder Samuel Walton, donated $825,000 to Welcome PAC.
Joshua Bekenstein, a co-chairman of Bain Capital, alongside his wife, Anita Bekenstein, donated a collective $375,000.
Hamilton Nolan, June 05, 2025 [How Things Work]
…It would not seem to be a promising time to be a centrist. Even the most naive observer can see that the establishment is being torn down before our eyes. Yet even deeper than the establishment of political parties and government agencies sits the establishment of The Center, always able to shift left or right as necessary in the moment to maintain its claim. Yesterday DC, a city soaked in laid-off federal employees, played host to Welcomefest, “The largest public gathering of centrist Democrats.” Hosted by Third Way, the Blue Dog PAC, and similar groups—and funded by billionaires including Reid Hoffman, Mike Bloomberg, and the Walton Family—the event drew hundreds of lanyard-draped capital creatures to a spot right next to the Washington Post’s headquarters. Holding an event 50 yards from reporters’ desks is a good way to get reporters to attend your event….
Unlike most political philosophies, centrism defines itself in relation to other political philosophies. The right stands for something, and the left stands for something, but the centrists stand for “in between those things.” This fact alone accounts for the centrists’ messaging problems, and their solution. The problem is: How do you get people to support a philosophy that doesn’t inherently stand for anything? Their solution is: Attack the other political philosophies as too extreme, leaving centrism by process of elimination. And because this is a contest for control of the Democratic Party, that means, in practice, “attack the left.” ….
But fascism is on the move, and secret police are snatching immigrants off the streets, and the blog wars feel a little beside the point right now. All of us, left and center alike, find ourselves now in the big, unwieldy boat labeled “The Opposition.” I know what the left wants: To tax the rich, to feed the poor, to increase equality, to free the unjustly imprisoned, to provide food and clothing and affordable housing and healthcare for all, winning the class war and smashing fascism along the way. Great. And… the centrists? What—besides successful podcasts and well-funded think tanks—do they want?
It became clear yesterday that the centrists have two primary messages, which contradict one another. The first message is, “We just need to do the common sense things that regular folks want.” The second message is, “Here are a bunch of highly paid Harvard-educated consultants to discuss what that is, statistically.”….
The consultants called for Democrats to win. Okay. Sure, let’s. The politicians and candidates who appeared dropped only crumbs of policy. Rebecca Cooke, a Democrat running in Wisconsin, called for the party to listen to union members and working class voices. Great. Janelle Stelson, a TV journalist who narrowly missed defeating the extreme right winger Scott Perry in Pennsylvania, criticized her opponent for voting against protecting firefighters. Fine. We’re with you there. New York Congressman Tom Suozzi, a classic backslapper, said that America was a nation of immigrants. Right. Yes.
So…so? Is that all? Be normal, do normal stuff, don’t be awful, be decent to people? Does this add up to a philosophy? Is this the platform that inspired all of those billionaires to donate to all of those PACs? Is this the stuff that drew $50 million into the coffers of Third Way? Is this what drew all of these people into this ballroom at such an urgent historical moment? ….
Sam Tanenhaus, October 29, 2018 [The New Republic]
Ideological division was once seen as the solution to America’s political gridlock. What went wrong?
Veronica Riccobene, June 3, 2025 [The Lever]
…In a sign of what an “Abundance” future may look like, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) has been on a veto spree, striking down a series of Democratic-led consumer-protection measures under the auspices of preventing unnecessary red tape and encouraging “Abundance” in the free market, in the words of authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
- Polis — whose $400 million tech fortune makes him one of the wealthiest elected officials in the country — champions a “prosperity and abundance agenda,” an ideology once fondly described by Klein as “individualistic liberalism.”
Trump’s Pageant of Corruption is a Gift to the Democratic Party
Josh Marshall, June 3, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
Over the weekend, I made the point that all the reanalyzing Democrats are doing is really wasted time and they need to start doing stuff, succeeding at doing stuff in 2025. I want to reiterate another point. I truly cannot imagine a bigger opening than the Trump Republican Party is currently giving to Democrats. A recent CNN poll shows the numbers of Americans who think the government “should do more to solve our country’s problems” as opposed to leaving it to individuals and businesses is higher than it’s been in decades… Meanwhile, we are greeted with a daily spectacle of cuts to government programs to pay for handouts to the ultra-rich. And we have just daily pageants of the most predatory and brazen corruption.
Last night, I was reading this Evan Osnos piece in The New Yorker about the sheer openness of the turbocharged corruption which, I think we have to say, is wholly without precedent at any time in American history. Most of the details in the piece are things you’ve probably heard of or mostly heard of. But I recommend reading it. It’s powerful and almost beggars belief how much he’s able to catalogue and organize together from just this last spring.
Could it really be a lot more brazenly and savagely corrupt than at any time in our history?….
Trump’s transactional regime
Trump’s Vision of Government: Members Only
Ross Rosenfeld, June 5, 2025 [The New Republic]
The right is busy creating two Americas: one for MAGA and one for the rest of us. Those of us who aren’t in their big club won’t have the same rights—and will undoubtedly suffer under this regime.
Resistance
The Trump Protests Will Fail — Unless People Do This
Evelyn Quartz, June 4, 2025 [The Lever]
The resistance won’t succeed until it stops being a performance and starts challenging the system that got us here.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
“The Intern in Charge”: Meet the 22-Year-Old Trump’s Team Picked to Lead Terrorism Prevention
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 06-05-2025]
Peter Thiel, Epstein Protector
Jim Stewartson, June 06, 2025 [MindWar]
For over a decade, Peter Thiel has been helping Jeffrey Epstein, Donald and the Russian government
Jacob Heilbrunn, June 1, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
William F. Buckley Jr. spent a lifetime trying to make a coherent intellectual case for conservatism but could never articulate what it was supposed to consist of apart from owning the libs….
…In a grand biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, [Sam] Tanenhaus closely traces Buckley’s remarkable odyssey from a cossetted Catholic childhood to titular leader of the conservative movement….
Buckley, who was born in 1925, inherited much of his buccaneering temperament from his father, William F. Buckley Sr. A larger-than-life figure—a staunch Catholic, lawyer, real estate investor, and Wall Street speculator—W.F. was expelled from Mexico in 1921 for his support for counterrevolutionaries. He experienced bankruptcy at age forty and recouped his fortunes with an oil concession in Venezuela. In 1924, he purchased an estate in Sharon, Connecticut, that he renamed Great Elm. An anti-Semite and a foe of the New Deal (which he saw as tantamount to Bolshevism), W.F.’s reactionary beliefs were echoed by his third son, Billy, who strove to show that he was loyal “to any of Father’s opinions.”
Chief among them was the conviction that aiding Great Britain in its battle against Nazi Germany would be a colossal mistake. The household hero was, of course, Charles Lindbergh, the famed aviator and head of the America First movement (which was founded in 1940). Lindbergh had accepted the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Hermann Goering in 1938. Three years later, in a notorious speech in Des Moines called “Who Are the War Agitators?,” Lindbergh blamed Jewish influence for trying to push America into World War II. He and his followers asserted that a Fortress America was the way to go. According to Tanenhaus, “W.F. Buckley’s view, and thus his children’s, was that America’s business with foreign nations should be restricted to business in the most literal sense: trade and investment of the kind Buckley Sr. himself had pursued throughout his career.” At Millbrook, a prep school in New York, a 15-year-old Buckley delivered his first public speech, “In Defense of Charles Lindbergh,” a denunciation of the critics of the Lone Eagle for blackening the name of a true patriot whose final mission—warning Americans that a Nazi triumph in Europe was inevitable—should be heeded rather than scorned.
Buckley not only absorbed isolationist thinking but also imbibed Social Darwinist precepts. He was thus spellbound by Albert Jay Nock, a close friend of Buckley Sr.’s and frequent visitor to Great Elm who wore a cape, carried a walking stick, and wrote an influential book in 1935 whose lapidary title said it all—Our Enemy, the State. In Nock’s view, only something he called “the Remnant”—a conservative aristocracy—could safely steward America’s future fortunes. In 1943, Buckley Jr. wrote an essay that was very much in the Nockian spirit at Millbrook, lamenting that the “great defect in our democracy” was the “ultra-democratic” system of suffrage that allowed all citizens to vote. It was a conviction that he never entirely shed….
Civic republicanism
Barry C. Lynn, June 1, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
…The task ahead for Democrats is not merely to resist and slow the predations and destructions of President Trump. It is not merely to knock the Republicans out of power in 2026 and 2028. It is to establish a new political economic regime which ensures that our liberty and prosperity are never again threatened by any homegrown oligarch or autocrat. And Democrats must do so in a world filled with great enemies, eager to exploit the chaos sown here in America by Trump and the oligarchs, to topple us.
None of this will be possible until Democrats first fully recover America’s original language of liberty. Doing so is the only way to relearn the wisdom about power and political economic structure baked into this language….
The idea that the early United States was an unregulated libertarian utopia is a modern, dangerous myth. In fact, Americans from the first used their local, state, and federal governments both to protect themselves from private corporate power and to work collectively to create and distribute new forms of wealth. They established simple bright-line market structure rules to protect the independence of the individual and the family, and to limit the size, structure, and behavior of the corporation, usually through direct legislative charter. And they aggressively used government power to distribute land and education to those with little or nothing.
They also carefully updated these rules to apply to the railroad, telegraph, telephone, and other powerful new network technologies. They focused less on limiting the size and more on regulating the behavior of these powerful new network technologies. They aimed to prevent the people who controlled these corporations from extorting wealth and power from users, by requiring the corporations to provide the same service at the same price to all individuals and businesses.
One result was a political economy designed to promote the dignity of the individual, as well as the constructive engagement of the citizen within the political economy. Another was a fantastic explosion of material prosperity that made the average American much richer than their peers in almost any other nation….
[TW: This is one of those essays that fill me with despair. Because Lynn focuses on what he terms “democratic liberalism” instead of civic republicanism. For example, as I have written a number of times, civic republicanism extends beyond liberalism’s fixation on individual liberty by also emphasizing each citizen’s civic responsibility to “do good.” Lynn writes that liberalism includes “a set of assumptions about the nature of the individual—that every person has an equal capacity to do good in this world, and to earn entry to the next—and a set of political and economic rules designed to protect all the forms of liberty such an individual might desire, be they political, commercial, or spiritual.” But without an understanding of the responsibilities included in civic republicanism, it is too easy to become ensnared in Locke’s trap of “protecting private property.” ]
Artificial Intelligence and The Posture of Skepticism
Josh Marshall, June 2, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
…The first is that even very positive technological revolutions (say, the Industrial Revolution) end up hurting a lot of people. Second, this revolution is coming to us under the guidance and ownership of tech billionaires who are increasingly wedded to and driven by predatory and illiberal ideologies. Both those facts make me think that we should approach every new AI development from a posture of skepticism, even if some or most may end up being positive. Trust but verify and all that. Point three is closely related to point two: AI is being built, even more than most of us realize, by consuming everyone else’s creative work with no compensation. It’s less “thought” than more and more refined statistical associations between different words and word patterns. And that’s to build products that will be privately owned and sold back to us. Again, predatory and illiberal … in important ways likely illegal….
Technology Does Not Solve Political Problems: Powerful tools just make strong people stronger.
Hamilton Nolan, June 1, 2025 [How Things Work]
Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America
Ava Kofman, June 2, 2025 [The New Yorker]
The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.
In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”
How ‘Paradise Lost’ Revolutionized the World (w/ Orlando Reade)
Chris Hedges, June 05, 2025
Professor Orlando Reade joins Chris Hedges to to examine the influence of ‘Paradise Lost’ on revolutionary thinkers, and to grapple with the moral grey area that exists in revolutions.
The US Navy’s five roads to ruin
[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2025]
…today the Navy is in trouble. The Navy and its boosters in Congress want us to believe the problem is all about too few ships and too few facilities.
In fact, the rot runs much deeper. Americans can see that something is wrong, especially when it is staring them in the face: Navy “bureaus” that cannot design ships, builders that cannot build, shipyards that cannot repair, depots running out of munitions, command failures and corruption, accidents at sea, and billion-dollar fires in port….
Yet what about quality and originality of thought? A Navy Ethos that punishes new thinking, that throttles innovation, that cashiers criticism — all by the time proclaiming how it celebrates these things — is an ethos chained to its own “Rules of the Game.”
In this sort of culture, only the right people, who say the right things, and put on the right, bright face to the public can expect to move up. This is the sclerosis of success, and it is, for any society of war, the most dangerous disorder: For it cannot be cured from within. …
This is what happens when servants become masters. Today, the business of the Navy is the business of its prime defense contractors, which have effectively taken over their titular overlords — the old bureaus — in the Department of the Navy. Today, the ideal cursus honorum, or life passage, for a naval officer is no longer to “make flag” and command a carrier strike group, but rather to realize one’s true destiny after retirement, with a seven-figure berth at one of the Big Five….
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There’s a chance for a Tiananman Square Massacre American style on Trump’s Big Beautiful Birthday Bash. Surely some radical protesters will step out in front of the tanks just as surely as those tanks will roll right over them.
THIS is Biden’s legacy. THIS is Clinton’s legacy. THIS is Obama’s legacy. Everything each and every one of those grifters did led to this moment. I would be remiss if I didn’t offer special thanks to Merrick Garland, ironically the grandson of Holocaust survivors, for slow-walking Trump’s prosecution for treason. I bet it doesn’t even phase him or any of them. So long as they are cozy and financially secure, it’s no big whoop. Of course, Biden is on another planet right now so obviously it doesn’t phase him but the rest don’t have Biden’s braindead excuse.