Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 22, 2026

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 22, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War

Beijing to Tel-Aviv and Washington: “Israel will cease to exist the moment it uses a nuclear weapon!”

Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, 20/03/2026 [defenddemocracy.press]

In the following paper, we will present the reasons why a nuclear war in the Middle East is now quite possible, the deterrent intervention of China which interrupted a period of dangerous tolerance of Israel by the great powers, and the relationship between what is happening in West Asia and what is happening around Ukraine and the American continent, particularly in Cuba….

These statements, and most likely the information it possesses, provoked an unofficial but very harsh statement from Beijing. This is the first time a major power has interrupted the unprecedented tolerance enjoyed by Israel and its lobbies, a tolerance that has now led humanity to the brink of the abyss.

…Specifically, Victor Gao, vice-president of the Chinese Institute for China and Globalization, when asked what the two nuclear powers, Russia and China, would do if Israel used nuclear weapons, he stated to the American The Cradle, that “the moment Israel uses a nuclear warhead against any country, it will be considered the number one enemy of humanity, it will be the demise of Israel as a state, as a regime, as a country.” He simultaneously warned Prime Minister Netanyahu, the government of Israel, and its armed forces that they will be considered enemies of humanity and responsible for whatever happens, in an indirect but clear reference to the Nuremberg trials that judged the Nazi leaders. Mr. Gao made it clear that what he says does not concern condemnatory statements but an advance notice of actions. He congratulated Mr. Trump on his statement that Israel will not use nuclear weapons and expressed the wish that he acts effectively in this direction.

Mr. Gao adds that any use of nuclear weapons by Israel will lead to an explosive proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and their use would result in hundreds of millions of deaths and the transformation of the entire region into an uninhabitable zone.

Mr. Gao makes also a reference to the Epstein archives.

The Chinese warning has been phrased in a… Chinese way. Mr. Gao is the head of a small party allied with the Communist Party and holds no government position, so the responsibility for his statement cannot be directly attributed to the Chinese leadership or the CCP. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that it constitutes an unofficial but authoritative expression of the Chinese position on the matter. And to leave us in no doubt on the issue, the Chinese Academy distributed this specific excerpt of Gao’s statements under the characteristic title “What would China do if Israel dropped a nuclear weapon?”….

IDF threatens ‘elimination’ for Russian leaders who ‘wish Israel ill’

Wyatt Reed, Mar 19, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]

Israel’s veiled threat to Moscow came just after Russian media warned traffic cameras in Moscow were vulnerable to the same exploits that Israel reportedly used to monitor Ayatollah Khamenei’s residence before assassinating him.

Breaking the Nuclear Taboo

Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolić Hughes, March 13, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]

…It would be the ultimate expression of Trump’s unbounded power for him to break the one remaining international taboo – which, despite far too many close calls, has persisted for more than 80 years – detonating a nuclear weapon. There are many indications that, despite the U.S. and Israel’s ability to bomb Iran at will, this war may not be going well for them. But that need not be the pretext for using a nuclear weapon. In Trump’s mind, the more unprovoked, outrageous, and unnecessary something is, the better. Given his fragile ego and rapidly deteriorating mental powers – going off on bizarre rants about poisonous snakes in Peru or the White House drapes – the more unhinged he is, the more he thinks it demonstrates his dominance.

Since the end of the Cold War, many people who pay attention have worried about an accidental or a miscalculated stumble into nuclear war. But with Trump breaking every taboo domestically and internationally, demonstrating that he is above the law and can do as he pleases at every turn, the ultimate taboo waiting to be broken is the nuclear one….

[TW: I wonder if there will be a mass resignation of military officers as Trump stumbles aver closer to using nuclear weapons. But they would lose their pensions. So, probably secret approaches to some (anti)Republican Senators and Congressmen begging for Congress to do something? And if Trump does issue orders to use nuclear weapons, would military officers refuse? Might they even demand Trump be arrested? Trump and Hegseth have pissed all over the Code of Conduct numerous times — Hegseth this past week, by declaring “no quarter” toward Iran, explicitly violated violated the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, and the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual. The commander in chief and the top civilian official at the Department of Defense should also be subject to the Code.]

Remember the Titan: The Fragility of Trump’s Golden Egg

Jim Stewartson, Mar 18, 2026 [MindWar]

GRAPH: Trump’s Pathologies

…While I hesitate to bring up the dreaded notion of bipartisanship, the best way to try to prevent the explosive scenario, to try and contain the criticality when it happens, is for the political system to present a combined show of force that draws a red line before it happens.

If he’s not given a sandbox to play in, Trump will take the entire playground.

For example, if the Democrats and 20 GOP Senators could find a way to agree publicly that if Trump engages in a preemptive nuclear strike for any reason without consulting Congress, he will be impeached and removed immediately. Even if he was not considering such a strike, just the statement would make clear to him that he is not, in fact, omnipotent….

The South Pars Pulse: Why the ‘Energy War’ is Actually a Thermodynamic Singularity 

[The Ultimate Avatar of Balance, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]

…By treating the destruction of the world’s largest natural gas reservoir merely as a ‘supply chain disruption’, the geopolitical establishment is exhibiting a fatal, terminal blindness. We are no longer dealing with economics; we are dealing with physics.

The strike on South Pars is not an ‘energy war’. It is an unmodelled Thermodynamic Pulse that threatens to liquidate the biological carrying capacity of the entire Persian Gulf.

The Methane Blind Spot

South Pars/North Dome holds an estimated 1,800 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. When upstream infrastructure of this magnitude is ruptured, the result is not just fire and smoke (particulate matter), which the environmental NGOs are currently monitoring. The far greater threat is uncontained venting of raw methane (CH₄).

Methane possesses a Global Warming Potential (GWP) roughly 80 times that of CO₂ over a 20-year horizon. However, in the immediate aftermath of a massive, concentrated release, the ‘horizon’ is not 20 years. It is measured in weeks….

Trump says he’s ‘not afraid’ of Vietnam-style ground combat in Iran 

[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2025]

…Speaking from the Oval Office alongside Ireland’s Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, the President fielded many questions about the Iran war.

‘Are you afraid that if you put boots on the ground in Iran, it could be another Vietnam?’ one reporter asked.

‘No,’ Trump shot back, adding, ‘I’m not afraid of anything.’

The Geopolitical Consequences of Defeat

[Policy Tensor, via Naked Capitalism 03-16-2025]

…The only way in which the United States can evade outright defeat is by suppressing and degrading Iran’s ability to hold gulf assets at high levels of risk and keep Hormuz closed.1 If the US cannot, through either the direct application of force or indirectly through military coercion, accomplish this strategic objective, the outcome will be indistinguishable from strategic defeat, even if the war ends in a ceasefire, for then Iran would’ve demonstrated for all to see that the United States does not, in fact, have the military means to impose its will on the gulf.

This means that the dynamics of the interdiction campaign are decisive.

If the interdiction campaign rapidly degrades Iran’s ability to attack gulf assets, that would still not guarantee victory, however. For victory requires the further success of countermining operations if the Iranians mine the gulf, as they have reportedly started doing. Countermining operations are not a solved military problem either. At the very least, they will also take many months. What is clear is that, a successful prosecution of the interdiction campaign to conclusion is a necessary condition for effective countermining operations….

Burning the Lifeboats to Keep the Lights On 

[The Ultimate Avatar of Balance, via Naked Capitalism 03-16-2025]

… something important needs saying: the US’s totally aimless campaign of wanton and indiscriminate destruction in Iran is definitionally tantamount to terrorism. An operation requires a stated strategic objective to qualify as a “war” or military action of some sort, legitimate or not. Trump’s clumsy bomb-fest—during which he proudly boasts he can “bomb” certain Iranian targets “for fun”—does not fit that description, and as such definitionally qualifies as a campaign of terrorism against a sovereign state and its civilian population. Let’s not even mention what the US is currently doing to Cuba, with the blockade having collapsed the nation’s entire electric grid as of yesterday.

The closest the US has come to stated goals in this debacle in fact align with definitional terrorism: the US wants to create economic hardship and infrastructural pain in the country which would spur the populace into overthrowing “the regime”….

 

Things Go Haywire as Israeli Escalation Throws Iran Conflict into Dangerous New Phase 

[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]

Things really hit the fan earlier today after Iran’s largest natural gas field, the South Pars, was struck by Israel. This field reportedly accounts for 75% of Iran’s natural gas production and 80-85% of its electric grid….

 

White House reasons from war copied directly from Israeli intelligence

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 03-20-2025]

Zachary Foster

@_ZachFoster

This is wild. The @WhiteHouse plagiarized its reason for launching a war on Iran from

@FDD, a cutout of Israeli intelligence.  Side-by-side screenshots in the thread:

Footage Confirms U.S. F-35 Taken Out By Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Air Defences

[Military Watch Magazine Editorial Staff, March-19th-2026]

…The F-35 was conceptualised after the end of the Cold War for an era of warfare in which adversaries would no longer field peer level fighter aircraft, and would instead rely heavily on ground-based air defences as Iran has. Iranian forces have made extensive use of infrared-guided systems to engage targets without emitting radar signatures or alerting targets’ radar warning receivers, with such systems being better optimised to engaging targets like the F-35. Although the F-35 has a reduced heat signature, the reductions made to its radar signature are significantly greater, leaving it relatively more vulnerable to targeting by infrared guided systems….

Iran Fires Two Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles at Diego Garcia Base

David Cenciotti, March 21, 2026 [theaviationist.com]

Iran has launched two missiles at the joint UK-U.S. base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, about 4,000 km away. Such a distance is well within the range separating Tehran from many European capitals. According to U.S. officials who talked to the Wall Street Journal, one ballistic missile reportedly failed because of a malfunction and did not reach the base, whilst the other was engaged by a U.S. destroyer utilizing an SM-3 interceptor.

​​​​​​​The attempted strike on Diego Garcia would mark a major escalation, highlighting Tehran’s apparent ability to target the strategic U.S.-UK base deep in the Indian Ocean and potentially put parts of Europe within reach.

Neither of the missiles hit the base, still, regardless of the outcome of the attack, the attempted strike with the IRBM, marks a potential turning point in the conflict. The choice of target, is a telling signal. The United Kingdom has just decided to grant the United States the use of its bases for the strikes, and British assets, as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced, have therefore become legitimate targets….

Until now, it had been believed that the intermediate-range missiles available to Tehran were capable of striking targets at a distance of up to 2,000 km. The decision to launch against the Diego Garcia base points to significantly greater capabilities in the weapons still available to the Islamic Republic.

The IRBMs, probably Khorramshahr-4s or another IRBM type, make not only Diego Garcia and other bases in the Middle East, but also many European capitals, potential targets within Tehran’s theoretical reach….

Though officially a British territory and British base, Diego Garcia is predominantly used by U.S. forces. Alongside communications and intelligence gathering facilities, both of which were major justifications for establishing this permanent military outpost in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia’s airfield is one of only three locations outside of the continental U.S. equipped with dedicated hangar facilities for the B-2 Spirit, and it can accommodate a vast number of strategic bombers, air to air refuelers, and intelligence gathering aircraft….

Netanyahu Concedes on “Total Victory” — Redefines ‘Victory’, Changes Goals of the War

[Conflicts Forum, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]

Iranian Strike Destroys the Emirates’ Most Valuable Military Aircraft at Largest Airbase

[militarywatchmagazine.com, March-16th-2026]

Multiple sources have reported that strikes launched by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have destroyed a Untied Arab Emirates Air Force Saab GlobalEye airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) system, which is one of the most high value military aircraft operated the the Middle East. The aircraft was targeted at Al Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi as part of a large scale drone attack on the facility….

Although UAE Airspace is protected by a dense multi-layered air defence network including U.S.-supplied THAAD and Patriot anti-ballistic missile systems, South Korean Cheongung-II air defence systems, and supporting air defence artillery, the effectiveness of this network has been highly limited. Iranian forces’ ability to strike Al Dhafra, which is one of the most heavily defended facilities in the country, has provided one of multiple indications that air defence capabilities are rapidly diminishing….

Reagan’s (and now Trump’s) Iran: The Treason That Changed America’s Energy Future

thomhartmann, March 17, 2026 [Daily Kos]

…Tragically for America and the world, it all came crashing down when a faction of Iran’s most extreme rightwing mullahs helped the fossil fuel industry’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter in the 1980 election. Reagan then killed the solar bank and the solar bond programs, and removed Carter’s 32 solar panels from the roof of the White House.

As a result, we’ve actually increased our consumption of fossil fuels so much that the fossil fuel industry’s billionaire investors have made an estimated $52 trillion in profits in the years since Reagan’s presidency. And global warming is now driving climate wilding that’s killing Americans and threatening all life on Earth….

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

President Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President that summer of 1980 on the popular position of releasing the hostages….

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979 and support a moderate government emerging in Iran.

But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s most hard-core rightwing radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and Reagan was happy to promise them….

Iran made ‘unexpectedly substantial’ offer during Geneva talks, US envoys ‘dragged’ Trump into war: Report

[defenddemocracy.press, March 17, 2026]

UK National Security Advisor Jonathan Powell attended the final US–Iran talks in Geneva last month and concluded that a deal was in reach, The Guardian reported on 17 March, citing sources as saying that Washington’s leading envoys were acting as “Israeli assets” who “dragged” the US into war.

According to the report, Powell thought what Iran was proposing was “surprising.”

“The UK team were surprised by what the Iranians put on the table. It was not a complete deal, but it was progress and was unlikely to be the Iranians’ final offer. The British team expected the next round of negotiations to go ahead on the basis of the progress in Geneva,” the sources explained…..

How Israel Convinced Trump to Wage War Against Iran (w/ Max Blumenthal)

Chris Hedges, Mar 19, 2026

Max Blumenthal reports that a psychological warfare campaign orchestrated by Zionist interests targeted Trump to drive him into war with Iran….

Blumenthal says the Israelis and their allies convinced President Trump that Iran was trying to assassinate him – a fear first stoked when Trump began a vicious cycle of violence with the regime after he assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani during his first term.

Here’s What Trump’s Iran War Money Could Fund Instead

Minnah Arshad, Mar 15, 2026 [Zeteo]

The price tag from Trump’s war on Iran is enough to reconstruct Gaza, provide healthcare to millions in the US, or end homelessness here at home for years.

For the Same Cost as Another Mideast War, We Could Make Oil Irrelevant

Paul Greenberg, March 19, 2026 [The New Republic]

The price tag for building enough renewables to power the grid is eerily close to America’s typical price tag for the kind of war it would take to fully secure the Strait of Hormuz.

Two trillion dollars. That’s what it can cost to overthrow a regime and secure an oil route in the Middle East….

But let’s consider what else that money could buy. The list is long. For $2 trillion, we could build 10 to 20 million new affordable housing units, solving homelessness and the housing shortage while creating millions of construction jobs. We could make college tuition free for over a decade for all Americans. And even if we wanted to just gain military capacity, which the president and his party seem to care a great deal about, $2 trillion would allow us to double all defense spending and shore up our depleted missile and missile defense systems and be better prepared for any future conflict.

All notable things. And yet none as notable as something that would make the power of future ayatollahs trivial: $2 trillion would be enough to build enough solar and wind capacity throughout the United States to make fossil fuels and their price swings irrelevant….

Joe Kent, a Top U.S. Counterterrorism Official, Resigns Over the Iran War 

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2025]

Inside the White House plan to sell the Iran war online 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]

Warriors’ Casino: The People Making A Killing Gambling On War — Insider trading on the end of the world?

Ryan Lovelace, Mar 17, 2026 [Racket News]

End Times Hunger Games: The Mythological Battle Raging Below the War on Iran — How five distinct visions of the apocalypse conspire to create endless war.

Jim Stewartson, Mar 20, 2026 [MindWar]

Donald Trump Has Lit a Global Match

Jordan Michael Smith/March 6, 2026 [The New Republic]

In the Trumpian worldview, weaker countries have little choice but to submit to U.S. demands. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein spoke to Trump’s advisers about the president’s theory of international politics at the outset of his second term and reported, “Every one said some version of the same thing: America has leverage it does not use. Under Trump, it is going to start using it.” In the president’s line of thinking, U.S. bullying of less powerful countries could never backfire because America is so powerful that, while other nations might complain about their shabby treatment, they would have little recourse but to bend. As Fox News host Jesse Watters put it in defending Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, “We don’t need friends…. America is not handcuffed by history.”

​​​​​​​Insufferable Bully Demands Friends

Asawin Suebsaeng, Mar 16, 2026 [Zeteo]

[TW: What a great headline!]

Trump not violating any law

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

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

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

Monopoly Round-Up: Bombshell Document Details Watergate-Style Corruption at the Antitrust Division 

Matt Stoller, March 16, 2026 [BIG]

…this settlement was widely seen as a corporate pardon by Trump of a hated monopoly.

And the process amplified that impression. The judge called the circumstances “mind boggling.” You are not supposed to surprise judges, you are supposed to tell them you are in negotiations. But Live Nation, whose strategy is led by a boomer antitrust lawyer named Dan Wall, did not do that. In fact, the DOJ’s own lead litigating attorney, David Dahlquist, didn’t even know about the settlement, and neither did the state attorneys general who were co-plaintiffs. I suppose the goal was to shock the state co-plaintiffs into accepting the deal, since they were unprepared to take over the trial.

But instead of working, the gambit backfired. The judge said the state attorneys general must continue the trial on Monday, without the DOJ, or settle. And 33 of them chose to move forward. These state officials were mostly Democratic, but some – like Texas’s Ken Paxton – are conservative enforcers. And a few, such as Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, are experienced at overseeing antitrust cases. Moreover, they hired a rock star antitrust lawyer, Jeff Kessler, to take over the case. Kessler has a long and illustrious career, his last win was beating NASCAR on behalf of Michael Jordan. This guy is not someone Live Nation wanted to face.

The backstory of this whole deal is, unsurprisingly, corruption. Live Nation has on retainer influential Republican Kellyanne Conway, as well as Mike Davis, a MAGA lobbyist close to Donald Trump and Pam Bondi. Months ago, Davis was able to force the ouster of the previous Antitrust chief, Gail Slater. Davis has a book of business, including forcing through the merger of two of the biggest real estate brokerages in America without the DOJ asking any real questions.

Now the Division is led by an inexperienced MAGA acolyte named Omeed Assefi, who promptly did what Live Nation’s CEO, Michael Rapino wanted. (And that’s despite Assefi’s work on a related case that had evidence of “the leading national ticketing provider” acting as an accomplice in criminal activity. See Exhibit B.)

So how might this trial help destroy the Trump Presidency? It is linked to the first real investigation of the administration by anyone with any power, which is the Democratic state attorneys general themselves. These people are co-plaintiffs in a bunch of different cases with the Trump Justice Department, and the Live Nation settlement isn’t the first time they’ve witnesses such bad acts….

ICE concentration camps are intentionally designed to obstruct due process & kill. 

[Borderland Talk with Jenn Budd, via Naked Capitalism 03-16-2025]

Kash Patel Embraces Big Brother — Deep State critic ‘bends the knee.’

Ryan Lovelace, Mar 19, 2026 Racket News

The MAGA takeover of tools used to spy on President Donald Trump’s campaign has not led to the dismantling of America’s surveillance state. Instead the Swamp’s new leaders are working to keep certain levers of its spying apparatus intact and hidden.

As Trump’s intelligence chiefs briefed Congress this week, new documentation revealed they have presided over an increased number of searches involving Americans’ data compared to former President Joe Biden’s team.

The FBI told Congress in a letter last week the number of its searches about Americans in a foreign intelligence database shot up 34 percent in 2025 as compared to the final year of the Biden administration. The shock statistic, unearthed by The Record, has gotten little attention in Washington….

AI Mistake Throws Innocent Grandmother in Jail for Nearly Six Months 

[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 03-16-2025]

Former DOGE employees give an inside look at the Elon Musk-led agency

[Mashable, via Naked Capitalism 03-15-2025]

Trump is Illegally Undermining Oversight of His Social Security Sabotage

Social Security Works, March, 19 2026 [Via Common Dreams]

Strategic Political Economy

The World According to Gaza

Chris Hedges, March 15, 2026

Gaza is only the start. The new world order is one where the weak are obliterated by the strong, the rule of law does not exist, genocide is an instrument of control and barbarism is triumphant.

Iran and the US economy 

Michael Roberts [via Naked Capitalism 03-20-2025]

GRAPH: Risk exposure to Middle East energy, by country

Indeed, one part of the US economy is benefiting, namely US oil companies.  They stand to receive a windfall of more than $60bn this year if crude prices maintain the levels they have hit since the start of the Iran war. Modelling by investment bank Jefferies estimates American producers will generate an extra $5bn cash flow this month alone following a roughly 47 per cent rise in oil prices since the conflict began.  The capitulation of Venezuela to US control is also enabling US energy companies to raise production and increase sharply revenues from the now highly priced Venezuelan oil exports….

GRAPH: Wealth of the global top 0.0001%, as a percent of world GDP 1985-2005

Global power shift

No Magnets, No Drones: How China Controls the Future of Warfare

Josh Owens, Mar 11, 2026 [oilprice.com]

…The drone has changed the face of war. Nothing has disrupted the battlefield so drastically since the introduction of the machine gun in World War I. Military experts describe the shift as transformative…a fundamental rewiring of how conflicts are fought, won, and lost.

Ukraine produced 1.2 million drones in 2024 alone. The scale is staggering, as Ukraine is now deploying roughly 9,000 drones per day. By 2025, drones were engaging over 80% of all frontline targets and accounting for an estimated 70% of Russian equipment losses. And every major military in the world is racing to match that capability. What this could mean is that the country that controls drone technology controls the next generation of warfare.

But all of those drones share one vulnerability: virtually every magnet in every one of those 1.2 million Ukrainian drones used in 2024 was manufactured in China. And the same is true for Western defense systems across the board

Not just Navy ships anymore: China now builds next generation fighter jets faster than anyone 

Kevin Walmsley

China’s Clean Energy Push Has Made It Less Vulnerable to Energy Shocks, Including the Iran War 

[Inside Climate News, via Naked Capitalism 03-15-2025]

Where in the world is clean energy technology made?

Dan McCarthy, 20 March 2026 [Canary Media, via Clean Power Roundup]

China continues to make the vast majority of the world’s solar, batteries, wind, and EV technology, both for its own needs and for export overseas.

GRAPH— Chian Dominates Clean Energy Manufacturing

Oligarchy

The Rich and Their Right-Wing Allies Have Poisoned America; We Hold the Antidote

Thom Hartmann, Mar 22, 2026 [Common Dreams]

…Back in 1971, Lewis Powell thought he saw a communist threat in Ralph Nader. Literally: he named him in his infamous manifesto, the Powell Memo, arguing that calls to regulate auto safety with seat belts and soft dash boards (Nader’s book Unsafe At Any Speed) were simply the first steps toward a socialist takeover of America….

The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he personally authored the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that claimed billionaire and corporate money in politics wasn’t bribery or corruption (as it had been under the law since the founding of the republic) but merely an exercise of First Amendment-protected free speech….

Hustlers, with help from the GOP, poisoned Christianity next.

Reagan’s campaign hired born-again alcoholic George W. Bush to work out a deal to integrate the evangelical movement—which prior to 1980 was non-political and even supported abortion rights—into the GOP. Jerry Falwell became the face of this church-and-state merger, spewing his own brand of poison.

The week after 9/11, Falwell and Pat Robertson solemnly agreed on TV that the attack on the Twin Towers was merely their god’s punishment for America tolerating “sin.” ….

And the first third of the 20th century was haunted by the rise of the Klan and the Republican Great Depression, until progressive President Franklin Roosevelt declared political war on them, saying, “[T]hey hate me, and I welcome their hatred!”

As FDR and his Vice President Henry Wallace showed us, the most effective way to reverse the effects of fascist poison in the bloodstream of our body politic is for progressives to take power and put both the nation and the middle class back together.

FDR, Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower—two Democrats and a Republican—renewed the faith of the American people in the government our Founders created and many died to give us.

They taught us that civic engagement—voting and participating in our political system—is the best antidote to fascist poison.

There are several reports that the former Department of Defense has established Peter Thiel’s surveillance software company Palantir as the “program of record” for all branches of military service. The man who announced it is the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steve Feinberg, an investment banker worth $5 billion. Feinberg’s company Cerberus has a 5% stake in Bank Leumi, one of Israel’s largest financial institutions. Feinberg is also reportedly close to Peter Thiel.

Palantir was heavily involved in the early stages of the Iran attack, “assisting in identifying and engaging 1,000 targets within the first few hours.” Presumably those targets included the girls’ school in Minab where 168 children were massacred by an American Tomahawk missile based on bad intelligence. Nevertheless, despite the slaughter, Peter Thiel’s long-held dream of being able to kill people at scale has been permanently granted.

Thiel’s Naziphilia has been clear for a very long time. And there is a reason for that. Thiel was raised in the most Nazi town on Earth in the 1970s: Swakopmund, in apartheid-controlled SW Africa (now Namibia). Thiel’s apartheid Christian school—and the town itself—used “Heil Hitler!” as a normal greeting, just as they did in Nazi Germany. Thiel’s father Klaus moved his family to Swakopmund when Peter was a baby to develop a secret uranium mine outside of town—which fed apartheid South Africa’s illegal nuclear weapons program.

Imagine what it was like to be a young gay boy growing up in a Nazi-soaked apartheid town in southern Africa, and being brought back to the U.S. at ten years old. Peter Thiel has reportedly described the early part of his childhood as being formative in his thinking—about who should have power and who should not.

This supremacist belief that the world should bend itself to your will because of your genetics alone was a feature of apartheid-era education—just as it was in Nazi Germany. This background is why both Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are among the most racist people to ever gain fame or power. The apartheid system was designed to produce people like Musk and Thiel—people who believe they are entitled to make the world safe for those who are privileged and white, and to enslave or kill everyone else….

Mapping Google’s Unmappable City 

[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 03-20-2025]

…North Oaks has managed to largely stay unmapped on Street View because of the way the city handles its streets. In almost every city and town in the United States, property owners give an easement to their local government for the roads in front of their homes (or don’t have any claim to the roads at all). In North Oaks, homeowners’ property extends into the middle of the street, meaning there is literally no “public” property in the city, and the roads are maintained by the North Oaks Homeowners’ Association (NOHOA): “the City owns no roads, land, or buildings. The 50-60 miles of roads in the city are owned by the NOHOA members whose property extends to the center of the road subject to easements in favor of NOHOA,” the homeowners association’s website, which has very little information on it and notes that it is “unable to share most private documents with the public.” The roads entering North Oaks have no trespassing signs posted and automated license plate readers….

Felonomics

I Predicted the 2008 Financial Crisis. What Is Coming May Be Worse.

Richard Bookstaber, March 16, 2026 [New York Times]

…We have returned to a period of risk, one rife with the sort of pressures that have led to major financial crises. This time, the risks are spread across industries, markets and nations: artificial intelligence, the roughly $2 trillion private credit industry, stock markets, Taiwan and now Iran. These risks are analyzed one by one, news article by news article. We understand them in isolation. Yet they are different entry points into the same underlying structure — a complex and tightly coupled system where the specific source of stress matters less than how quickly that stress can spread.

Signs of systemic strain are emerging.

Let’s start with private credit, which is already showing worrisome signs. Over the past two decades, the retreat of traditional banks after the financial crisis has left many companies increasingly reliant on borrowing from institutional investors. But these loans rarely exchange hands, leaving investors uncertain about what these instruments are really worth or how easily they could be sold if conditions deteriorate….

January’s EV Registrations Fell 41% As The Full Weight Of Trump’s Policy Changes Hit Home

[Jalopnik, via The Big Picture, March 16, 2026]

Electric vehicle registrations fell off a cliff to begin the year, history says the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran will be disastrous for our auto industry, the Honda Prologue will soon join its newly canceled electric siblings in heaven and the Trump administration is suing California over its zero-emission vehicle and greenhouse gas rules. So much for states’ rights. Policy matters. Strip away the EV incentives and watch adoption collapse in real time. A masterclass in how government can kill a market transition.

Trump’s border wall spending creates a billionaire family 

[Business Times, via Naked Capitalism 03-20-2025]

…Since Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill into law on Jul 4, Fisher Sand & Gravel has won more than US$8 billion in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to design and construct segments of Trump’s long-touted wall on the southern border. The awards account for nearly one-fifth of the money DHS has agreed to spend over that timeframe, during which its three largest contracts – ranging from US$1.5 billion to US$1.7 billion each – all went to Fisher….

During Trump’s first term, Fisher became a regular pitch man on right-wing networks, insisting his wall would be built faster, sturdier and cheaper than the competition’s. He built a privately funded three-mile barrier in Texas. And later, he hired immigration bulldog-turned-border czar Tom Homan to help with lobbying….

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Exposed: How Debt Became the Tool the Wealthy Use to Drain Workers’ Income 

[Egberto, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2025]

The economic system is not failing by accident; it was engineered to extract wealth upward while disguising exploitation as normal market behavior. The structure of supply, demand, wages, and credit reveals a deliberate shift—one that transformed earned income into debt and public resources into private profit.

• The system prioritizes profit maximization over human well-being, using pricing models that extract the highest possible payment rather than reflect real value.
• Wages stagnated while productivity increased, meaning workers created more wealth but received none of the gains.
• Corporations converted withheld wages into consumer credit, forcing people to borrow what they should have earned.
• Government policy mirrored this scheme by cutting taxes on the wealthy and replacing revenue with public debt owed back to them.
• Media failures and ideological conditioning normalized this extraction, labeling dissent as radical instead of rational.

This is not merely inequality—it is systemic exploitation. A progressive response demands restructuring the economy to prioritize wages, public investment, and democratic control over capital. Anything less leaves the machinery of extraction intact.

Nasdaq’s Shame: How to rig an index to appease a billionaire. A look at how the exchange has lost its way.

[Keubiko’s Musings, via The Big Picture, March 16, 2026]

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Wyden Sounds Alarm as DAG Blanche Intervenes to Conceal Details of Mystery Epstein Investigation 

[United States Senate Committee on Finance, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]

Restoring balance to the economy

BREAKING FREE — Pathways to a fair technological future (pdf)

[The Norwegian Consumer Council, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2025]

…Enshittification is the result of a dysfunctional market, where  companies have been able to get away with mistreating and exploiting consumers. Consumers are trapped in digital services, potential competitors are shut out, and policymakers and regulators are unable or reluctant to clamp down on anticompetitive, illegal and otherwise abusive behavior. In practice, a handful of tech companies have become so powerful that they do not have reason to fear any consequences.

Although enshittification has spread to everything from social media platforms to connected fridges, it is not a natural law. Much of what is needed to prevent enshittification is already there: the laws need enforcing though. The path we are on can be challenged and reversed – we can have a better digital world. This requires rebalancing the power between consumers, big tech companies and alternative service providers. It means giving consumers more and better choice over what happens when they are using these platforms.

The fight to disenshittify the internet is also a fight for innovation:  Big Tech is able to enshittify their services after they have become dominant and restricted competition. By pruning back the excesses of big tech, alternative services can get the nourishment they need to grow and flourish. However, this requires active policy choices and vigorous enforcement of existing laws

Will Evicting Blackstone Help Young People Buy Homes? Mega investors are a mega problem. But not the only one.

Eric Salzman and Greg Collard, Mar 16, 2026 [Racket News]

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

Vertical farming of strawberries

Disrupting mainstream economics

Economic questions: the Thorstein Veblen question

Richard Murphy, March 16, 2026 [Funding the Future]

…Thorstein Veblen belongs in this series because he exposed a central absurdity of modern capitalism: that wealth and consumption are often driven not by need, usefulness, or well-being, but by status, rivalry, and display. His work reveals how economic systems can produce vast amounts of waste while presenting it as success….

Hence the Thorstein Veblen Question: If much of modern consumption exists not to meet human needs but to signal status and superiority, why do we treat rising consumption as evidence of prosperity rather than as evidence of social rivalry and waste?

Economic questioins: the David Ricardo question

Richard Murphy, March 17, 2026 [Funding the Future]

Ricardo’s most important contribution was to analyse how national income is divided between landowners, workers and capitalists. His theory of rent showed that landowners could gain income not through productive activity but simply through ownership of scarce resources. His argument was that as population and economic activity expand, land becomes more valuable, and so landlords capture increasing rents without in any way contributing to production.

Ricardo recognised the consequences immediately. When rents rise, they absorb a growing share of national income. That income must come from somewhere, and that was either from wages or from profits.

Hence the David Ricardo Question: If rising rents inevitably squeeze both wages and productive profits, why do modern economies allow rent extraction to dominate economic life?

Glossary entry: Rent

Richard Murphy, March 16, 2026 [Funding the Future]

Climate and environmental crises

The Latest Front in the Battle Over Climate Lawsuits: Bills Wiping Out Liability 

[Inside Climate News, via Naked Capitalism 03-15-2025]

Republican lawmakers in multiple states and Congress are advancing proposals to shield polluters from climate accountability and prevent any type of liability for climate change harms—even as these harms and their associated costs continue to mount.

It’s the latest in a counter-offensive that has unfolded on multiple fronts, from the halls of Congress and the White House to courts and state attorneys general offices across the country.

Dozens of local communities, states and individuals are suing major oil and gas companies and their trade associations over rising climate costs and for allegedly lying to consumers about climate change risks and solutions. At the same time, some states are enacting or considering laws modeled after the federal Superfund program that would impose retroactive liability on large fossil fuel producers and levy a one-time charge on them to help fund climate adaptation and resiliency measures….

Big Oil Knew It Was Wrecking Louisiana’s Coast, Records Show 

[DeSmog, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2025]

The Colorado River’s Problems Are About to Get Deeper 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2025]

• The Colorado River has been losing water for decades due to the planet heating and overuse, and a recent warm winter has led to a lack of snow in the mountains where the river begins.
• A heat wave will quickly melt what little snow there is, and the states along the river are struggling to agree on how to divvy up the dwindling resource, with the federal government potentially stepping in.
• Lake Powell, the main reservoir near the border between the upper and lower basins, will get just 52% of its usual inflow from snowmelt this year, and is at risk of reaching “dead pool” or “minimum power pool” due to low water levels….

For vast swaths of the American West, the past winter was the hottest in at least 131 years of records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Nine states, including the four in the upper Colorado River basin, experienced their hottest winters ever.

All that heat contributed to one of the worst snow droughts on record. Snowpack in those upper-basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming was recently at just 59% of its 30-year average and the lowest in at least a decade, according to US Department of Agriculture data compiled by Water-Data.com.

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

She Was in Labor at a Florida Hospital. Then She Was in Zoom Court for Refusing a C-Section.

Amy Yurkanin, March 20, 2026 [propublica.org]

A virtual court hearing from a pregnant mother’s hospital bed shows what forced medical treatment can look like.

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Indexing Capital Gains to Inflation by Executive Order Is Still Illegal and Still a Bad Idea. 

Bruce Bartlett [Bartlett’s Notations, via The Big Picture, March 16, 2026]

On February 19, the usual right-wing organizations that are always pushing for more tax cuts no matter what the circumstances sent a letter to Trump telling him to adjust capital gains for inflation by executive fiat. This is a campaign that they have waged since 1992 without success. The problem is that the president simply does not have the power, a fact admitted by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in Trump’s first term, who said Congress would have to act first. This is something that could have easily been done when the so-called “one, big, beautiful bill” was enacted last year. However, given Trump’s propensity to take actions without legal authority, such as toppling foreign governments at will, and the Supreme Court’s frequent willingness to rubber stamp his actions, the possibility that he might do something on capital gains indexing cannot be ruled out. For this reason, I have compiled a bibliography of research on the issue of indexing capital gains. The legal commentary is overwhelmingly negative on the president’s authority to do so without congressional action. The economic literature says that indexing capital gains would be extremely complex.

Civic republicanism

[TW: I consider Mike Brock, Dougald Lamont, and Jim Stewartson examples of how USA’s degeneration into oligarchy has catapulted many people into Jefferson’s “return to first principles” and an examination of what a republic is and should be, and where we are now.]

The Philosopher Kings

Mike Brock, Mar 15, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

…Marc Andreessen is a particularly vulgar specimen of this ilk. His effective accelerationist philosophy — e/acc, in the argot of the tech-right — presents itself as a grand vision for human flourishing. Technology will solve everything. The builders must be freed from the constraints of the timid, the regulated, the democratic. Growth is the only morality that scales….

If effective acceleration were genuinely about abundance for everyone — if the philosopher-king pose were sincere — the political form it produced would be universal. It would strengthen democratic institutions. It would distribute the gains broadly. It would build the public infrastructure that compound growth requires. It would accept the friction of accountability as the price of legitimacy.

Instead it produces exit. Fiefdoms. Opt-in jurisdictions for people with enough capital to opt in. The promise of infinite material comfort turns out, on inspection, to be infinite material comfort for the people who already have material comfort….

Andreessen was, once, part of something genuinely democratizing. The browser changed the world. The early internet was, for a moment, a real disruption of the existing order of things — a moment when the tools of production and distribution became available to people who had never had them, when the hierarchy of attention could be circumvented, when a person with nothing but a connection and something to say could find an audience.

That moment was real. The democratic energy of it was real.

What is being sold now is a betrayal of that moment, dressed in its language. The vocabulary of disruption remains. The posture of the rebel remains. What has changed is the direction of the disruption — which is now aimed, with increasing precision, at the democratic institutions that might impose accountability on the people who captured the gains from the first wave.

Effective accelerationism is the ideology you construct when you have accumulated enough power from a democratizing moment that you need a philosophy to justify keeping it. When the regulatory state starts to look less like an obstacle to progress and more like an obstacle to you, specifically….

The philosopher king was supposed to return to the cave because he understood that power without wisdom is catastrophe. Because he had seen enough of the Good to know that the city could not be left to people who hadn’t….

What we have instead are men who have mistaken their term sheets for enlightenment. Who have looked at their net worth and seen, reflected there, evidence of superior cognition. Who have concluded, from the fact of their wealth, that the rest of us should be grateful for whatever they decide to build next, and in whatever jurisdiction they decide to build it, and under whatever terms they decide to offer.

This is not philosophy. It is rent-seeking dressed in a toga….

Never follow people who are afraid of their own natural deaths. For to place the subject of ones own mortality as the primary object of concern within ones own moral outlook, is the true sign of selfishness. You do not want to be in foxholes with such men.

The Philosopher Kings, Part II: A necessary correction of the moral record.

Mike Brock, Mar 16, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]

…A clip has been circulating this week of Andreessen in conversation with David Senra, a podcaster who studies the habits of “great men.” The thesis on offer was this: great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself.

I watched it. And then I wrote this, on X:

Shorter @pmarca: “I really don’t give a fuck about anything other than pursuing the objects of my desire. I am unbothered by how these pursuits may affect others. And I believe this makes me great.”

I want to explain, with some care, why this is not a rhetorical attack. It is a philosophical diagnosis. And the philosophy in question is not obscure….

…He is sitting there, considering himself a great man of history, by proudly declaring that he cares nothing for others and relentlessly pursues the objects of his desire.

Aristotle had a word for this. The akolastos: the intemperate man who has so thoroughly habituated himself to appetite that he no longer even experiences the pull of the good. Who doesn’t struggle against his worst impulses because he has extinguished the part of himself that would recognize them as such. The akolastos is beyond correction not because he cannot be shown the good, but because he has trained himself not to see it….

I am aware that some will say I am being uncharitable. That Andreessen is simply describing a psychological type, not endorsing moral vacuity. That he is making an empirical observation about the personalities that build things.

Let me address this by noting what is on the a16z reading list.

Carl Schmitt.

For those unfamiliar: Carl Schmitt was the Nazi jurist who provided the intellectual framework for the suspension of democratic norms in the service of sovereign power….

Marc Andreessen is enschittification incarnate. He is a living synonym for what the word means — the process by which a platform, or a person, or an idea extracts maximum value while delivering minimum accountability, until the underlying thing collapses under the weight of its own extraction.

Right down to his basic thought processes….

Marc Andreesen Claiming He Avoids Introspection Because It Was Invented by Freud is Just the Tip of an Iceberg of Stupidity

Dougald Lamont, Mar 19, 2026

…Civilization is not based on technology. It’s based on the law, and always has been. I am all for technological progress, but I am not going to pretend that technology is an untrammelled good. Technology has no inherent virtue, or inherent evil. Whatever is powerful is powerful for good or for evil, and there is no denying that technology has been developed and used to kill millions and millions of people….

In this section, Andreesen waxes eloquent on the virtues of the market, and again returns to the “we believe” – because he can’t truthfully say “we know”:

“We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy.”

Now this is one of the most remarkable statements, because in the US and around the world, every single country that became wealthy through innovation and technology, did so by being protectionist, not by free markets. Countries only turn to free trade once they’re rich.

Not some rich countries – all of them. To develop a textiles industry hundreds of years ago, the UK hired weavers from Belgium (people with name Fleming, for example) to come to the UK. They blocked imports from India. The US had tariffs of over 30% for nearly a century, into the 1930s.

The US technological and global manufacturing supremacy during and after the Second World War was funded by government. The US created an entire aerospace manufacturing industry and doubled the entire tool stock of the country by 100%, entirely at government expense.

Add to that investments in R & D and new technologies originally for military use- the jet engine, radar, electronics, computing, nuclear and medical technologies, all of which were later commercialized.

The ultra-high pressure economy the US ran between 1938 and 1945 meant that unemployment dropped to 2%. Various controls were put in place to contain inflation and by 1945 the average American had very little debt and they were saving 20% of their salary a year….

As the economist Marianna Mazzucatto wrote in her outstanding book, “The Entrepreneurial State” which asked the question, “Why did the U.S. develop global tech companies like Google, Facebook, Youtube and Amazon, when Europe did not?”

The answer was that the development of an incredible number of key innovations – including their development at private companies – were financed through public, not private expense.

XEROX, the copying and print company, had an outfit called PARC, or the Palo Alto Research Centre. They developed a lot of key technologies that were eventually commercialized by Apple. Xerox opened PARC in 1970, hiring the greatest minds in the field to research advances in computer science.

PARC innovations included a Graphical User Interface (GUI), the mouse, windows, drag and drop interactions.

The product that turned Apple into multi-trillion dollar company was the iPhone – which was preceded by the iPod….

The technology and the credit for the agency that developed it:

First Generation iPod

• DRAM cache – DARPA
• Click wheel – RRE, CERN
• Lithium-ion batteries – Department of Energy (DOE)
• Signal compression – Army Research Office
• Liquid crystal display – National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Defense
• Micro hard drive – DoE / DARPA
• Microprocessor (CPU)

Second Generation Ipod / iPhone

• Multi-touch screen – DoE, CIA/NSF, DoD
• NAVSTAR-GPS – DoD / Navy
• SIRI – DARPA
• HTTP/HTML – CERN (Europe)
• Cellular technology – US Military
• Internet – DARPA

In addition, Apple had the following

1. Direct Equity Investment – Government funding: Prior to IPO, Apple received $500,000 from Small Business Investment Company licensed by a U.S. Federal Agency
2. Access to Research funded by state or federal governments – Military, academic, private-public partnerships
3. Tax, trade and tech policies to support innovation for Apple or drive market share

Microprocessors, which were developed in 1950s and 60s by Bell Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, only had one customer to sell to – the U.S. Government. The only customers at first were NASA and the Air Force (for nuclear missiles)….

The Morally-Challenged In Charge — And it’s getting worse.

Aurelien, Mar 18, 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]

…Liberalism has replaced the old question “how should I behave?” with the new question “what can I get away with?” just as it has replaced “how should I live my life?” with “how can I be as successful as possible?” The result is perhaps the most amoral or immoral ruling class in the history of the West, for whom anything not explicitly illegal is fair game, and anything explicitly illegal is just a challenge to find your way around. On the one hand this evokes justified anger, but on the other hand it holds out the temptation to emulation….

…I have here to join the long queue of people who are unable to understand why Starmer didn’t know Mandelson was not morally fit to be an Ambassador anyway, but I’d argue beyond that, that things have really gone downhill when the government doesn’t even seem to realise that that the man should never have been allowed within radioactive detection distance of the Diplomatic Service in the first place. They really don’t get it, after forty years of “what can I get away with before I’m found out and then how can I wriggle out of the consequences if I am?” being the moral standard increasingly used by elites.

So we face the curious situation that politicians and other members of the ruling class around the world are detested as never before, and partly because they are incompetent, yes, partly because they are crooked, but mostly because they are overwhelmingly unpleasant and ethically-challenged people. (And for that matter, many important public figures among the Famous are just as unpopular for the same reason.) Now it’s true that there are countries such as the United States, and parts of Africa, where public expectations of their politicians are already about as low and despairing as its possible to get, but that doesn’t mean that people are reconciled to this situation; quite the contrary. So in general, and in spite of forty years of Liberal indoctrination, we still find that popular criticism of politicians is not so much legalistic and procedural, as based on a disappointed sense of morality. The anger aroused by allegations that Mrs von der Leyen has personally made money, directly, or indirectly, from both the Covid and the Ukraine crises, will not go away if a report eventually clears her of doing anything technically illegal. Most people would simply reply that a person in a position of public trust shouldn’t behave like that, whether it’s technically legal or not….

…The exaltation of the Individual inevitably produces a solipsistic world-view in which everything I experience is just a facet of Me, and things are only good or bad insofar as they benefit Me or not. Other people are there to be manipulated or profited from, or at worst are just Non-Playing Characters….

…But we have moved today to a stage of ultra-liberalism, where I have a right to do Anything I Can Get Away With, and where the rich and powerful acknowledge no restraining moral imperatives at all, setting in the process trends that others may copy….

Because of course the rational pursuit of individual self-interest, which is what Liberalism is, does not necessarily lead to personal happiness, and by definition even less to a moral society… Socrates had argued a very long time ago that only a virtuous life can make us happy, and so logically a life of pure rational self-interest would make us unhappy….

…Liberal society has no answer to the following Prisoners’ Dilemma kind of conundrum: if everybody including me behaves well, I receive no special benefit, but if everybody else behaves well and I behave badly I do receive a special benefit. So then why should I behave well? Arguments about the common good are not receivable, because in Liberal thought either there is no common good, distinct from the sum total of individual goods, or if there is it takes second place to the personal good of the individual. The conundrum is actually insoluble in the terms in which it is posed. It will always be advantageous for me to be dishonest if everyone else is honest, and nothing can be done about that….

…forty years of turbo-liberalism and the official abolition of Society as a concept….

[TW: By denying  historical figures such as Franklin or Jefferson have any legitimacy for emulation today, “the left” is — probably unknowingly but who knows? — assisting this demoralization of society. (And demoralization is the exactly accurate word to use in the context of Aurelian’s discussion; I’m surprised he doesn’t use it.)]

Jeffrey Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America (New York, NY, Simon & Schuster, 2024)

By reading the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers who inspired the Founders, Rosen shows us how they understood the pursuit of happiness as a quest for being good, not feeling good—the pursuit of lifelong virtue, not short-term pleasure. Among those virtues were the habits of industry, temperance, moderation, and sincerity, which the Founders viewed as part of a daily struggle for self-improvement, character development, and calm self-mastery. They believed that political self-government required personal self-government.

Benjamin Franklin: “without Virtue Man can have no happiness in this World.” [Autobiography, 188]

Cicero, Tusculan Disputations

XVII. , then, through moderation and constancy, is at rest in his mind, and in calm possession of himself, so as neither to pine with care, nor be dejected with fear, nor to be inflamed with desire, coveting something greedily, nor relaxed by extravagant mirth—such a man is that identical wise man whom we are inquiring for: he is the happy man, to whom nothing in this life seems intolerable enough to depress him; nothing exquisite enough to transport him unduly. For what is there in this life that can appear great to him who has acquainted himself with eternity and the utmost extent of the universe? For what is there in human knowledge, or the short span of this life, that can appear great to a wise man? whose mind is always so upon its guard that nothing can befall him which is unforeseen, nothing which is unexpected, nothing, in short, which is new. Such a man takes so exact a survey on all sides of him, that he always knows the proper place and spot to live in free from all the troubles and annoyances of life, and encounters every accident that fortune can bring upon him with a becoming calmness. Whoever conducts himself in this manner will be free from grief, and from every other perturbation; and a mind free from these feelings renders men completely happy