Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 31, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
[Guardian, Drop Site Daily: May 28, 2026]
LEO Technologies, a Texas-based AI company founded and led by Elliott Broidy—a Republican fundraiser pardoned by President Donald Trump on his last day in office in 2021, days before Broidy was to be sentenced for secretly lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests—won a $106 million contract from the Bureau of Prisons to translate, transcribe, and monitor prison phone calls using artificial intelligence last month, the Guardian reported. The contract marks LEO’s first with the federal government. Broidy, who has twice pleaded guilty to separate criminal offenses.
The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr.
Robert Faturechi, May 28, 2026 [propublica.org]
Christopher Armitage, May 24, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Other crypto founders are serving eight, twelve, and twenty-five years in prison for the same conduct. The only thing that separates the Trump sons from those men is their last name.
Ruth Marcus, May 24, 2026 [The New Yorker]
Trump’s Jan. 6 slush fund is right from Hitler’s playbook! This is not a coincidence
Dean Obeidallah, May 25, 2026
It was about a year after Jan. 6 that I first raised red flags in both articles and on my SiriusXM radio show that Donald Trump would be increasingly defending and even praising the Jan. 6 terrorists. That was way before Trump was calling them “patriots,” pardoned them or recently erased their crimes from the DOJ website and created his $1.8 billion terrorist slush fund to reward them.
The reason I raised that concern is not because I’m some type of political version of Nostradamus. Rather it’s because I have read a great deal about the history of fascist leaders and spoken to many experts.
That history was telling us that Trump would not reject the J6 terrorists but instead embrace, celebrate and honor those who helped him wage his failed coup. After all, it’s exactly what Adolph Hitler did after his 1923 failed coup known as the “Beer Hall Putsch.”….
Here’s the Real Reason Pam Bondi is Returning to the Trump Regime
Dean Obeidallah, May 28, 2026
On Wednesday, we learned that fired Attorney General Pam Bondi was returning to work for the Trump regime. However, this time no longer as the corrupt administration’s top attorney but as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) that will focus on Artificial Intelligence….
But why would Bondi—who has no experience in the AI area—be appointed to this board by Trump and get a hero’s welcome?! Well former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner has a theory—and it’s one that resonates with me.
Glenn’s view it’s likely two reasons. First, “This is probably a wonderful opportunity to grift Should someone be interested in doing just that,” Kirschner commented.
And second—and this is the big one—”Pam Bondi knows where all the Epstein bodies are buried and Trump wants to keep her close.” Ding! Ding! Ding! That sounds like a winner. This is especially true given Bondi will testify Friday, May 29 before the House Oversight committee. (Obviously, the timing of the new gig is not a coincidence!)
And as I have written about in the past, Bondi served as Florida’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2019 at the very time Epstein was operating his massive child rape and women sex trafficking ring in that very state. Yet Bondi NEVER investigated Epstein despite there being more one thousand victims. That was clearly a decision by her in an effort to protect Trump and other powerful men….
We also discussed Trump DOJ’s latest actions to cover up the Jan. 6 crimes. This comes in the form of Acting AG Todd Blanche deleting a massive number of Jan. 6 related files from the DOJ website about the people charged and convicted of crimes—including those who brutally beat up police officers like Michael Fanone.
Some of the records Blanche deleted–as NPR reported— include:
- Daniel Rodriguez, who pleaded guilty to driving an electroshock device into the neck of former Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone, and who was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.
- Thomas Webster, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting law enforcement with a metal flagpole, tackling a police officer to the ground and trying to remove the officer’s gas mask. Webster was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
- Peter Schwartz, who was convicted by a jury of assaulting police officers with pepper spray and throwing a metal chair at law enforcement. Schwartz was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
And DOJ is bragging about this erasure of records saying in a statement they are “proud” to strip the “DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.” The goal in deleting these records is not just part of the effort to rewrite Jan. 6. It’s also to make it more difficult for the media and public to uncover the crimes committed by Trump’s followers—especially since he is on the verge of giving them a huge pay day with his $1.8 billion terrorist slush fund….
How the War on Terror Created the Age of Trump (W/ Matt Kennard)
Chris Hedges, May 27, 2026
Matt Kennard shows in his new book that the bipartisan War on Terror laid the groundwork for the Trump presidency and the rise of fascism — now, with extremists empowered, we face the consequences.
Trump’s $250 Greenback Is a Gift to the Criminal Class
Timothy Noah, May 28, 2026 [The New Republic]
National Park Entrance Fees Are Funding Trump’s D.C. Projects
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2026]
Strategic Political Economy
GRAPH: Not All Oil Is the Same (types of oil)
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
The Mystery Gasoline Surcharge: How Oil Incumbents Are Trying to Maintain Fossil Fuel Dominance
Matt Stoller, May 29, 2026 [BIG]
Among American elites, there appears to be an aggressive embrace of new technologies, whether crypto, generative artificial intelligence, or automated systems in war. But there is an important exception. If you deploy energy systems at scale that compete with fossil fuels, you will be ignored. The reason is both the narrative power of oil companies, and the Trump administration’s view that fossil fuel infrastructure is a deep source of American strength.
What’s interesting about this dynamic is that clean tech systems – batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles – are having real impacts, far more measurable than crypto or AI. Here is a chart of annualized gasoline sales in California, which has dropped by 2.5 billion gallons a year since 2019, despite more cars on the road. And California is leading the way in America; a quarter of new cars there are electric….
[TW: I have not yet come across a book that, imho, adequately explains the proper principles of political economy for a republic. I have been pondering these principles since it became clear around 2009-2010 that President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership had no intention of imposing accountability and justice on the financial predators who had created the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Among the principles of political economy of civic republicanism I have identified are
[1. Scientific and technology progress are fundamental and essential to a republic’s economic health (note I do not use the term “economic growth” here).
[2. Because private enterprise, in reality, is mostly risk averse and therefore unwilling to invest in breakthrough science and unproven technology, one major responsibility of the national government is to encourage and support scientific endeavors and the development of new technologies — including outright funding. First Secretary of the Treasury was explicit about this in hid December 1791 Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures, which carefully and thoroughly refuted the “free enterprise” and “free trade” nostrums of British empire factotum Adam Smith. Point number 2 is reflected repeatedly in the history of how nations actually industrialized, including
- USA’s deliberate seeding of new armory machine tool technology into the rest of the economy in the early 1800s (which created the bases for modern industrial mass production);
- the massive land giveaways that supported the development of nationwide rail networks in the mid-1800s;
- outright national funding of the telegraph and infant electricidal industry;
- agricultural research and development, including fighting pests and diseases, and identification and support of new crop breeds;
- outright government funding of the road and highway network that made possible the widespread use of automotive technology;
- early funding and continued support for aviation and aerospace technology;
- the development of transistors, integrated circuits, computers and the internet.
[To use Marxist phraseology, it is the political superstructure — the government — that most often creates and determines new means of production — the exact opposite of the disastrously erroneous Marxist view of reality.
[3. Unfortunately, though it is government support which creates new industries, new companies and huge private fortunes, the human faults of avarice, lust for power, pride end up transforming these new industries, new companies and new private fortunes into opponents of further change to the means of production. When this inevitably occurs, Marxist analysis of how the means of production determines the political superstructure tends to reflect reality with more fidelity than other forms of economic analysis.
[4. Therefore, a republic must always take steps and impose measures to limit the accumulation of wealth, the translation of wealth into political power, and misuse of the political system by concentrations of wealth and the morbidly rich. The argument that every billionaire is a policy failure must be fleshed out by developing this framework of civic republican political economy. Much of the history of neoclassical and Austrian economic thinking is a series of case studies in how concentrations of wealth and the morbidly rich used academia to develop schools of political economy which justified selfish behavior and concentrations of wealth, and in effect suppress and bury a decent exploration and consideration of civic republican political economy.
[5. Civic republican political economy therefore demands making moral judgements about what is good and bad for the preservation and development of human existence. Preserving the use of fossil fuels endangers human life istelf and is therefore bad. Remember that two of the basic principles of civic republicanism are justice, and the General Welfare. Gambling, prediction markets, crypto, and artificial intelligence should all be rigorously subjected to moral judging. Markets cannot and will not do this. The essence of the evil of neoliberal and neoclassical economics is that they use mathematical certainty as a facade to evade moral judgement.
[Though it omits any consideration of government’s role in supporting the early development of the petroleum industry, Stoller’s article is an excellent case study of how an industry, once mature, becomes a force for oligarchy and against republican governance. – TW]
Paycheck to Paycheck Statistics: How Many Americans Are Struggling? (2026)
[WealthVieu, May 6, 2026, via seekingalpha.com]
[See especially the table, Paycheck to Paycheck by Income:]
Household Income % Living Paycheck to Paycheck
Under $25,000 85%
$25,000-$50,000 75%
$50,000-$75,000 65%
$75,000-$100,000 52% ….
[Benzinga, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2026]
More workers are raiding their 401(k)s as average balances fall, Fidelity says
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2026]
Oligarchy
The Digital Media Oligarchy: Who Owns Online News?
[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2026]
[TW: Who owns what: explains much.]
Felonomics
The National Debt’s Unforgiving Math
Jared Bernstein, May 25, 2026 [The Atlantic]
…What changed? The national debt held by the public, about $31 trillion, is now the size of the U.S. economy, up from 39 percent of the economy in 2008 and 79 percent in 2019. For most of the country’s history, the fact that the economy’s growth rate surpassed the interest rate on the debt enabled us to keep paying our bills.
But as my colleagues and I show in a policy brief for the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research, the fiscal outlook today is much more challenging. We concluded that the combination of higher deficits and climbing interest rates raises the risk that borrowing will become more expensive and will push government debt levels to climb relentlessly. This is a debt spiral.
[TW: Notable because Bernstein had been a voice of reason against the scare mongering of the (anti)Republican deficit hawks. I have increasingly fearful of what might be the consequences of so large a part of the federal budget siphoned off to interest payments, Especially now that Trump is so rapidly destroying USA standing in the world, and huge incentives for massive dumping of dollars holdings. An archived version of the article was not available yet, so I could not check whether Bernstein placed enough emphasis on the fact that the run up in budget deficits is entirely the result of the Bush Jr., and Trump tax giveaways to the morbidly rich.]
Stealth Deregulation & Institutional Decay
Dave Nadig [via The Big Picture 05-27-2026]
Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez, May 27, 2026 [Zeteo]
[Mountain State Spotlight, via Naked Capitalism 05-29-2026]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Andrew Rivera, May 30, 2026 [More Perfect Union]
There’s a trap in your grocery store that you don’t even know about. Kroger wants you to think that you’re saving money by joining their loyalty program, but that’s not the full story. These loyalty programs, they’re complex surveillance schemes designed to harvest your data, build a psychological profile on you, and maximize how much you’re willing to spend….
A Consumer Reports investigation revealed that Kroger collects such vast amounts of data that it builds profiles of its customers, including income, gender, household size, and education level — and it sells that data to tobacco firms, financial companies, and data brokers. Home Depot captures internet activity, including browsing history and in-store Wi-Fi usage. Macy’s tracks customers’ license numbers, search history, and even ethnic origin and sells it to data brokers.
It’s all part of an emerging industry: how to hack your brain. Because companies invest a lot in these programs, they expect a big return on their investment….
Your Mattress Got Worse on Purpose
[Worse On Purpose, via The Big Picture 05-24-2026]
The practice has a name. Mattress retailers call it the “name game,” and it exists to deliberately confuse buyers. The manufacturer makes one mattress, then ships it to ten different retailers with a different cover and a different model name on each. The world’s largest mattress maker now owns America’s largest mattress retailer. The FTC tried to stop them and lost. A funny, angry tour through the enshittification of the mattress business — private equity, foam compression, fake reviews, and the bed-in-a-box pivot to “premium.” You will recognize every move from other industries.
Meat Packing Industry Wage-Fixing Continues with Cargill Lockout
[UFCW 7, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2026]
The Reserve Currency Trap: The Mechanics of US Industrial Erosion
Craig Tindale. [via Naked Capitalism 05-27-2026]
Important
Speculation and the end of the neoliberal imagination
[Free Market Moralism, via Naked Capitalism 05-28-2026]
Health care crisis
What Will It Take to Contain the Central Africa Ebola Outbreak?
[Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, via Naked Capitalism 05-24-2026]
Predatory finance
Why Private Debt, Not Government Spending, Drives Crises
Steve Keen [YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
Shadow Banking’s $1.47 Trillion Takeover Of U.S. Bank Lending
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 05-30-2026]
Goldman Sachs Just Confirmed the Worst-Case Scenario
[Eurodollar University, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Elon Musk’s Plan to Make You Invest in SpaceX
Ryan Cooper, May 20, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Jim Stewartson, May 30, 2026 [MindWar]
… Perhaps the most harmful consequence of SpaceX going public is that many of the protective rules the markets have on public companies are being changed or dropped—just to be able to list Musk’s stock.
- Profitability Requirement: Historically, the S&P 500 required 12 months of public trading and four consecutive quarters of positive GAAP earnings. S&P gutted this requirement to admit SpaceX.
- Seasoning Period: Nasdaq reduced its inclusion seasoning window from 90 trading days to 15, and FTSE Russell cut its requirement to just 5 days. S&P 500 historically required a 12-month public trading wait.
- Free-Float Minimum: Nasdaq and CRSP eased their minimum float thresholds to accommodate the relatively thin initial float (around 3%–5%).
This means index funds, which are held in most retirement accounts, will be forced to buy Musk’s unprofitable company. In effect, the richest man has figured out how to make almost half of America subsidize his empire, with vastly less oversight than it should require.
As diabolical as this is, however, it appears to be a defensive move, not an offensive expansion. Musk, like Thiel, seems to be bunkering down by consolidating his operations under one authoritarian roof.
But for what? Why is the broligarchy so nervous? ….
How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2026]
Restoring balance to the economy
Private Equity Blocked from Buying Homes. Mostly.
Matt Stoller, May 24, 2026 [BIG]
Wall Street titans start to see their power ebb in the waning days of the Trump era, losing fights over both housing and railroad regulation….
…So what hiking housing prices? There is a split in both parties over that question. One theory comes from a group of Wall Street-friendly liberals and libertarians, known as the “Abundance movement,” who argue the problem is that we’re not friendly enough to capital, and the solution is to remove zoning limitations. Yet despite the removal of many such limitations in states like California, there hasn’t been a spurt of homebuilding.
A different theory comes from anti-monopolists, who believe that the consolidation of financing power and homebuilding capacity led to supply restrictions. That group argued that Wall Street cash was pouring into single family housing as an asset class, driving up prices for ordinary people. And those buyers, as corporate landlords, didn’t serve renters particularly well. There is substantial evidence behind this theory….
Greg Casar, May 28, 2026 [The American Prospect]
We face potential unemployment on par with the Great Depression. We need a mass employment program to get through it. AI can pay for it.
The Case for a New Works Progress Administration
Asad Ramzanali, Ganesh Sitaraman, May 29, 2026 [Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator]
…AI might be a new technology, but many policy responses for how to deal with social dislocations are old and well-known. If society experiences mass unemployment, the most direct policy solution is mass employment. In fact, this is exactly what the United States government did in response to the Great Depression. One in four workers were unemployed at the worst part of that crisis in the early 1930s. In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a wide range of New Deal employment programs, from the Civilian Conservation Corps to the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA is particularly notable because Congress funded it with $4.9 billion in 1935, an astonishing 6.7% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. The scale of WPA job creation aimed to match the devastation of Great Depression job loss.
Ben Zipperer, May 21, 2026 [Economic Policy Institute]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Scientists Discover a Massive Reservoir of Drinking Water Hiding Beneath the Atlantic Ocean
[ZME Science, via Naked Capitalism 05-30-2026]
Disrupting mainstream politics
Graham Platner Reveals The Real Story Of FDR
David Sirota, May 29, 2026 [The Lever]
…In the popular telling, Roosevelt in the 1930s tried to add justices to the high court, but his initiative proved controversial among voters, and he was eventually rebuffed, delivering a blow to his legacy. Google FDR and “court packing” and you’ll see how pervasive this fable is.
It is commonly described as everything from a “cautionary tale” to a “losing” battle to a “terrible idea” — a narrative that has been internalized by Democrats, who see its moral as, Don’t ever tangle with the high court, and especially not with so-called “court packing.” Hence, the last Democratic president rejected court expansion even as the Roberts Court was repealing the 20th century.
This parable’s staying power is fantastic for the master planners who spent 50 years buying most of the seats on the current Supreme Court. Any parable that deflates liberals’ support for a confrontation with Supreme Court power is a tale that fortifies the American Right.
Except there’s one problem: This particular tale is false. Wildly, absurdly false — and its moral is the opposite of what Democrats and liberals came to understand, as explained by Platner….
Platner’s telling of the FDR story is entirely, provably accurate: FDR’s gambit may have failed to actually expand the court, but that wasn’t necessarily its true goal. Its objective was to force the court to stop blocking the New Deal, and in that, it was incredibly successful. Indeed, the gambit wasn’t a cautionary tale about loss, as liberals and Democrats perceive — on the contrary, it was a guidebook for political success.
And yet, if your information diet is exclusively corporate and liberal media, it’s entirely possible you’ve never heard that….
Platner instinctively opted to use that opportunity to tell liberals the real story of what happened — a story that might make liberals realize that for decades they’ve been fed horeshit that helps politicians and media convince them that Democrats are always powerless, when in fact they aren’t. Indeed, if Democrats regain control of Congress and the presidency, they can do what FDR did — they can try to expand the Supreme Court. They can also legislate term limits and do what Platner is promising: impeach specific justices….
David Sirota, May 29, 2026 [The Lever]
… “We cannot continue down this path,” oysterman Graham Platner told about 200 onlookers. “Like many generations of Americans before us, we’re going to have to rise to the occasion. We’re going to have to get uncomfortable…We’re going to have to learn how to fight. It’s the only way that we’re going to get through this, but get through it we have to, because the alternative is unacceptable.”
The barn was silent. The crowd that only minutes ago was boisterously gorging on local oysters and a keg of hard apple cider was now riveted by the sandy-haired 41-year-old U.S. Senate candidate in jeans and a navy sweatshirt.
“ Corporate conservatism in America, it knows what it wants — it’s got a light at the end of its tunnel,” the Democrat said in a gravelly voice now familiar across social media. “It’s one in which we own nothing. All we do is work and consume. Everything’s a subscription model. Nobody owns a home. We all rent. Our entire existence will just be turned into a way for those who have enough already to pull more and more and more. That is what they want. But we need to define a better future… in which our economy and our political system actually has the needs of working people at its forefront. And we’re going to have to build power and get it.”
And then Platner asked the crowd to imagine his campaign as part of an effort to create something that doesn’t yet exist: a serious congressional opposition to Donald Trump and oligarchy….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
[The One Percent Rule, May 26, 2026, via Naked Capitalism 05-27-2026]
On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical on the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. The document runs through the Social Doctrine of the Church from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to Francis, then turns to AI, digital power, truth, democracy, work, freedom, war, and hope. It opens with two biblical scenes. In Genesis, a people in Shinar build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. In Nehemiah, a ruined Jerusalem is rebuilt after exile, section by section, family by family. The digital age, Leo says, has given us another building site, AI. The question is not whether to build. We are already building. The question is whether we are building Babel or Jerusalem.
I think this is the most serious religious document yet written about artificial intelligence because it refuses the two simple comforts that now dominate public speech about AI. It refuses the sales pitch, with its confident predictions and its quarterly earnings cadence. It also refuses panic. Leo’s encyclical is neither a product brochure nor a fire alarm. It is more severe than both. It asks what kind of human being is being trained by the systems we are building, buying, praising, fearing, and slowly obeying….
The encyclical is at its sharpest when it rejects neutrality. “Technology is never neutral,” Leo writes, because it bears the marks of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. This is not a slogan. It is a test. Ask who pays for the system. Ask what it optimizes. Ask what it must ignore in order to work at scale. Ask who can appeal. Ask who is made easier to manage. Ask what kind of person the system needs us to become so that the system can call itself successful. The answer will not be found in the demo. Demos are designed to be charming. A demo is a machine wearing its Sunday clothes….
Matt Ford, May 27, 2026 [The New Republic]
Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on Monday. The 42,000-word statement is being described by major media outlets as centering on the rise of artificial intelligence and the moral, spiritual, and social challenges that it poses to modern society. Even the encyclical itself says that its topic is “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”
[Vukture, via The Big Picture 05-24-2026]
Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users. Vulture on the slow realization that the algorithmic feed isn’t curating reality so much as constructing one. A useful frame the next time a “viral moment” looks too clean.
The end of the internet’s golden age.
[Axios, via The Big Picture, May 27, 2026]
Axios with a tidy summary of what just ended: search referral traffic, social distribution, the open-web business model. Pair with the TechCrunch “Search as you know it” piece from last week.
Fear and Loathing in Palo Alto
Alex Bronzini-Vender, May 19, 2026 [Washington Monthly]
… Theo Baker, an investigative journalist wunderkind and soon-to-be Stanford graduate, is not the first to trace Silicon Valley’s rot to his university. (The authors Malcolm Harris, John Carreyrou, and Noam Cohen have each staked out similar territory.) But he is the first to document, with rigor and detail, the institution’s recent history and culture. Baker’s much-anticipated debut book, How to Rule the World, is three things at once: an account of his George Polk Award-winning investigation into former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s research misconduct, an ethnographic study of the campus’s social “underbelly,” and a personal memoir….
The argumentative spine of How to Rule the World, though, is Baker’s case against Stanford. Its culture, he argues, inculcates fraud. Venture capitalists throw ungodly sums of money at undergraduate “builders” with little due diligence. Students, predictably, learn to misappropriate it, overclaim their abilities, and misrepresent themselves to their peers and to the public. Feeling pressure to appear accomplished and perfect, students engage in all manner of deception to keep up. And these issues, in Baker’s freshman year, extended all the way to Stanford’s presidency. Baker writes in the prologue that “power protects itself, secrets remain hidden in plain sight, and robust guardrails are lacking,” and this was true both of “the president, whose research had escaped scrutiny for years,” and in “the underbelly of the student body.” Tessier-Lavigne and his students, he argues, both participated in the university’s fake-it-till-you-make-it culture….
Collapse of independent news media
Finley Williams, May 30, 2026 [The American Prospect]
… Late last year, the American Press Institute published a “guide to influencer collaborations,” while The New York Times launched a TikTok-style “Watch” tab which features short, informal clips describing recent events, or showing a reporter explaining their latest story. The Washington Post was a notable new-media early adopter, when journalist Dave Jorgenson famously launched its TikTok, and later The Washington Post Universe, in 2019. The Post’s TikTok has amassed almost two million followers….
Resistance
Christopher Armitage, May 30, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
…Cooper v. Aaron, the 1958 case where the Supreme Court declared that its interpretations of the Constitution are “the supreme law of the land.”³ Every state official who takes an oath to support the Constitution must therefore obey the Court’s rulings, even when those rulings are wrong. This doctrine, which legal scholars call judicial supremacy, treats Court decisions as binding not just on the parties to a case but on everyone, everywhere, forever, until the Court itself changes its mind.
Cooper arose from the desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Orval Faubus deployed the National Guard to prevent Black students from entering Central High School. The Court’s assertion of supremacy served a morally urgent purpose: forcing state officials to stop nullifying Brown v. Board of Education through defiance and delay. Nine justices signed the opinion, an unprecedented show of unanimity designed to signal that resistance was futile.
Cooper’s doctrine has been accepted as settled constitutional law for nearly seven decades. But settled is not the same as correct. James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, explicitly rejected the claim that the Supreme Court holds exclusive authority to determine constitutional meaning. In his Report of 1800, Madison argued that state governments retain authority to judge whether the constitutional compact has been dangerously violated by the federal government.⁴ That authority, Madison wrote, must extend to violations by the judiciary as well as by the executive or the legislature.⁴
Abraham Lincoln offered a similar analysis when confronting Dred Scott. He accepted that the Court’s ruling bound the parties to that case. Dred Scott himself remained enslaved. But Lincoln refused to treat the Court’s constitutional reasoning as binding on the political branches. “If the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” Lincoln warned in his First Inaugural Address, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”⁵
Lincoln acted on this position. His administration issued passports to Black Americans and, through Attorney General Edward Bates’ November 1862 opinion declaring free Black people citizens of the United States, repudiated Dred Scott’s central holding through executive action.⁶ The Act to Secure Freedom to All Persons within the Territories of the United States, signed by Lincoln on June 19, 1862, flatly prohibited slavery in any territory, directly contradicting the Court’s ruling. As historian Paul Finkelman wrote, “With one sentence, Congress undid a key aspect of the holding in Dred Scott.”⁷ Republicans treated Dred Scott as what it was: a corrupt ruling by partisan justices who had abandoned constitutional interpretation for political advocacy. They complied with the judgment in the specific case while refusing to accept its reasoning as controlling precedent.
So when can a state tell the Court no? Lincoln articulated the conditions in his 1857 speech on Dred Scott: a decision deserves acquiescence as settled doctrine only when it has been “made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part based on assumed historical facts which are not really true.” ….
Trump v. United States gave the Supreme Court the power to decide, case by case, which presidential actions are immune from prosecution. Given this Court’s track record, we know exactly how those decisions will go. A Republican president who orders the assassination of a political rival commits an official act. A Democratic president who sends aid to Ukraine commits treason. The doctrine has no basis in constitutional text, no grounding in historical practice, and no support in precedent….
These rulings share a common characteristic: they expand Republican power and contract Democratic power, consistently, predictably, across every domain. When the Court rules on voting rights, the result restricts ballot access in ways that benefit Republicans.¹⁶ When the Court rules on campaign finance, the result allows more corporate money to flow to Republican candidates.¹⁷ When the Court rules on regulatory authority, the result strips power from agencies that enforce environmental, labor, and consumer protections that Republican donors oppose.¹⁸ When the Court rules on presidential authority, the result expands executive power when Republicans hold the White House and contracts it when Democrats do.
The pattern extends to the Court’s procedural choices. When the Trump administration seeks emergency relief, the Court grants it. When the Biden administration sought similar relief, the Court denied it….
David Sloss, a constitutional law professor at Santa Clara University, has made the case for state defiance in response to Bruen. Sloss argues that the ruling violates the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states powers not delegated to the federal government.²¹ The Supreme Court held in United States v. Lopez that the power to enact local gun regulations is not delegated to the federal government.²² Therefore, Sloss argues, state gun laws fall within the sphere of reserved state authority, and federal interference, including interference by the Supreme Court, exceeds constitutional limits.²¹
The same logic extends to other domains. Blue states possess independent authority to protect their residents in areas where the federal government has no legitimate constitutional claim. When the Supreme Court issues rulings that exceed constitutional boundaries, states retain the Madisonian authority to judge those violations and act accordingly….
DOJ sues Massachusetts over refusal to issue undercover license plates to ICE
[Drop Site Daily, May 29, 2026]
The Justice Department sued Massachusetts Thursday over the state’s refusal to issue confidential license plates to federal immigration agents, arguing the policy discriminates against ICE and CBP in violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause—one of four such lawsuits filed Wednesday and Thursday against Massachusetts, Maine, Washington, and Oregon. Governor Maura Healey rejected the suit as another “specious complaint against political enemies,” arguing that confidential plates are reserved for criminal law enforcement and that ICE’s civil enforcement work does not qualify.
Lyna Bentahar, May 30, 2026 [The Lever]
On May 19, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a law making it a felony to host or advertise prediction markets, making the state the first in the country to outlaw prediction markets. The law will go into effect in August.
More than a dozen states across the country are seeking to regulate prediction markets as they’ve exploded in recent months, due to concerns about how they encourage problem gambling and risk enabling insider trading. Hawaii and North Carolina are also considering legislative bans similar to Minnesota’s.
Just two days after Walz signed Minnesota’s law, Rhode Island’s attorney general sued the prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket, alleging that the companies have operated in violation of the state’s gambling regulations. And in Massachusetts, the state’s Supreme Court appeared poised to reject Kalshi’s claims that it was not bound by the state’s gambling laws….
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 05-25-2026]
[Unherd, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
An Incomplete List of Successful Anti-Data Center Legislation
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 05-26-2026]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture 05-24-2026]
On the now-mainstreamed 2020 denialism in elected office: Parikh is just one of many election deniers who were long relegated to the fringe and are now—with Trump back in office and still not over his electoral defeat six years ago—embedded inside the government. system. Whether ‘winning’ is the right word depends on the time horizon; the trend is unmistakable. The universe of people pressing debunked theories is so broad that it’s a feature of the system.
MAGA Isn’t Broken. This Is What It Was Built to Do
[The Rational League, via The Big Picture 05-24-2026]
A pointed counter to the “victims of propaganda” framing — argues the movement is functioning exactly as designed. The internal left-of-center debate on how to think about MAGA voters keeps getting sharper. The most dangerous thing about MAGA is that they mean it.
The Conspiracy Is the Cover Story – The truth is right in front of your eyes
Mike Brock, May 30, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
Iran-Contra was a conspiracy. Members of the executive branch of the United States, operating outside the knowledge of Congress and in direct violation of the Boland Amendment, ran a covert weapons-sales program to Iran and used the proceeds to fund a paramilitary force in Nicaragua. The operation involved Oliver North in the National Security Council, William Casey at the CIA, John Poindexter as National Security Advisor, and, at various levels of awareness, President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. The conspiracy was uncovered, hearings were held, indictments were filed, several of the conspirators were pardoned. The documentary record is in the National Archives. The conspiracy was real. It happened.
The 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh by the Central Intelligence Agency was a conspiracy. The 1974 secret oil-for-security handshake between Henry Kissinger and the Saudi royal family was a conspiracy. COINTELPRO was a conspiracy. MK-ULTRA was a conspiracy. The tobacco industry’s coordinated suppression of cancer research for forty years was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the Master Settlement Agreement filings. The Sackler family’s strategy to addict tens of millions of Americans to OxyContin was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the bankruptcy filings. The NSA’s PRISM program was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the Snowden archive. The Saudi murder of Jamal Khashoggi was a conspiracy, and it is documented in the CIA assessment that the United States government attempted, briefly, to suppress before having to release….
Pizzagate was not a conspiracy. The Great Reset was not a conspiracy. The 9/11-as-inside-job theory was not a conspiracy. Chemtrails are not a conspiracy. Lizard people are not a conspiracy. The election was not stolen by Italian satellites controlling Dominion voting machines through Hugo Chávez’s ghost. Adrenochrome harvesting is not a conspiracy. QAnon’s the Storm was not a conspiracy. The moon landing happened. The vaccines were not bioweapons.
These are conspiracy theories. They share a structure. The structure is that an imagined coordination is asserted, the coordination is held to produce outcomes that no actual coordination of the kind described could plausibly produce, and the assertion is unsupported by the documentary record except through a chain of motivated misreadings and outright fabrications. They are not facts. They are theories about facts that do not exist.
The distinction is not subtle. The distinction is the difference between knowing how the world is run and pretending to know how the world is run. The distinction is the difference between Daniel Ellsberg and Alex Jones. The distinction is the difference between James Risen and Steve Bannon. The distinction is the difference between the Panama Papers and Q drops….
[The Intercept Briefing, May 22 2026]
The Pro-Israel Lobby’s Quiet Cash Shuffle
Luke Goldstein, May 22 2026 [The Lever]
The South Rises Again
CARTOON – SCOTUS conservatives raise a confederate flag over a slain Civil Rights Act.
Dr. Paul Zeitz, May 27, 2026
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Report: Chief Justice John Roberts’ Wife Made Over $10 Million As “Legal Consultant”
[Forbes, via The Big Picture 05-24-2026]
The disclosure-versus-recusal gap at the Court keeps widening: Jane Roberts, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts, made more than $10 million in commissions over an eight-year stretch where she matched top lawyers with elite law firms—including some that had cases before the Supreme Court—according to documents obtained by Insider, as concerns grow about justices possibly having unreported conflicts of interest.
Christopher Armitage, May 27, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Supreme Court’s John Roberts Faces Impeachment Resolution from Democrat
Jason Lemon, Newsweek, via scotusblog.com, May 26, 2026
On Thursday, Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, introduced a “long-shot effort” to impeach Chief Justice John Roberts “centered on allegations that the Supreme Court under his leadership has acted in a partisan and inconsistent manner,” according to Newsweek. “In a statement announcing the resolution, Cohen said that Roberts has led the court to be ‘understood as biased: with decisions designed to benefit Republicans at the expense of representative government, seemingly contradictory and unexplained orders, and a pattern of ethical breaches that raises questions about the role of the wealthy.’”
Jefferson Hamilton
>To use Marxist phraseology, it is the political superstructure — the government — that most often creates and determines new means of production — the exact opposite of the disastrously erroneous Marxist view of reality.
Never miss a chance to take a shot at Marxism, eh, Tony? Unfortunately you are once again clearly wrong here, as the superstructure has radically changed since the heyday of your preferred ideology and yet the base remains the same. The sad truth is that civic republicanism failed a long time ago, because the bourgeois state *cannot* restrain the bourgeoisie, and any who try, like your poor, noble (and here I am not being entirely facetious) civic republicans, are eventually shown the door. Stoller is in the same delusional boat, alas.
KT Chong
New survey: Around the world, people increasingly associate “democracy” more with China than America — The world is redefining the meaning and perception of what “democracy” is.
—
The Democracy Perception Index 2026, commissioned by Western and Western-aligned countries and organizations (including Taiwan), contains findings that are devastating for the United States and surprisingly favorable toward China.
This is not “CPC propaganda”. It comes from the Alliance of Democracies — founded by former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen — along with partners like the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. They surveyed over 94,000 people across 98 countries, representing more than 90% of the world’s population.
The most striking result is that an overwhelming majority of the world — with only a few notable exceptions such as Japan — now views China more favorably than the United States. The US net favorability has collapsed to -16%, while China sits at +7%.
More importantly, the DPI 2026 ranks the United States among the bottom five most negatively perceived countries in the world. (The absolute dog-shit bottom is Israel at -24% favorable rating.)
In 63 out of 83 countries polled on this, people see China in a better light than America.
Even more surprising, the survey suggests that many people around the world may now regard China as embodying the qualities they associate with democracy more than the United States does.
How is that possible?
The reason is the meaning and perception of “democracy” is changing in the minds of much of the world’s population. According to the survey, the most important characteristic of a democratic government is NOT free elections or political freedoms. The number one answer was a government that works to improve the living standards and welfare of its people. The number two answer was a government that maintains peace and refrains from waging wars, bombing, invading, or interfering in other countries. Only after those priorities came things such as free elections, political competition, and “freedom.”
In other words, for much of the world, democracy is increasingly being judged by outcomes rather than procedures. People are asking whether a government delivers prosperity, stability, security, and peace, rather than focusing primarily on how leaders are selected.
Whether one agrees with this definition or not, the survey suggests that the traditional Western narrative of democracy is losing ground globally. The United States has long promoted democracy as free elections, political rights, and civil liberties. Yet much of the world appears to be redefining democracy as effective governance that improves people’s lives and avoids unnecessary conflict.
If that trend continues, the West may find that it no longer controls the global conversation on what “democracy” actually means.
Sources:
Alliance of Democracies DPI: https://allianceofdemocracies.org/democracy-perception-index
Nira Data report: https://www.niradata.com/dpi
Coverage: https://www.intellinews.com/global-democracy-perception-of-us-collapses-behind-russia-and-china-for-first-time-442011/
Mark Level
A downside of Tony Wikrent’s extensive curation & inclusion of important arguments, podcast links, etc. is that sometimes it’s just too much, one has to pick a couple of things to look at and otherwise respect life not online.
So looking at the comments, I want to thank Jefferson Hamilton for calling out Tony’s implicit bias here. I mostly respect Matt Stoller, he does good, solid, steady work, although overall becasue (a) the ‘Murican public is so propagandized and apolitical (one could even say anti-ideology, or the 3 chimps, See No, Hear No & Speak No Evil) his correct takes will never gain traction, & (b) the MICIMATT is fully designed and weaponized to make sure that no one who is even vaguely Leftist will ever get their grubby little hands anywhere near the Levers of Power. A wonky Institutional Machine like “civic republicanism” will never really change things, won’t even do tiny reforms. (Okay, Lina Khan under Biden did a couple dozen positive things. But the other 98% of Biden’s staff only did corrupt and harmful things.)
There’s a quixotic element to Stoller’s work, but he should nonetheless be admired for trying, when relatively few other pundits can be bothered.
Thanks for KT Chong’s note as well, though this is a “Dog Bites Man” story, not a “Man Bites Dog.” China builds infrastructure, makes alliances, US just does shock’ n’ awe mass murdering and genocide. Rest of the world has dumb Libs, but not enough of them to assume US democratic, China not. What happened to the Libs in Russia who used to support a Fascist, Victory Navalny, who wanted to exterminate Muslims, and (wait for it!!) Jews as well? A great “hero”, randomly murdered by an Amazonian shaman who teleported to Asia and shot him with a poisoned dart gun. What a story, science fiction, couldn’t make it up.
Not a fan of Tim Walz overall, and glad I got out of Minnesota almost a year ago, but good on him for purging garbage from the system up there, and thanks for the share, Tony.
spud
Mark LevelL
Walz was a very good governor, he saved what Dayton had started, and that was to end republican austerity for us, yet lavished tax breaks on the wealthy, till the point where the state almost collapsed.
minnesota ranks near the top of standard of living in america. i will watch the stupid voters again, vote in the austerity for us, tax cutters for the rich, and the cycle will start all over again.
———-
The standard of living in Minnesota is generally high, with affordable housing, good healthcare, and strong job opportunities. However, costs vary significantly between urban and rural areas, with the Twin Cities being the most expensive.
redfin.com ruralmn.org
Minnesota offers a high standard of living characterized by affordable housing, quality healthcare, and a robust job market. However, costs can differ greatly between urban and rural areas.
Key Factors Influencing Standard of Living
Housing Affordability
Median Home Value: Approximately $351,614, which is lower than the national average of $368,581.
Rent Costs: Median gross rent is around $1,264 per month, making housing relatively affordable compared to other states.
Healthcare Quality
Healthcare services, including doctor visits and dental care, are about 2% lower than the national average, contributing to overall well-being.
Employment Opportunities
Minnesota boasts a low unemployment rate of 3.2%, which is significantly below the national average, indicating a strong job market.
Cost of Living Comparison
Category Minnesota vs. National Average
Housing 17% lower
Utilities 4% lower
Groceries 2% higher
Clothing 3% lower
Healthcare 2% lower
Entertainment 3% lower
Urban vs. Rural Living
Twin Cities: The most expensive area, with costs higher than the state average.
Rural Areas: Generally more affordable, providing a lower cost of living.
Overall, Minnesota’s standard of living is supported by its affordability in housing and healthcare, alongside strong employment prospects, making it an attractive place to live.
rentcafe.com payscale.com
——–
Minnesota is ranked 5th overall as the best state to live in according to a WalletHub study, which evaluated states based on factors like quality of life, affordability, and education. The state scored particularly well in education and health, ranking 5th in education and health metrics.
fox9.com Patch
Minnesota’s Ranking in Standard of Living
Minnesota is recognized as one of the best states to live in, currently ranked 5th overall according to a WalletHub study. This ranking is based on various factors that contribute to the standard of living.
Key Factors in Ranking
The WalletHub study evaluated states across five main dimensions:
Affordability
Economy
Education and Health
Quality of Life
Safety
Minnesota’s Performance in Key Categories
Here’s how Minnesota ranks in specific categories:
Category Minnesota’s Rank
Education and Health 5th
Quality of Life 10th
Affordability 14th
Safety 19th
Economy 29th
Notable Strengths
Education and Health: Minnesota excels in education and health, ranking 5th in these areas, which contributes significantly to its high standard of living.
Low Poverty Rate: The state has the third-lowest percentage of residents living in poverty, enhancing overall quality of life.
Comparison with Neighboring States
While Minnesota ranks 5th, its neighbor Wisconsin is slightly ahead at 4th place. Both states are recognized for their livability, but Minnesota’s strengths lie particularly in education and health metrics.
Overall, Minnesota’s combination of quality education, health services, and a relatively low poverty rate makes it a desirable place to live.
fox9.com Patch
————-
what is the difference between the liberals that took over the democrat party, and the liberals who founded the nation.
there is a reason why bill clinton liberals, are called neo-liberal. they have more in common with european liberals, who support austerity and the austrian school of economics(crank science).
american liberalism is no longer the liberalism of the enlightenment, bill clinton made american liberalism, into a Ayn Randian ideology:
” inequality will never be a concern of the professional class because meritocracy makes no sense without it. “Professional-class leaders … feel precious little sympathy for the less fortunate members of their own discipline—for the adjuncts frozen out of the market for tenure, for colleagues who get fired, or even for the kids who don’t get in to the ‘good’ colleges.” In particular, there is no real sympathy in this class for organized labor. “The idea that someone should command good pay for doing a job that doesn’t require specialized training seems to professionals to be an obvious fallacy. ”
the democratic party must be destroyed.
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/how-bill-clinton-and-the-democratic-party-killed-an-essential-part-of-liberalism/
How Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party killed an essential part of liberalism
History News Network
28 Mar 2016 at 13:13 ET
Bill Clinton says he will keep giving lucrative speeches “to pay our bills” while wife Hillary Clinton runs for the White House
New York Times columnist Timothy Egan recently wrote that Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has made “the word socialist…no longer toxic in the United States.” Perhaps ironically, the same cannot be said for the word liberal. For decades now, conservatives have gotten political mileage out of characterizing liberals as latté-sipping fops who despise religion and the family but love wasting other people’s tax dollars on their social engineering schemes.
Democratic politicians have implicitly endorsed this characterization by putting distance between themselves and liberalism in their self-descriptions and policy choices.
Many liberal voters, in turn, have turned away from this term because they do not want to associate themselves with the feckless politicians who, they believe, do not do enough to advance the values that are important to them. While Republicans think liberals are too radical, progressives find them too squishy.
Thomas Frank is clearly in the latter camp, as he explains in his new book, Listen, Liberal–or–What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? As the founder and former editor of The Baffler, one-time columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper’s Magazine, and author of 2004’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (among several other books), Frank has never been shy about criticizing the inane celebrations of the business class, the phony populism of the self-serving culture industry and the duplicity he sees at the heart of the conservative project. In his latest book, Frank turns his gaze to the recent history of the Democratic Party, and he does not like what he finds.
Specifically, he argues that its elected officials and house intellectuals have done little about the issue that, he believes, should be defining the nation’s contemporary politics: income inequality.
Inequality represents, in President Obama’s words, “the defining problem of our time.”
As a concept, though, inequality is but a shorthand for a nexus of contemporary problems. George Packer compellingly describes this phenomenon as “the unwinding” in his 2013 book of that title, while Frank prefers the Victorian phrase, “the social question.” Regardless of the name, however, Frank locates in inequality “the reason why some people find such significance in the ceiling height of the entrance foyer and the hop content of a beer while others will never believe in anything again.” Over the last thirty or forty years, he avers, the lives of working people have become “wretched” and “precarious.” Yet in the face of such a catastrophe, argues Frank, Democrats “cannot find the conviction or imagination to do what is necessary to reverse” the tide of inequality.
Instead, they emphasize the role of impartial, uncontrollable factors like technology and globalization, arguing that these problems can best be faced by obtaining the training and skills necessary to compete in the modern workplace.
While Democrats may believe that these positions represent the new face of liberalism, Frank argues that they abandon and even reject traditional liberal priorities. Higher levels of education will not create jobs or increase the strength of labor unions.
And by emphasizing the “inevitability” of technology and globalization, liberal politicians minimize the extent to which those developments are shaped by public policy. Such an analysis absolves them of the responsibility to harness the power of government to shape the way that economic and technological factors influence the working class. Another longstanding liberal value has been that of collective action.
Yet the Democratic emphasis on education and training heaps the entire burden of economic upheaval upon the individual displaced or soon-to-be-displaced worker
Frank argues that the source of the Democratic Party’s change in priorities has been a shift in its self-understanding. The party of Franklin Roosevelt once defined itself in class-oriented terms, as the representatives of workers in their battle against the “economic royalists.”
Today, however, the party owes allegiance to a different group. “The deeds and positions of the modern Democratic Party,” Frank argues, “can best be understood as a phase in the history of the professionals.” The interests of the working class once defined the Democratic Party, but that time has passed. Today, it is the concerns of the professional class that set the Democratic agenda.
Professionals sit atop a hierarchy, but it is not one of wealth, but of knowledge. “Teachers know what we must learn; architects know what our buildings must look like; economists know what the Federal Reserve’s discount rate should be; art critics know what is in good taste and what is in bad.”
Today’s Democratic Party is a coalition of many interest groups, but “professionals are the ones whose technocratic outlook tends to prevail,” according to Frank. Indeed, “it is not going too far to say that the views of the modern-day Democratic Party reflect, in virtually every detail, the ideological idiosyncrasies of the professional-managerial class.”
The political values of professionals only occasionally align with those of workers and the poor. Thus, instead of challenging the idea of meritocracy that underlies this stratification, Democratic policies tend to celebrate it. Since movements such as civil rights, feminism and gay liberation all exist to knock down barriers to meritocracy, they can be incorporated into the contemporary party’s priorities.
But Frank points out that inequality will never be a concern of the professional class because meritocracy makes no sense without it. “Professional-class leaders … feel precious little sympathy for the less fortunate members of their own discipline—for the adjuncts frozen out of the market for tenure, for colleagues who get fired, or even for the kids who don’t get in to the ‘good’ colleges.” In particular, there is no real sympathy in this class for organized labor. “The idea that someone should command good pay for doing a job that doesn’t require specialized training seems to professionals to be an obvious fallacy.”
Frank’s presentation of his “theory of the liberal class” is the most provocative part of the book. Much of the rest is historical in content: a walk through the recent past of the Democratic Party.
The combination of the debacle of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago and the humiliating defeat of George McGovern in the 1972 presidential race prompted a wave of Democratic self-assessment in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the “New Politics” movement, the articulation of the new philosophy of “Neo-Liberalism” in the pages of the Washington Monthly and Al From’s Democratic Leadership Council are perhaps the most prominent attempts to chart a new Democratic course.
Frank argues that such efforts represented a conscious “realignment of choice” in which the Democrats intentionally sought to distance themselves from workers in order to chase after the professional constituency. “In the 1930s, the blue-collar group was in the forefront,” wrote Democratic power broker Frederick Dutton in 1971. “Now it is the white-collar sector.” For Frank, the decline of Democratic interest in cultivating organized labor served as the source of many of the party’s problems. “Closing the door on working people’s organizations also meant closing the door on working people’s issues.”
The central figure in this narrative is, of course, Bill Clinton. The nation’s 42nd president found his positions by “triangulating” between liberal and conservative views, articulating a new “third way” of American politics. Historians have just begun taking up the period of the 1990s. So far they have generally characterized Clinton somewhat positively, presenting him as an innovative figure who responded to a changing world by revitalizing a tired doctrine.
In The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz presented a Clinton boxed in between, on the one hand, the conservative revolution represented by Ronald Reagan’s presidency and, on the other, the “self-deluding Democrats’ unrealistic assessments and expectations.” Triangulation, on this interpretation, was a “means to revive and reinforce the refurbishing of American liberalism.” Gil Troy approvingly quotes Al From, Clinton’s guru of centrism, in his claim that the president “saved progressive politics … by modernizing it.” For these historians, Clinton was liberalism’s savior.
To Frank, though, Clinton was responsible for the death of an essential part of liberalism. “Erasing the memories and the accomplishments of Depression-era Democrats was what Bill Clinton and his clique of liberals were put on earth to achieve.”
One of the president’s favorite sayings was that “the world we face today is the world where what you earn depends on what you can learn.” This reflects, in Frank’s interpretation, the core New Democratic principle that “you get what you deserve, and what you deserve is defined by how you did in school.” Given such a premise, which is “less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it,” it is hardly surprising that Democrats have little interest in championing the cause of workers.
Frank is critical of Clinton-era developments such as the president’s emphasis on balancing the budget in the face of a recession, the appointment of Goldman Sachs alum Robert Rubin and Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan to prominent positions, the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), the draconian crime bill that both Bill and Hillary Clinton now disavow (1994), welfare reform (1996) and the termination of Glass-Steagall (1999).
He is also displeased by President Obama’s decision to continue and expand the Bush bailouts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Despite the hopes of many of his liberal supporters, Obama has turned out to be a moderate on inequality. Taking office in a turbulent atmosphere in which a large constituency wanted banks (and bankers) to be punished for their role in ruining the economy, Obama did little on this front.
Frank’s interpretation of contemporary Democrats as those committed to the interests of the professional class explains why. “We must acknowledge the possibility that Obama and his team didn’t act forcefully to press an equality-minded economic agenda in those days and in the years that followed because they didn’t want to.”
Over the last several decades, many liberals and leftists have expressed dissatisfaction with the Democratic take on economic issues. What makes Frank’s book new, different and important is its offer of a compelling theory as to how and why the party of Jefferson, Jackson and Roosevelt is now so unlikely to champion the economic needs of everyday people. The Democratic abandonment of economic issues, Frank helps us understand, is due neither to cowardice nor to corruption. It is instead an expression of a coherent and consistent philosophy, albeit one that might not be terribly progressive.
Today, conservatives who are themselves extremists caricature liberals as extremists. At the same time, would-be consensus builders decry partisanship and suggest that the best policies are to be found midway between the two major parties, without regard to what these parties support. In such a looking-glass world, Listen, Liberal is a desperately needed corrective.
Mike O’Connor is a history adjunct in Georgia and author of A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism. He blogs at the website eight hundred words.
Purple Library Guy
Hrm. I’m prepared to believe that an identification with an educated professional/managerial class had something to do with Democratic moves to the right. I am NOT prepared to believe that deep-pocketed donors and organizations of same had nothing to do with it. Mr. Frank’s conclusion that, “The Democratic abandonment of economic issues, Frank helps us understand, is due neither to cowardice nor to corruption,” seems way overdone–there is plenty of corruption there, and the evidence is very strong.
Indeed, I might claim that part of the reason that the Democratic party came to be dominated by professional/managerial types uninterested in class struggle is precisely that they were the ones palatable to those paying the piper.
spud
Purple Library Guy:
yep, the new kind of liberal, neo liberals, chase the rich mans money, that’s for sure. so best to call neo-liberals for what they are, and are not. they are not the liberals that the majority of the founders were, born out of the american enlightenment.
this is a true american liberal, born out of the american enlightenment. by equating the the neo-liberals of today as liberals, slanders towering liberals of the founding fathers.
https://www.opednews.com/populum/page.php?f=Thomas-Paine–An-American-by-Rev-Robert-Vincig-090704-853.html
Thomas Paine – An American Liberal Lion
Thomas Paine – An American Liberal Lion
Written by Rev. Robert A. Vinciguerra Saturday, 04 July 2009 01:26
America is facing a crisis, though unlike the crisis she faced when
the Quaker pamphleteer wrote “The Crisis” in 1776, the United States
born out of that crisis faces ones of poverty, inequality, debt, under-
education education, and tyrannical opposition to personal freedoms.
Once again, these are the times that try men’s souls.
First, the author of this article would like to underscore that he is
aware of conservative movements to garner Paine as their own hero;
recalling a forgotten American revolutionary and conjuring up the
great man as a bastion of conservative ideals.
I say nay to the those who would paint the great Thomas Paine as a
sympathizer with the cause of modern conservatism, and specifically I
cast shame unto one Bob Basso, a man who is not a great pamphleteer
who writes for the benefit of all mankind, but one who is a horrid
jester, a propagator of lies, and performs for the musings of those
who purposely contort Paine’s spirit like so many decrepit whores.
I extend this condemnation also to Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, Newt
Gingrich, and all other similar manner of infinite intellectuals whose
goal it is to willfully pervert the message and sprit of Paine through
willful and calculated deception.
On The Liberalism of Thomas Paine
The conservatives who tout Paine’s name today are the very ideological
kin of those who defamed him over 220 years ago for rattling the cages
of the establishment.
They are the kith of men such as Edmund Burke,
as British Parliamentarian who condemned Paine’s views of “The Rights
of Man” in favor of ideals which conserved the political norm.
Indeed, in fact, in truth, and in all right, Thomas Paine is the kin
of modern liberals. Not liberals such as William Jefferson Clinton or
Harry Reid. No, I think he would have thought them to be too
conservative in their actions and too dispassionate in their politics.
Paine is in the lineage of liberals who are far more left than the
nation’s acceptable upper echelon.
Paine would consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his brethren. Yes,
the same man who conservatives love to hate, Paine would have had an
acute sense of brotherhood towards. After all, it was FDR who
established the national minimum wage of 25 cents in 1938.
Furthermore, it was again FDR who implemented Social Security, an
ideal which Paine was an advocate for in his 1796 work “Agrarian
Justice.”
I shall now proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is to create
a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person,
when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds
sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her
natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed
property:
And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every
person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as
they shall arrive at that age.
In his full throated defense of the French Revolution in “The Rights
of Man,” Thomas Paine also advocated free, universal education. He
proposed that his social agenda be paid for through income tax, just
as much of it is today.
While conservatives blast liberal policies that include universal
healthcare, universal education, social security, and workers right
due to the increasing national debt, Paine saw it differently. Paine
praised national debt in first, and perhaps most famous pamphlet,
“Common Sense”:
The debt we may contract doth not deserve our regard if the work be
but accomplished. No nation ought to be without a debt. A national
debt is a national bond; and when it bears no interest, is in no case
a grievance.
What was true in Paine’s mind then is also true today. If America’s
bond is a well educated population, free from the fear of
debilitating, life threatening diseases that conventional HMOs refuse
to cover, then it is worth every penny of debt that America incurs to
provide that level of medical freedom.
Imagine for a moment if the equal to Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein,
or Paine himself were alive today, living in poverty, without the
medical insurance to cure them from fatal, but preventable diseases.
Would we have them die and sacrifice their lives and the glorious
wonders of invention and discovery that they would bestow upon us all
in the dawn of the 21st century? I should hope, not, but the enemies
of Paine who today masquerade in his image would have exactly that be
the case.
On the subject of Paine’s religious convictions, those same ma squerading opponents of Paine’s ideology would have all believe that
Thomas Paine was a Christian as well as a conservative, however,
nothing could be further from the truth. Paine was a devout Deist.
Deists believed that a creator deity made the world, humans, and have
mankind a destiny that included rights to the world, but later ceased
to intervene in the lives of men. Another famous Thomas and founding
father, Jefferson , also subscribed to this philosophy, as did several
other of America’s founders.
Paine’s quintessential work on the subject, “The Age of Reason,”
details his views on religion, including Christianity, which were so
unpopular in his time that he was ostracized for them. He died a poor
and obscure death; his bones where defiled, and his only remaining
friend in the United States was Jefferson.
In the first chapter of his 1795 work, “Age of Reason,” Paine defined
in no unclear terms what his true religious beliefs are, and left any
repercussions to be damned.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or
Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify
and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
Thomas Paine and America in the 21st Century
Would Thomas Paine be disappointed in today’s American government?
Yes, but not because the President is perusing an agenda which will
provide universal healthcare to all citizens, but because the country
when he risked his life to create did not come to the basic conclusion
that heath care is a “natural right” (as he would’ve called it) 200
years prior.
Moreover, Paine would be so infuriated by the way that his own good
name has been used against his very philosophies, that he would
undoubtedly be inspired to write the greatest pamphlet of his career,
and in doing so becoming the mortal enemy of those propagandists who
defile his name for their conservative cause today.
When celebrating the birth of this greatest of all nations, this year
and any other year, remember the courage of Thomas Paine’s
convictions, and recall them accurately, and not through the
narcissistic delusions of his ideological enemies
different clue
Here is a Jay Reed video about the coming and onrolling oil shock coming from the anti-Iran war and the Hormuz closure. Jay Reed shows a clip of someone noting that the IranGov perceives time to be on its side as oil reaches $160 a barrel and then maybe higher too.
Now, I am as patriotic as the next Mainstreamal Normie Suburbamerican and don’t like in-the-abstract the thought of ‘losing a war’, I think this is a case where ‘losing the war’ could allow the non-KlanMAGA non-Right to ‘win the peace’ if it can get organized, practiced and mentally oriented to do so. But that requires the non-KlanMAGA non-Right to internalize the basic fact that there is no We in this country. There is only THEM and US. And one side of that binary wins by making the other side lose. Hopefully the Civil Cold War which the KlanMAGA Republicanfederate Party has deliberately engineered us into can be won by US and lost by THEM at a pre-violent Cold-War level.
The best thing that could happen would be Iran able to keep Hormuz closed right through to the end of the 2028 election to keep the price-pain level rising, rising, ever-rising and rising some more. Then hopefully the US side would be able to organize US-selves to help eachother survive better in a forcefield matrix background of oil at $160, then $200, and then maybe even higher. Hopefully the THEM side would be less organized to survive in such a price-matrix forcefield. Hopefully THEM would be made too weakened to be able to prevent US from becoming invulnerable to THEM’s aggression. That would put US in a position to be able to win the winnable among THEM over to US’s side and maybe tip the balance of force and power so far in US’s direction that US can begin to deMAGAtaminate the country.
As Yoda once said : ” ‘ We?’ ‘WE!? NO! US or US NOT. There is no ‘We ‘.”
If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.
If life hands you melons, make melonade.
If life hands you demons, make demonade.
But US have to be able to see it that way first.
Anyway, here is the video.
” This Is What’s Coming To America And It’s SCARY — Here’s Why ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz_TmE5ifEc
Like & Subscribe
The price of gas is falling. These content creators are as much grifters as is Trump, in sentiment at least if not in scale. They are really exploiting the Boo Factor. Every day for the last 16 years at least, some of these same content creators, heavily-influenced by grifting bored ex-military, have been declaring WW3. No shit, every single day my feed has a video with WW3 in the title. The boy who cried grift, anyone?
different clue
@L&S,
You may be right. Time will tell. We shall see.
Still, as they say at the NRA, it is better to have readiness and not need it than to need
readiness and not have it.
different clue
Here is an interesting video from a thing called MS Now. I really don’t know what that is.
But this particular video is about the AI Data-Center Industrial Complex’s invasion and conquest of many large land footprints in Texas to build their data centers . . . and a rising negative reaction to it in the rural Texas areas targeted by this digi-colonial invasion. Several Trump-voting rural residents are quoted at length about how they plan to vote for Talarico and any other Democrat who offers any slender hope of slowing down, stopping or maybe even rolling back the tide of data center conquest.
Could this be emerging as a building surprise to some Republican office-seekers in Texas?
” ‘WE’VE HAD ENOUGH’: Meet the GOP TX residents voting BLUE over AI data centers ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvD9M5oRd2o
different clue
That video I offered just above “looks” real to me. Maybe it is AI slop sewage but it doesn’t look like it. It seems real to me.
Here, on the other hand, is something that looked like well-crafted AI slop-sewage to me. After a minute of it, I slider-barred through it to see if it would have the slightest trace of anything other than the AI newsbot talking. It did not. So I stopped watching.
I offer it here just so that people can take a look at the ” uncanny valley” AI-slopsewage feel of it. If anyone else decides it is real and wants to say so, and say what I missed, that would be fine. I would take another look for traces of reality. But for now I take it as just another warning about all the AI sewage bubbling up out of billions of toilets all over the Internet.
“Mark Carney DESTROYS Trump at NATO —7 Seconds That Shocked the World”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqTy2VU8f14
(What a deliciously click-baity headline. But a slider-bar view-ahead revealed zero trace of any such actual “7 Seconds at NATO” footage.)
Dan Kelly
‘No shit, every single day my feed has a video with WW3 in the title. The boy who cried grift, anyone?’
I imagine the people buying judge nap’s survival kits will in fact be among the first to die if the shit really hits the fan.
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=F2HH7J-Sx80&list=RDF2HH7J-Sx80
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2HH7J-Sx80&list=RDF2HH7J-Sx80
—
Colonel MacGregor is attempting to form a new national party and run for president I imagine.
MacGregor does a decent job calling out the Zionist Power Configuration.
He also supports ICE wholeheartedly.
ICE went from barely existent under Bush Jr to fully formed and operational under Obama, who praised Homan as an excellent deporter when Homan was working for Obama, who himself was working for…
—
The most important antiwar vote in my lifetime was the vote against going into Afghanistan. Even the vaunted ron paul – who economic libertarians hold up as the pinnacle of virtue on par with jesus himself – well, old ron paul failed miserably as he voted in favor. Only barbara lee voted against but she votes in favor of most of the appropriation bills funding everything.
They all do.
—
John Mearsheimer, a ‘realist’ who thinks the Iraq invasion under Papa Bush was okay on ‘US interest’ grounds but the 2003 invasion was Zionist when in fact it’s been largely all Zionist all the time for a long time…well, Mearsheimer thinks ‘Mother Russia’ – do even half of the Russian populace refer to their own country as ‘mother russia’?…it reeks of weird ‘homeland’-ish type language – anyway, Mearsheimer has recently called for the motherland of russia to ‘tactically’ nuke targets in Europe.
Our own wargaming says that our own use of ‘tactical’ nukes will always without fail end up in full blown nuclear war.
Evidently ‘mother russia’ can do it without the same consequences.
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=aAm5KTWvUTk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAm5KTWvUTk
different clue
If Mearsheimer really called for Russia to tac-nuke targets in Europe, that would mean that Mearsheimer has lost his mind, given up and become an Accelerationihilist.
different clue
Here’s a little demonstration of how individual social media posters and such can keep mentioning Trump-Epstein in seemingly unrelated contexts.
“That’s sick”
https://www.reddit.com/r/middleclasshq/comments/1tvqyh7/thats_sick/
Dan Kelly
different clue,
It seems Mearsheimer is essentially parroting the ‘Karaganov Doctrine’ which goes something like this:
”When preemptively (although belatedly) starting a military operation against the West, we, acting on old assumptions, did not expect the enemy to unleash a full war.
So we did not use active nuclear deterrence/intimidation tactics from the very outset.
And we are still dragging our feet.
By so doing we not only doom hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine (including losses from a plunging quality of life) and tens of thousands of our men to death, but we also do a disservice to the whole world.
The aggressor, which is de facto the West, remains unpunished. This clears the way for further aggression.
Greater reliance on nuclear deterrence, and accelerated movement up the escalation ladder are designed to convince the West that it has three options regarding the conflict in Ukraine.
First, to retreat with dignity.
Second, to be defeated, to flee as it did from Afghanistan, and to face a wave of armed and sometimes thuggish refugees.
Or, third, the exact same, plus nuclear strikes on its territory and the accompanying societal disintegration.
It is Russian tradition to deliver a crushing defeat to European invaders and then agree on a new order.
Our enemies must know that if they do not retreat, the legendary Russian patience will run dry, and the death of each Russian soldier will be paid for with thousands of lives on the other side.”
https://archive.ph/0jBQv
—
Mearsheimer brought up the nukes as the not-too-far-off result of larger conventional escalatory measures by both sides.
But he strongly insinuates that this is the only way Europe and ‘the west’ will learn, and he then wonders aloud how the west might respond even though we already know the answer to that and so does he but he continues in this same vein.
This is after bringing up the fact that the Ukranians attacked ‘the bomber leg of Russia’s nuclear triad’ – something that was ‘unthinkable during the cold war.’
He the goes on to say that:
‘We felt…we meaning the UK an the US mainly but the west more generally…that it was okay for Ukraine to go after one leg of the Russian strategic nuclear triad.
I actually found that quite shocking at the time. I still find it quite shocking.
And this gets back to Karaganov’s point – and the point of others in the Russian elite – that the West doesn’t believe that Russia has meaningful red lines.
The west doesn’t respect the fact that we’re a nuclear power.
They don’t understand that they can’t or they shouldn’t be able to send Ukranian forces into Kursk in 2024. This is supposed to be unthinkable.
I think quite correctly, that they didn’t make it clear at the time back in 2024 that what the west and the Ukranians did was unacceptable. In other words, a lot of people inside of Russia feel that Putin has not put his foot down early enough.
And then question becomes, what does putting your foot down mean?
And as you pointed out, it seems that they’re talking about now is bombing Kiev in ways that they haven’t bombed Kiev in the past. And what they did this past Sunday night is the first step in that direction.
I’m not sure that’s enough.
I don’t think that will have that much of an effect on how people in the west think.
And in fact you may be right that this is probably going to cause the west to double down in its support for Ukraine. Well, if that’s the case, the Russians will escalate and that means they’ll attack with conventional weapons a target inside of Europe.
And if that doesn’t work, they’ll escalate again.
This is where we’re at. We’re going up the escalation ladder.
So let’s look at phase two of that. Let’s just presume that yes, Russia hits. Then you get a lot of Zelensky saying ‘Oh my god, please come and help us.’ And the Europeans are angry and whatever.
So they don’t back down. They double down and they send more stuff.
And then Russia says, okay, we’re now going to execute phase two, which they have published this list of enterprises and drone factories, missile factories, etc. All throughout, from Great Britain all the way across and they actually make good on that one.
So now then, and in concurrence with that, they say if that doesn’t work, the next one is tactical nuclear weapons.
Will that finally get the attention of western Europe?
I think it will.
I mean, the question you have to ask yourself – if Russia uses nuclear weapons – what will the west do?
What are you going to do at that point?
Because if you counter with nuclear weapons of your own, the Russians are likely to retaliate and you’re going up the escalation ladder. Right?
One could argue that if the Russians attack with conventional weapons in a European country and say at the same time that if this is not sufficient and you don’t understand our red lines we want you to fully appreciate that we will turn to nuclear weapons next.
The idea that you’re going to threaten their survival via Ukraine, that you’re going to give Ukraine weapons to hit Mother Russia and kill large numbers of Russian civilians is categorically unacceptable.
And we are willing to play hard ball up to the point where we are willing to use nuclear weapons to cause you to change your behavior.
If they do that, then you might not have to ue nuclear weapons.
But you do not want to underestimate how dangerous this situation is.’
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?t=3101&v=vf7wor54aNg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf7wor54aNg&t=3101s
—
Sergey Alexandrovich Karaganov is another fascinating figure. He is from a ‘mixed’ Russian and Jewish family but he has deep Jewish roots on his maternal side.
He is a member of both the Trilateral Commission and the CFR in addition to all his positioins inside Russia itself.
Karaganov has made some mild statements ‘cautioning’ the Zionist entity about ‘preemptive strikes’ but that is about all. He recognizes and has always been very concerned about Iran as a major power. He talks about the sad reality of nuclear mutually-assured destruction but has also said that it pardoxically can help ‘keep the peace.’
BUT he makes exceptions galore for the Zionist entity as compared to its neighbors even while saying at the surface level that there should be a balance between the Zionist entity, Iran, and the Arab states.
He in fact doesn’t ultimately believe Iran should have nukes and has called for Russia to ‘mediate’ the situation while saying that the UAE, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt – in that order – are the best-suited Arab states to ‘stabilize’ the situation.
Russia should also assist other ‘majority states’ to nuclearize.
Of course, the entities named are already Zionized, with the UAE being the most, Saudi the second most, and Egypt the least but still strongly supportive of the Zionist entity overall despite claims and occasional minor actions to the contrary to appease its masses.
Here’s Karaganov:
‘A sustainable nuclear balance must be established in the Middle East between: Israel, if and when it overcomes its fall from grace due to the atrocities it committed in Gaza;
Iran, if it withdraws its pledge to destroy Israel;
and one of the Gulf countries or their commonwealth.
The most acceptable candidate to represent the entire Arab world is the UAE.
Suitable alternatives point to Saudi Arabia and/or Egypt.
Naturally, the World Majority countries should move towards nuclear status at a measured pace, while training relevant personnel and elites. Russia can and should share its experience with them.’
https://karaganov.ru/en/decades-of-wars/
[In fact, Iran hasn’t ever ‘pledged to destroy’ the Zionist entity]
different clue
Here is a post from the technology subreddit called: ” Spammers are flooding Reddit with fake posts designed to show up in AI search results ”
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1twzntr/spammers_are_flooding_reddit_with_fake_posts/
The article itself is on techspot, and is called ” Spammers are flooding Reddit with fake posts designed to show up in AI search results
The spam campaign that doesn’t want to sell you anything – it wants to train AI to recommend it”
https://www.techspot.com/news/112654-spammers-flooding-reddit-fake-posts-designed-show-up.html
It was bound to happen. Surely others are also mal-training AI to do this too.
Who gets charged a tiny bit of money every time someone clicks on an AI link? How many such AI links would have to be posted as charge-somebody-a-fee clickbait morsels before whoever is charged every time an AI clickbait morsel is clicked on start losing so much money that they try torturing their government into outlawing certain aspects of AI, or perhaps outlawing certain kinds of AI altogether?
Could a mass movement of disgruntled internet readers and searchers leaderlessy decide to flood every every internet venue with so many petafloptillions of clickable AI sewage morsels that the places paying for all those AI sewage morsel someone-clicked-the-link charges that the powerful victims of this flood of AI sewage decide to do what I just hoped for in the prior paragraph?
Could clever people invent AI SewageBots written to create and post/upload/whatever petafloptillions of AI sewage morsels all by themselves without any further human intervention to where the owners of the AI sewage-flooded venues are indeed forced to either take action or go extinct under the rising flood of AI sewage?
Can the “internet” be worked that way even in theory?
different clue
And here from the KeepItQuarterly subreddit ( which may be a pop-up political action subreddit created just for the subject it is addressing) is a post called:
“The SEC wants to cut your window
into Wall Street”
https://keepitquarterly.org/?rdt_cid=5529276895566617943&utm_campaign=broad_investing&utm_content=blackout_bad_news&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=reddit
(“Heads up: SEC Rule S7-2026-15 would let public companies hide bad numbers for six months at a time. Insiders dump their shares before disclosure, retail buys the bag.
Comment is open till early July” )