Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 4, 2025

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 4, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

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

‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges

[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]

Judges Who Rule Against Trump Become Target of New MAGA War

Malcolm Ferguson, May 2, 2025 [The New Republic]

At least 11 federal judges and their families have been threatened and harassed since they ruled against President Trump on issues of deportations, federal funding, and his war on “wokeness.”

The judges, under anonymity, told Reuters that they had received multiple intimidating calls and emails to their homes and offices. Some have been subject to the disturbing “pizza box” method, in which antagonists will anonymously send a pizza to the home of a judge or their relatives just to show that they know where they live.

This is only compounded by the countless attacks and doxxing attempts that people like Laura Loomer and Elon Musk have made on X. When U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled against Trump’s illegal deportation of 137 men under the Alien Enemies Act in March, Loomer and Musk shared photos of his daughter, while their army of keyboard warriors called for the execution or arrest of Boasberg and the rest of his family. Loomer did the same to Judge John McConnell after he blocked Trump from freezing education grants, posting a picture of his daughter who had worked for the Education Department. Loomer’s post conveniently omitted that McConnell’s daughter left the department before Trump was even inaugurated….

You Already Knew He’s The WORST President Ever— Did You Also Know He’s The Most Blatantly Corrupt?

Howie Klein, April 26, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

…On Thursday, Drew Harwell and Jeremy Merrill reported that shady characters have poured tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s meme coin since he advertised on Wednesday that top purchasers could join him for an “intimate private dinner” next month. “The holders of 27 crypto wallets have each acquired more than 100,000 $TRUMP coins, stakes worth about a million dollars each, since noon on Wednesday, when the team announced that the 220 top coin holders would be rewarded with a ‘night to remember’ on May 22 at the president’s Trump National Golf Club outside Washington. Crypto wallets are generally anonymous, making it challenging to identify who the purchasers were.”

They also advertised something so blatantly illegal that they partially removed it, no doubt at the insistence of White House lawyers: an offer of a tour of the White House for the 25 top $TRUMP coins purchasers. Now they’re just offering a tour but with no indication of what. This idea of offering direct presidential access to those who pay into a project benefiting the Trump personal bottom line would be enough to get him impeached if House Republicans weren’t so wedded to enabling his criminality. Not one House Republican has spoken out about this.

Harwell and Merrill wrote that “the biggest buyer acquired 2 million coins worth about $24 million.” That’s a substantial bribe, especially coming from a criminal in China who desperately needs a pardon from Trump. “Taken together, the 27 wallets acquired more than 8 million $TRUMP coins, worth about $100 million as of Thursday afternoon…

How Trump Accidentally Sabotaged His Own Case Against Abrego Garcia

Greg Sargent, May 3, 2025 [The New Republic]

He has now said it right out in the open—not once but twice. In two major interviews, President Donald Trump openly declared that he has the power to bring the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States. And on both occasions, Trump said straight out that he is not doing so because administration lawyers have told him he doesn’t have to—or that he shouldn’t.

This has been widely seen as an admission that Trump is defying the Supreme Court, which has directed the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Yes, it is that. But these two moments are also their own story. They offer a unique glimpse into the deep rot of bad faith infesting Trump and Stephen Miller’s broader project to expand the president’s removal powers into something extraordinarily vast and entirely unaccountable….

Men DOGEbags at Work

‘There’s Never Been a More Blatant Corporate Incursion Into the Public Sector Than DOGE’ 

[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]

Jeff Hauser is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project:

“We, in general, track corporate influence in politics, with a particular focus on the executive branch. And there has never been a more blatant corporate incursion into the public sector than DOGE, which reflects the privatization of our domestic policy, and increasingly our foreign policy as well, by people who are not even bothering to give up any of their private sector ties, and actually join the government for a few years—which we’re not fans of; we believe in career civil servants. But these people aren’t even doing that much. They’re just continuing to run, say, Tesla and SpaceX while running large swaths of the government, and never having been put before the Senate for nomination.”

Rule by Contractor: DOGE is not about waste and efficiency—it’s about privatization.

Brett Heinz, April 3, 2025 [The American Prospect]

Musk’s Trump ties could wipe away $2.3 billion in legal exposure 

[Musk Watch, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]

DOGE Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 04-01-2025]

DOGE aide dismantling CFPB owns stock in companies that could benefit from cuts 

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 04-30-2025]

Michael Lewis’s Paean to Federal Workers Hits Differently Under DOGE

Sam Rosenfeld, May 4, 2025 [The New Republic]

While Elon Musk paints federal bureaucrats as inefficient or worse, Lewis and other literary essayists shine a light on the quiet heroes of the civil service….

…the essay collection Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service …. ultimately make the implicit case for bureaucracy—the core rationale for why we use government to perform certain tasks, and why lawmakers in that government would want to grant significant autonomy to unelected agents to carry them out. The writers’ shared instinct for character observation and portraiture, moreover, helps to elucidate a distinct ethos and personality type common in the civil service. It’s a culture that belies the image of a rogue deep state that animates Donald Trump’s demolition squad, whether in its vanguardist iteration under the Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and his Project 2025, or in the edgelord tech-right anarchism suffusing Elon Musk’s DOGE. But it also stands unmistakably at odds with those wreckers’ own vision of work and collective purpose….

Teenage Cybercriminal: DOGE’s “Big Balls” Goes Primetime

Jim Stewartson, May 02, 2025 [MindWar]

As I wrote, Coristine is a cybercriminal, who was a member of “The Com,” a cyberstalking and hacking network that included “764,” a Satanic Nazi pedophile cult, that extorts minors for illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Coristine also had a website called “Tesla.Sexy” which had links to CSAM, the KKK, and neo-Nazi content.

Note: Chris Krebs who discovered Coristine’s connection to cybercriminal network “The Com” was specifically targeted by Donald Trump through an illegal Executive Order.

To complete the brief backgrounder on “Big Balls,” it must be noted that he happens to be, of all things, the grandson of KGB double agent Valery Martynov who was executed in Russia for being a traitor to the Soviet Union in 1987 — after covertly working for the FBI and CIA for years

Strategic Political Economy

Do You Believe In Magic?

Aurelien, April 30, 2025, via Naked Capitalism 05-01-2025]

…In one of my very earliest essays, I pointed out that the West has very largely lost its capability to think and plan in any kind of long-term sense. Thus, we are continually out-pointed and disappointed when dealing with states who at least make an effort to look to the future in an organised fashion….

Visions are easy, but the West has progressively lost the capacity to formulate and operate mechanisms for putting them into practice. In part, this is because there is very little inherited understanding left of the necessary practical steps. For example, re-shoring manufacture of some pharmaceuticals would involve activities that most politicians and pundits have never heard of, let alone be able to describe. Finding and importing supplies of chemicals, designing and building factories, recruiting and training skilled technicians and graduates in chemical engineering (having set up the necessary courses first, naturally), dealing with all the various health and safety hazards, setting up a distribution system for the products … I doubt if much of our current ruling class and its parasites has any idea even of the steps involved, let alone how to sequence them. By contrast, there’s a great deal of experience in closing factories, making workforces redundant and tying yourself to overseas suppliers….

The Anglo-Saxon (now more broadly western) fixation with archetypal heroic entrepreneurs and university dropouts has obscured the historical fact that no significant industry, and no key technology, has ever been developed without some level of planning and government encouragement. Very quickly, for example, states realised that iron ore, coal, and steel-making capability were important national assets, and acted accordingly. The modern idea that even strategically-important goods can come from anywhere so long as they are cheap would have seemed incomprehensible even half a century ago….

The British Conservative government elected in 1979 decided on an entirely different approach. Rather than imitating Britain’s successful competitors, it decided to do the opposite of what they did, and essentially to rely on magic. Now I don’t use that word idly. I don’t mean magic in the austere High Magic sense, but in the vernacular sense of rituals and spells which are supposed to bring about changes in the real world. Thus, all the government had to do was to create the right magical environment (low taxes, few regulations) and the “animal spirits” (interesting choice of words, that) of entrepreneurs would spontaneously do the rest, through the “magic” (interesting choice of words, that) of the “market.” The magician, however, having summoned up these powers, should make sure to stay well away from the working.

This ideology, entirely devoid of any empirical foundation at all, came to dominate quickly, because it was culturally acceptable in a country that disliked vulgar manufacturing, which preferred manipulation of abstruse symbols to actually doing real work, and which secretly hoped to find a magic lamp which would generate money without the need for actual effort. This was most obvious in attempts to control inflation, which, the government argued, was the principal obstacle to a national economic revival, because it “complicated the calculations” of businessmen, the poor things. Because inflation was believed to be a result of too much money in the economy, then the amount of money had to be reduced by making it expensive to borrow, hence high interest rates would bring inflation down, no matter how paradoxical it might seem to attempt to reduce prices by putting them up. But that’s magic for you. Of course, the rate of inflation could be measured in many different ways, and the flow of “money” in the economy depended on which definition you used. Nothing daunted, the government began to “target” the growth of M3, one of the definitions of money, convinced that through symbolic manipulation and the recital of incomprehensible formulae, the rate of inflation would come down. (Thus, the story of the dazed Conservative MP leaving the Chamber after one more jargon-infested announcement by the Chancellor, and muttering “I thought M3 was a Motorway.”)….

I dwell a little on this story because it was the first real sighting of the faith-based approach to government which has characterised the modern era. Instead of doing things, governments “create the conditions” for others to do things, and sit back in hopeful anticipation. Serial failures, in true New Age fashion, meant that the spell was not right, or more usually that it was not used with enough will and conviction. The idea that governments should actually do things is considered a quaint anachronism. The idea was to have a Court Magician who would make amazing things happen: the most recent incarnation is the misnamed AI, whose output can fool you into thinking it’s an oracle, if you don’t look too hard.

Rise of the rentiers

Global power shift

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Netanyahu at JNS Conference: Israel will maintain military control over Gaza, will not install PA 

[Ynet, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]

Gaza humanitarian aid ship bombed by drones in waters off Malta 

[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]

Israel’s International Blackmail Campaign (w/ Norman Finkelstein) 

[The Chris Hedges Report, via Naked Capitalism 04-28-2025]

Oligarchy

The group chats that changed America 

[Semafor, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]

…Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.

This constellation of rolling elite political conversations revolve primarily around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures. None of their participants was surprised to see Trump administration officials firing off secrets and emojis on the platform last month….

“It’s the same thing happening on both sides, and I’ve been amazed at how much this is coordinating our reality,” said the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who was for a time a member of a group chat with Andreessen. “If you weren’t in the business at all, you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently — and [they’re] not. It’s a small group of people who talk to each other and overlap between politics and journalism and a few industries.”….

…The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to Rufo, a healthy development.

“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” he said. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end — so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”

Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”….

But their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion,” wrote one of their key organizers, Sriram Krishnan, a former partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (typically styled a16z) who is now the White House senior policy adviser for AI.

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 04-01-2025]

Nikhil Pal Singh

@nikhil_palsingh

They really think that they are the only essential human agents and the rest of us are disposable. A stunning and virulent delusion. The enemies of society now rule it.

Quote

vitrupo

@vitrupo

Apr 29

Marc Andreessen says when AI does everything else, VC might be one of the last jobs still done by humans.

Let’s Not Mix Trump Up With The U.S.A.— And Let’s Hope No One Overseas Does Either

Howie Klein, April 26, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

[Trump’s] pathology— his inability to distinguish between personal grievance and national interest— isn’t just a personality flaw; it’s a foundational threat to the U.S. and the world. In his mind, an indictment is an act of war against the country, an election loss is evidence of treason and criticism of him personally, whether domestic or international, is an attack on America itself. This fusion of ego and nation is textbook authoritarianism, and, as we’ve been watching since January, it warps every institution it touches. When Trump talks about “retribution,” he’s not talking policy— he’s talking vengeance. And when millions cheer him on, it’s not because they believe in America, but because they believe in his America: a place where power is personal, loyalty is blind and the law bends to the will of the strongman.

Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston, Northwestern University, 1945), pp 60-62.

Another interesting aspect of Harrington’s theory of mixed government is the moralistic elements in his thinking. The reason that monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy degenerate into tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy, he tells us, is that they contain no counter-balance to the natural tendency in man for passion to usurp the rule of reason. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that when the one, the few, or the many rule by reason, we have the three simple pure forms of government, and that when passion creeps in we have their corruptions.47 From this position, it followed that the whole art of constitution making was so to contrive the state that the institutions of government would compensate for and overcome the natural evil in man.48 Harrington thought that this could be done by mixed government…

The citizen may be sinful, he wrote, “and yet the common-wealth bee perfect,” and “the Citizen, where the common Wealth is perfect can never commit any such crime, as can render it imperfect or bring it unto a natural dissolution.” 49 Harrington did not believe, as did Richard Baxter,50  that governments stood or fell because they were in the hands of good or evil men. He had no faith in the adequacy of the rectitude of even good men for the task of government. Hence we have his insistence on the Machiavellian principle that government is by law and not by men. “Give us good men and they will make us good Lawes,” he declared, “is the Maxime of a Demogogue. .. . But give us good orders, and they will make us good men, is the Maxime of a Legislator, and the most infallible in the Politickes.”51

[Harrington warns that “modern prudence” enables  government that becomes] “an Art whereby some man, or some few men, subject a City or Nation, and rule it according unto his or their private interest.” 52 Law being the very basis of government, two consequences followed. The first of these was the importance of the state resting upon a fundamental law or constitution which could not be changed….

All Authoritarians Nullify The Independence Of Their Nation’s Judiciary— Trump Is Doing Exactly That

Howie Klein, May 1, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]

Steve Inskeep interviewed Steve Bannon for Morning Edition yesterday. Like the Project 2025 extremists Bannon is dismissive of the independent role of the federal courts. He “took issue with judges who have blocked many of Trump’s actions….

On Tuesday, Kate Shaw, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, warned that the courts aren’t likely to save us from Trumpism. Shaw, who agrees we’re facing a constitutional crisis, wrote that “perhaps more than a constitutional crisis, we’re in a rule of law crisis. And while the courts are caught in the middle of this crisis, it’s not something they can adequately remedy. The basic proposition of the rule of law is that we are a society of laws, not of men. Government actors must wield their power consistent with rules that are known in advance, so people understand what’s expected of them and what consequences will attach to particular actions.”

[TW: “a rule of law crisis” sounds to me like the real problem USA is no longer a republic, but an plutocratic oligarchy. So of course we have rule of men — very rich men — not law. ]

Trumpland

Chris Hedges, May 03, 2025

The corporate coup d’état and collapse of American democracy began long before Trump. He is simply snuffing out what remains….

All of these pillars of an open society, as I detail in my book “Death of the Liberal Class,” were degraded long before Trump. The press, including public broadcasting, academia, the Democratic Party, a corporatized and banal culture, a judiciary that serves the billionaire class and a Congress bought by lobbyists, have been disemboweled. They are easily picked off. Few want to rise up to defend them. They sold us out. Let them die.

“The loss of the liberal class creates a power vacuum filled by speculators, war profiteers, gangsters, and killers, often led by charismatic demagogues,” I wrote in “Death of the Liberal Class” in 2010. “It opens the door to totalitarian movements that rise to prominence by ridiculing and taunting the liberal class and the values it claims to champion. The promises of these totalitarian movements are fantastic and unrealistic, but their critiques of the liberal class are grounded in truth.”

Fascism is birthed by a bankrupt liberalism that has surrendered its traditional role in a capitalist democracy. It no longer ameliorates the worst excesses of the ruling class and the empire by instituting incremental and piecemeal reforms. It scolds and moralizes the disenfranchised workers it betrayed.

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Virginia Giuffre’s father insists she didn’t die by suicide: ‘Somebody got to her’

Ronny Reyes, May 1, 2025 [New York Post]

In a 2019 tweet, Giuffre said resolutely that she was not suicidal.

“I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape or form am I suicidal,” she wrote. “I have made this known to my therapist and GP – If something happens to me – in the sake of my family do not let this go away and help me to protect them,” she wrote “Too many evil people want to see me [quieted].”

Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre says she has just days left to live after getting hit by school bus

Anthony Blair, March 31, 2025 [New York Post]

“Still no Epstein files”: MAGA conspiracy theory in crisis after victim’s death

Amanda Marcotte, April 30, 2025 [Salon]

It’s getting tougher to believe that Trump will expose the secret satanic Democratic cabal ruling the world

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

How Shareholder Payouts Fuel Corporate Profiteering

David Sirota, April 30, 2025 [The Lever]

Corporations are preparing to cite Trump’s trade war as justification for raising prices — just as they previously cited pandemic supply chain slowdowns to raise prices. It’s a familiar tactic: They want us to believe macroeconomic forces mean they have no choice but to fleece us.

However, a new Federal Reserve study notes that ever-higher prices have coincided with a sudden increase in corporate profit-taking. Those profit increases are fueled by a quest for dividend payouts to company shareholders, rather than for resources to reinvest in companies — all while employee compensation declines….

…Whereas “profits averaged 13.9 percent of national income over the 2010-19 period,” a surge began in 2020, and by the end of 2024, corporate profits comprised more than 16 percent of national income….

More Americans are financing groceries with buy now, pay later loans — and more are paying those bills late, survey says 

[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 04-27-2025]

Trumpillnomics

Waiting for the Supply Shock: It’s coming, and we know approximately when.

David Dayen April 30, 2025 [The American Prospect]

…And much of this damage is unavoidable even if Trump reversed everything today. The realities of time mean that there’s now a big gap in shipments. And you don’t just call up a supplier and say “Restart production” again and have it happen. That supplier may have moved on to other orders, or gone out of business. Shipping experts estimate at least two months of impact from the current three weeks of depressed cargo, and it won’t be just three weeks.

So this is why UPS announced 20,000 job cuts yesterday. This is why companies are pulling back all their forecasts of future earnings, because they are essentially unknowable, and desperately cutting spending wherever they can. This is why, during earnings season, Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive and Adidas and practically everyone else are talking about price increases and cuts to their outlook. This is why people are posting their Temu and Shein orders with giant “import charges” attached (that’s about a different tariff, the closure of a loophole that allowed direct shipments from China). This is why farmers, seeing China cancel pork shipments in one of the retaliatory measures, are already in a state of depression and begging for bailouts. (Which cannot come unless Congress replenishes the farm bailout fund, as I explained last week.)

FTC opens the floodgates for tariff profiteering

[Pluralistic, via The Big Picture April 27, 2025]

Have you heard that tariffs are going to drive prices up? Me too. There’s a good reason we’re hearing a lot of talk about tariffs prices: tariffs are a tax that is ultimately paid by consumers. Trump plans to raise $6t in tariffs, making them the largest tax increase in US history: But that $6t is just for starters. If there’s one thing we learned from the pandemic supply-chain shocks, it’s that corporate CEOs never let an emergency go to waste. Bosses, knowing that you’d been warned to expect higher prices, went ahead and jacked up their prices way over inflation, blaming it on covid, on stimulus checks, on Biden, on the phase of the moon. Blaming it on anything – except greed. That’s why we called it “excuseflation”

Americans Really Dislike Trump. But They’re About to Truly Hate Him.

Jason Linkins, May 2, 2025 [The New Republic]

Last weekend, Apollo Global economist Torsten Slok published a preview of coming attractions in the form of a report documenting what he’s calling the imminent “Voluntary Trade Reset Recession.” As Slok documents, Trump’s economy—though quite sluggish—has been boosted by the fact that inventories rose rapidly as firms acted in anticipation of tariffs being imposed. Now that tariffs have arrived, the sugar high is over and collapse is on the way. The most straightforward way of looking at the future is on page 4 of Slok’s report….

The latter half of that prediction may well be the more devastating part. As Marketwatch’s Steve Goldstein highlighted, Slok said that “small businesses that account for more than 80 percent of employment and capital expenditure don’t have the working capital to pay tariffs.” In other words, Trumpnomics will soon be best known for that which is absent: products on the shelves of retailers, and businesses on the streets where you live, now shuttered.

Here is where the Wall Street versus Main Street divide is going to be keenly illuminated as Trump’s tariffs start the economic bloodletting. The White House has rather persistently explained away the turmoil its tariffs have wrought as a harm done only to high-flying financiers, and claimed that the benefits to ordinary people would soon emerge….

Traffic at the Port of Los Angeles set to plunge amid tariffs

[Los Angeles Times, via The Big Picture April 29, 2025]

Arrivals will drop by 35% as essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers have ceased, and cargo coming out of Southeast Asia locations is much softer than normal,” according to Executive Director Gene Seroka for the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners.

SPOOKED BY TRADE WARS, TRUMP OFFICIALS HOARD SUPPLIES: ‘IT WOULD BE STUPID NOT TO!’ 

[Rolling Stone, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]

Trump’s Weakness Shows Through

David Dayen, May 2, 2025 [The American Prospect]

Today on TAP: The executive order purporting to cut NPR and PBS funding was supposed to go through Congress, but Trump had to go it alone….

The only durable way to defund public media is to defund CPB. And Trump was on the road to doing that with a simple majority vote in Congress. Then he apparently pulled the plug and went it alone. Reading between the lines, we can presume that there aren’t enough votes for rescinding CPB funding, or for a rescission package that is toxic because it’s attached to a president with a 39 percent approval rating.

Tariffs are Already Stalling the Economy 

[Apricitas Economics, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]

Eroding US brand, has made the country 20% poorer, Citadel chief says.

[Semafor, via The Big Picture April 27, 2025]

Though the president may have identified real problems, his methods to solve them don’t appear to be working, and are unlikely to revive American manufacturing, Griffin told Semafor’s Gina Chon at the World Economy Summit in Washington, DC.

Workers Overheated and Died Under Trump’s Workplace Safety Nominee

Sam Pollak, April 30, 2025 [The Lever]

David Keeling, the nominee to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), previously helped oversee health and safety operations at companies including UPS and Amazon, where workplace injuries and heat-related illnesses are common. In the six years that Keeling worked as a top safety executive at the two companies, OSHA fined the businesses a collective $2 million for more than 300 workplace safety citations, including for heat-related illnesses as well as deaths that occurred amid extreme temperatures, The Lever found…..

Only Teslas Exempt from New Auto Tariffs Thanks to 85% Domestic Content Rule 

[Fuel Arc, via Naked Capitalism 04-30-2025]

Predatory finance

The Corporate Crusade Of Trump’s Top Retirement Cop

Katya Schwenk and Luke Goldstein, May 2, 2025 [The Lever]

Daniel Aronowitz, Trump’s Labor Department nominee to oversee the retirement and benefits accounts of more than 150 million Americans, is the president of an insurance company that provides liability coverage to employers and retirement fund managers at risk of being sued for squandering retirees’ savings.

Fewer lawsuits against Aronowitz’s customers means fewer payouts that his company would have to cover — even if that means less money for retirees.

Aronowitz’s company, Encore Fiduciary (formerly Euclid), which he founded in 2011, insures an undisclosed list of major employers and other financial firms. Under its auspices, he’s led a years-long legal crusade against what he calls “frivolous” lawsuits by retirees and workers against employer-sponsored pension funds and 401(k) retirement plans for squandering their savings.

In particular, he’s proposed halting what he characterizes as an onslaught of litigation targeting fund managers for collecting exorbitantly high fees that cut into retirees’ nest eggs. Those lawsuits, Aronowitz claims, have hampered his industry, throwing it into a supposed “crisis.”

Restoring balance to the economy

Italy Shows How Amazon Can Be Forced to Bargain: Shut Down Its Distribution 

[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 05-01-2025]

Apple’s Monopoly Is Finally Held Accountable

David Dayen, May 2, 2025 [The American Prospect]

…The case before the court concerned Apple’s monopoly power over its iOS App Store. Apple has built a tollbooth whereby apps that offer items for purchase must pay a 30 percent tax to Apple….

Finally, on Wednesday, Federal District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled. And I think the technical term for what happened is she lost her shit. “Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction,” Rogers wrote. “Remarkably, Apple believed that this Court would not see through its obvious cover-up.”

Gonzalez Rogers’s ruling was swift, punitive, and dramatic. She permanently barred Apple from imposing any fee on off-app purchases, lifted all restrictions on app developer communications with customers, banned the full-frame scare screens, and enabled the dynamic URLs that keep users logged in. “There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order,” Gonzalez Rogers said, immediately putting the ruling into effect even as Apple plans to appeal. Moreover, she sent a criminal referral to the U.S. Attorney in Northern California for Apple and Alex Roman, for contempt of court….

…When the Justice Department required Bell Labs in a 1956 consent decree to license its patents, it essentially created Silicon Valley, unlocking markets that had been frozen by the AT&T monopoly. IBM, at the outset of an antitrust case that started in 1969, unbundled software from its computer systems, giving rise to the software market….

Health care crisis

Kennedy Orders Search for New Measles Treatments Instead of Urging Vaccination 

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-03-2025]

Air filters in classrooms reduce sick days by more than 10 per cent 

[New Scientist, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]

Denial of Airborne Infection: A Review 

[Psychology Today, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]

What’s the Deal With Autism Rates? 

Cremieux Recueil [Neutrino, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]

A deep dive.

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users 

[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]

Maga’s sinister obsession with IQ is leading us towards an inhuman future 

Quinn Slobodian [The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]

…It is no coincidence that IQ talk surged in the 1990s, first through Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s infamous book, The Bell Curve, which suggested there were long-term and insurmountable gaps in IQ between racial groups, and second, more subtly through gifted and talented search programmes in the US that found kids and plucked them from public schools into supercharged summer programmes for the bright.

One such person was Curtis Yarvin, the middle-aged software engineer and amateur political theorist who has drawn attention for his techno-monarchist philosophy and whose work has been positively cited by the US vice-president, JD Vance….

IQ fetishism had a history in the valley; one of the pioneers of the need to take eugenic measures to increase IQ was William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor (the building block of computer chips), who proposed that people with an IQ below the average of 100 should be given $1,000 per IQ point to sterilise themselves. In 2014, the American tech billionaire Peter Thiel said the problem with the Republican party was that too many of its leaders were “lower IQ” compared with those in the Democratic party. IQ was also a common focus of discussion on the popular blog Slate Star Codex and elsewhere in the so-called “rationalist” community….

As Musk has said himself, “we are all extremely dumb” compared with the “digital super intelligence” that he is helping to build through initiatives such as his model at xAI, which recently bought the social media platform X….

Oracle engineers caused days-long software outage at U.S. hospitals 

[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]

Your iPhone is a target for thieves. Do this to help protect your data

[Washington Post, via The Big Picture April 28, 2025]

How to Protect Yourself From Phone Searches at the US Border

[Wired, via The Big Picture April 28, 2025]

Customs and Border Protection has broad authority to search travelers’ devices when they cross into

20 verification tools for combating misinformation.

[Beyond Bylines, via The Big Picture April 27, 2025]

Fact-checking sites like Snopes and Google’s Fact Check Explorer, as well as reverse image search engines, identity verification sites, and AI detection tools. While this list is intended for journalists, these resources are useful for anyone who wants to evaluate what they read or find online critically.

First Driverless Semis Have Started Running Regular Longhaul Routes 

[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 05-03-2025]

Climate and environmental crises

Carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability 

[Nature, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]

Study Finds Synergistic Convergence of Global Warming, Pesticide Toxicity, and Antibiotic Resistance 

[Beyond Pesticides, via Naked Capitalism 05-03-2025]

Bees, fish and plants show how climate change’s accelerating pace is disrupting nature in 2 key ways 

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 05-03-2025]

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

World’s Largest Battery-Electric Ship Launched by Incat

[maritime-executive.com, May 2, 2025]

Democrats’ political malpractice

Jeffries Wants Dems to Put an End to the El Salvador Trips 

[The Bulwark, via Naked Capitalism 04-01-2025]

Democrats Had a Shot at Protecting Journalists From Trump. They Blew It.

Shawn Musgrave, April 29 2025 [The Intercept]

Last year, Senate Democrats had a clear opportunity to make basic protections for journalists a matter of binding federal law, rather than mere policy that could be undone with a vendetta-laced memo. Following years of debate over the proper scope of a federal shield law for reporters, the PRESS Act unanimously passed the House of Representatives and had a bipartisan roster of Senate sponsors, including Republican Lindsay Graham of South Carolina.

Then Democratic leaders blew it.

For months, they let the PRESS Act sit in the Senate Judiciary committee without a hearing, even though that committee’s chair, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., was the bill’s co-sponsor.

After the election, Trump demanded that Republicans kill the bill. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., swore the PRESS Act was a top priority for his last weeks as Senate majority leader. But neither he nor Durbin put any apparent effort into moving the bill forward, either on its own or as part of must-pass legislation like the defense budget. They offered statements of reassurance and support for the press, but no action.

In mid-December, with time running out, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the PRESS Act’s lead sponsor, tried to advance it himself, bringing the bill to the Senate floor on a motion to enact it by unanimous consent. A single Republican, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, blocked it with a grandstanding speech about the evils of leaks and “America-hating and fame-hungry journalists,” as he’d done with prior versions of the PRESS Act.

Abundance for Whom? 

[Breakthrough Journal, via Naked Capitalism 04-28-2025]

Trump’s transactional regime

Trump’s Throwing Everything at Maine

Luisa S. Deprez and Amy Fried, April 30, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

…the state has become a particular focus of the president’s ire. What is the trigger? A single sentence spoken by Governor Janet Mills at the White House in a February governors’ meeting: “See you in court.”

That remark came after Trump challenged Mills on state policy, under the Maine Human Rights Act, allowing transgender students to participate in school sports per their gender identity.

Federal agencies began taking extraordinary steps against Maine within days of the encounter. And true to her word, Mills has seen them in court every step of the way. In some cases, the Trump administration backpedaled; in a few others, the congressional delegation intervened; and in others, court proceedings are ongoing.

The Trump administration has held up funds for after-school meals, universities, farmers, jails and, for a time, prevented people from applying for their newborns’ Social Security numbers in hospitals. Acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudeck even admitted he singled out Maine because he “was ticked” that Mills was not “real cordial to the president.”

[TW: Trump and the officials in his regime have the classic autocratic traits of pettiness and vindictiveness. ]

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

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

Thomas Mills, May 02, 2025 [PoliticsNC]

It’s a very dark time in North Carolina. The state Court of Appeals handed control of the State Board of Elections to the party that is attempting to subvert our democracy. The court overturned a lower court ruling that blocked legislation stripping power from the governor to appoint members of the State Board of Elections. The bill was passed after Democrat Josh Stein won the gubernatorial election in November.

The GOP legislation shifts the power of appointment to the state auditor’s office which is held by Republican Dave Boliek. The new board will have three Republicans and two Democrats.

Boliek moved quickly to dissolve the existing board that held a Democratic majority and appoint the new one. At stake is the Supreme Court seat that Republicans are trying to steal by disenfranchising military voters from heavily Democratic counties. The Republican board is likely to side with Jefferson Griffin and the GOP, putting partisanship above democracy.

Boliek named two highly partisan Republicans to the board. Francis DeLuca was President of the Civitas Institute, an arm of the conservative political infrastructure developed by Art Pope. Civitas was the essentially the political wing of the John Locke Foundation. Former Senator Bob Rucho was the architect of the 2011 gerrymandering that the courts described as targeting African American voters with “surgical precision.”

Republicans have been trying to take over the State Board of Elections for years. The legislature tried to grab the power to appoint the board, but the courts rebuffed them, saying the SBOE is part of the executive branch. Voters even rejected their attempt to strip the power from the governor when they soundly defeated a constitutional amendment by more than 60% of the vote. Now, a highly partisan Court of Appeals has put politics above the will of the people and the good of the state.

House GOP Proposes Eliminating Key Antitrust Law 

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]

Donald Trump Is Following the Sam Brownback Playbook

Nate Weisberg, April 28, 2025 [[Washington Monthly]

A newly elected Republican chief executive, backed by a cadre of right-wing economists and think tanks, rides a populist wave to victory. Despite inheriting a relatively healthy economy, he unleashes a radical economic policy agenda and defunds government agencies, promising that his actions will usher in a new era of prosperity.

Instead, the economy slows. Budgets collapse. Investors are spooked. Core services erode. Even allies defect. By the end, voters—many of whom once cheered the project—recoil, and a Democrat wins back power.

That’s a version of the scenario Democrats are praying plays out in response to Donald Trump’s second-term agenda—and one Republicans are quietly fearing.

But it is an equally accurate description of what’s happened in Kansas over the past decade and a half. In 2012, after riding a Tea Party wave to victory two years earlier, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback launched what he called “a real live experiment” in conservative governance, slashing income taxes, starving the state budget, and insisting that a burst of economic growth would follow to pay for it all.

But that growth, and fresh tax revenue, never came. To fill his ballooning budget holes, Brownback squandered the state’s surplus, drained the rainy-day fund, fully privatized Medicaid, raided the state’s highway funds, decimated state agencies, and cut public education funding. When the service cutbacks started affecting people’s lives, even Brownback’s own supporters started to notice. Roads fell apart. Class sizes grew. And Brownback’s approval rating sank from 55 percent in his first month in office to 22 percent in 2016. Rather than finish out his second term, he took a job with the first Trump administration in 2017. The following year, Laura Kelly, a Democratic state legislative leader with a clear record of opposing Brownback’s reforms, won the governorship. Four years later, she was reelected, in part by tying her opponent to Brownback. To this day, she is one of the most popular governors in the country. ….

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

The Untold Story of How Ed Martin Ghostwrote Online Attacks Against a Judge — and Still Became a Top Trump Prosecutor 

[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 04-27-2025]