Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 02, 2025
by Tony Wikrent [via Naked Capitalism 10-29-2025]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
MAGA’s 9/11 Is an Assassination — “Charlie’s death is like a domestic 9/11,” says Treasury Secretary
Ken Klippenstein, Oct 28, 2025
Within hours of Charlie Kirk’s shooting last month, politicos in the White House and lawyers at the Justice Department and Homeland Security scrambled to draft up back-of-the-envelope plans for a crackdown on their domestic foes, sources tell me. Illegal immigrants, anti-ICE protesters, leftists, trans people, gamers, Hamas supporters, Antifa; the administration had a hard time pinning down who exactly was the new enemy, so they ended up including them all.
But how to do it? How to destroy the “enemy within”? The answer was to frame the Kirk assassination and political violence generally as a national security problem and not merely one of law enforcement….
As one source close to the White House told me, the gruesome spectacle of Kirk’s bloody assassination was traumatic for the many administration officials who knew him personally; especially Donald Trump, who narrowly survived his own assassination attempt last year. Their anxiety about domestic terrorists walking among us, hiding in plain sight, is in large part attributable to this.
Asked if the murder was traumatic event for MAGA, Mike Howell, a former homeland security official and president of the Heritage Foundation-backed Oversight Project, replied simply: “100%.”….
The administration’s frantic planning session precipitated by Kirk’s murder was formalized days later in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. Called “NSPM-7” by insiders, the sweeping directive targets radical left “terrorism” by relying on so-called indicators like “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” speech. (I’ve reported on the significance of NSPM-7 here.)
Banking compliance expert Poorvika Mehra told American Banker that NSPM-7 “is basically asking you to follow the money, but within ideological movements, and compliance teams immediately ask which customers put the banks at risk.” She anticipates that banks will respond to NSPM-7 by simply dropping affected clients rather than deal with the headache….
ICE following orders from far-right activist Laura Loomer
Drop Site Daily, October 27, 2025
British journalist and political commentator Sami Hamdi was detained by U.S. immigration officers at San Francisco International Airport while on a speaking tour, reportedly after criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said Hamdi appeared to have been taken into custody following pressure from far-right activist Laura Loomer, who publicly claimed credit for the detention. Hamdi had just spoken at CAIR’s Sacramento gala on Friday and was scheduled to appear at the group’s Florida event the following night. Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin posted on X that Hamdi’s visa was revoked and that he was in ICE custody “pending removal,” adding: “Under President Trump, those who support terrorism and undermine American national security will not be allowed to work or visit this country. It’s common sense.”
Top Trump Officials Are Moving Onto Military Bases
Michael Scherer, Missy Ryan, and Ashley Parker, October 30, 2025 [The Atlantic]
How Designating Antifa as a Foreign Terrorist Organization Could Threaten Civil Liberties
Thomas E. Brzozowski, October 27, 2025 [justsecurity.org]
Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designations are one of the most powerful legal instruments in America’s counterterrorism arsenal. Originally conceived to combat international terrorist networks like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS), these designations trigger sweeping financial sanctions, severe criminal penalties, and extensive surveillance authorities. President Donald Trump’s comments at a White House roundtable on “Antifa” earlier this month make it likely that his administration will designate this decentralized anti-fascist movement as an FTO — a move that would create an unprecedented expansion of counterterrorism authorities into the domestic political space….
Once an organization is designated as an FTO, providing “material support” to it becomes a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison, or life if the support results in death. The statutory definition of “material support” is intentionally expansive and includes providing: “currency or monetary instruments, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, personnel, and transportation.” Only medicine and religious materials are explicitly exempted.
The breadth of this definition reflects Congress’s determination to eliminate all forms of assistance to designated organizations. The statute applies to U.S. persons regardless of where the prohibited conduct occurs, creating global reach for American terrorism prosecutions. The Supreme Court’s decision in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project clarified that even speech intended to promote peaceful conflict resolution may constitute material support if provided to a designated organization….
Trump DOJ Charges House Candidate Kat Abughazaleh With Conspiracy for Protesting ICE
Jessica Washington, October 29 2025 [The Intercept]
The Department of Justice has brought federal charges against Illinois House candidate Kat Abughazaleh and five other activists for protesting outside of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago.
The 11-page indictment, which was filed on October 23 and unsealed Wednesday, accuses Abughazaleh and the other protesters of using “force, intimidation and threat” as part of a conspiracy to prevent an unnamed ICE agent from “discharging his duties” and to “injure him in his person or property.”
Stephen Miller’s Snowballing Deportation Deceptions.
[emptywheel, via The Big Picture, October 27, 2025]
How the False Story of a Gang ‘Takeover’ in Colorado Reached Trump
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, October 27, 2025]
The claim that Aurora, Colo., has been overrun by gun-toting migrants stemmed from the city’s fight with a landlord. Now it is central to one of former President Donald J. Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign promises.
ICE Is Now Wandering the Streets, Scanning People’s Faces to Check If They’re Citizens
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2025]
Letters from an American, October 29, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Oct 30, 2025
On October 27, Anna Giaritelli of the Washington Examiner broke the story that the White House was reassigning ICE field officers and replacing them with officers from Customs and Border Patrol (CPB). Greg Wehner and Bill Melugin of Fox News reported that the shift will affect at least eight cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Portland, Philadelphia, El Paso, and New Orleans. They reported that the changes reflect a split within the Department of Homeland Security. In one camp, so-called border czar Tom Homan and ICE director Todd Lyons have focused on arresting undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes or who have final deportation orders. The other includes Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, special government employee Corey Lewandowski, who advises Noem, and Greg Bovino, a Border Patrol sector chief who has been overseeing the agency’s operations in Los Angeles and Chicago. That faction, Wehner and Melugin say, wants to arrest all undocumented immigrants to boost their deportation numbers.
One senior official told Wehner and Melugin: “ICE is arresting criminal aliens. They [Border Patrol] are hitting Home Depots and car washes.” A border patrol agent, though, told the journalists: “What did everyone think mass deportations meant? Only the worst? Tom Homan has said it himself—anyone in the U.S. illegally is on the table.”
Joyce Vance, Oct 30, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
On July 14, 2023, Taylor Taranto, 37, of Pasco, Washington, was charged in a federal indictment with carrying a firearm without a license and possessing an illegal device designed to feed large quantities of ammunition to a firearm. He was also charged with four misdemeanors related to his involvement with events on January 6….
The charges related to January 6 were wiped out by Donald Trump. But Taranto was convicted on the gun charges in May of this year. Those charges stemmed from an arrest near former President Barack Obama’s home in the District of Columbia. The charges don’t mention President Obama. The Justice Department’s official release indicated that “Prior to his arrest, court documents say that Taranto made several concerning statements regarding the residences in the area and desires to commit acts of violence against a federal facility.”
Taranto’s van was searched pursuant to his arrest. He had quite an arsenal with him, including the two weapons circled in yellow below. All told, investigators said they found two guns, a machete and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in Taranto’s van.
How did Taranto know where Obama lived? Donald Trump posted it on social media in June of 2023. Taranto was arrested in Obama’s neighborhood the same day….
Federal law requires judges to impose a sentence that is “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” to reflect the seriousness of the offense, promote respect for the law, and provide just punishment, while also deterring future crimes, protecting the public from the defendant, and affording the defendant rehabilitation opportunities. Judges are required by law to consider a number of factors, including the nature and circumstances of the offense and the history and characteristics of the defendant. So prosecutors write to those issues in their sentencing memo, analyzing the evidence to advocate for the sentence they believe the judge should impose. It’s literally their job. You don’t leave key details, like a defendant threatening to send a former president to hell, out of the equation.
But in this case, simply doing their jobs resulted in the removal of the prosecutors. ABC’s Katherine Fauders was the first to report that “Two federal prosecutors were informed Wednesday they will be put on leave after filing a legal brief that described the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as being carried out by ‘thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters,’ sources tell me.” She continued, “The two prosecutors, Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, were locked out of their government devices and informed Wednesday morning they will be placed on leave just hours after filing a sentencing memorandum in the case of Taylor Taranto.” ….
Exclusive: Three-star general pushed out amid tensions with Hegseth
Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, Haley Britzky [CNN, via Naked Capitalism 11-01-2025]
…Lt. Gen. Joe McGee, the director for Strategy, Plans, and Policy on the Joint Staff, left his position earlier this month, the sources said. They added that McGee had frequently “pushed back” against Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine on issues ranging from Russia and Ukraine to military operations in the Caribbean.…
Trump Administration Admits It Doesn’t Know Who Exactly It’s Killing in Boat Strikes
Nick Turse, October 31 2025 [The Intercept]
Officials acknowledged they don’t know the identities of the people they’re killing and can’t meet the evidentiary burden to prosecute survivors….
Three people are known to have survived the U.S. attacks: two on an October 16 strike, and one during a series of attacks on October 27. But none have been prosecuted for the supposed drug smuggling for which Trump claims the right to summarily kill them. “They said they could not actually hold or try the individuals that survived one of the attacks — in our country or one of the repatriating countries — because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden,” said Jacobs. “It led some to speculate that there’s a higher evidentiary standard to hold someone than to kill them, which is problematic.”….
Trump’s Yemen Strike Killed 61 Immigrants and No Combatants
Nick Turse, October 28 2025 [The Intercept]
The attack on Sa’ada detention center violated humanitarian law and should be investigated as a war crime, says Amnesty International.
US will limit number of refugees to 7,500 and give priority to white South Africans
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 11-01-2025]
Good News: A Court Rejects Trump’s Effort To Suppress The Vote
Joyce Vance, Nov 01, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
In March, Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “PRESERVING AND PROTECTING THE INTEGRITY OF AMERICAN ELECTIONS.” Predictably, it was designed to do anything but that. Its goal was to make it more difficult to register to vote.
In April, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a senior judge in the District of Columbia, issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily prevented key parts of the executive order from going into effect while the litigation moved forward. The key problem Judge Kollar-Kotelly observed was that Trump was trying to usurp the power the Constitution affords to the states and Congress to run elections.
Friday, the Judge granted summary judgment in parts of the case, entering a permanent injunction that prevents the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) from implementing the worst provision of Trump’s executive order: one that purported to require proof of citizenship to register to vote….
Donald Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Midterms Is Already Under Way
David A. Graham, October 28, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Letters from an American, November 1, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Nov 01, 2025
Yesterday I wrote that President Donald J. Trump’s celebration of his new marble bathroom in the White House was so tone deaf at a time when federal employees are working without pay, furloughed workers are taking out bank loans to pay their bills, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are at risk, that it seemed likely to make the history books as a symbol of this administration.
But that image got overtaken just hours later by pictures from a Great Gatsby–themed party Trump threw at Mar-a-Lago last night hours before SNAP benefits ended. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby skewered the immoral and meaningless lives of the very wealthy during the Jazz Age who spent their time throwing extravagant parties and laying waste to the lives of the people around them….
Amendment 25 Watch
Mehdi Hasan, Oct 27, 2025 [Zeteo]
For years now, Trump and his supporters have bizarrely behaved as if the first Trump presidency ended in 2019. They like to brag about the amazing state of the economy in 2019, while ignoring the soaring unemployment they left behind at the end of 2020. They complain about the COVID lockdowns in 2020, as if the president behind the lockdowns wasn’t… Donald John Trump.
On Friday, Trump went one step further. In fact, the president took a full step right into Crazytown with this post on his Truth Social website:
“Documents show conclusively that Christopher Wray, Deranged Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, and other crooked lowlifes from the failed Biden Administration, signed off on Operation Arctic Frost,” he wrote. “They spied on Senators and Congressmen/women, and even taped their calls. They cheated and rigged the 2020 Presidential Election. These Radical Left Lunatics should be prosecuted for their illegal and highly unethical behavior!”
Got that? The president of the United States thinks ex-Special Counsel Jack Smith and former Biden DOJ alums Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco “cheated and rigged the 2020 Presidential Election.” Back in 2020, to be clear, Merrick Garland was an appeals court judge, Lisa Monaco was a lawyer in private practice, and Jack Smith was the chief prosecutor at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
How, then, did they “rig” the 2020 election when they weren’t in government? ….
And, on Saturday, the mad king in the White House took a further step into Crazytown. He increased tariffs on Canada by 10% over current levels because – I kid you not – the Canadians hurt his feelings with a television ad. Yes, really!
“Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs,” he declaimed on – where else? – Truth Social, adding: “The sole purpose of this FRAUD was Canada’s hope that the United States Supreme Court will come to their ‘rescue’ on Tariffs that they have used for years to hurt the United States.”
How is this not a parody? How is this even legal? Does this sound like a sufficient national security argument for Trump bypassing congressional authority on tariffs?
Strategic Political Economy
Chris Hedges, Oct 30, 2025
The genocide in Gaza is not a freakish anomaly. It is a harbinger of what awaits us as the ecosystem disintegrates and governments embrace climate fascism.
108 Steps the Trump Administration Has Taken To Destroy America
Christopher Armitage, Oct 29, 2025 [The Existentialist Republic]
Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions
[justsecurity.org]
How the Supreme Court Legalized Political Corruption
[The American Prospect, October 31, 2025]
This week on our live show, executive editor David Dayen talks to David Sirota, co-author of the book Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America. The story begins with a tobacco lawyer who makes it to the Supreme Court, and goes through a series of rulings that open up campaign spending to corporations and effectively strike down laws aimed at stopping public corruption. They talk about how corporations engineered these developments from the sidelines, and how a few innovative initiatives are trying to fight back.
Global power shift
China’s economic successes are reshaping the Western media narrative
[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2025]
Stabilizing the U.S.-China Rivalry
[RAND, via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2025]
Reaction:
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2025]
Absolutely extraordinary paper by RAND, the main think tank of the US military-industrial complex, and another key sign that the U.S. deep state – despite all the chaos and noise – is shifting away from deterring China, towards accepting coexistence (it’s literally what they recommend in the paper)….
The Illusion of American Leverage
Dr Warwick Powell [via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2025]
America’s Suez — When the Tariff Titan Blinked
Dr Warwick Powell [via Naked Capitalism 11-01-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israel slaughtered 104 Palestinians YESTERDAY. 46 children. What kind of “ceasefire” is this?
Shaun King, Oct 29, 2025
UN Commissioner Declares Israel Has Committed 4 Types of Genocide in Gaza and Left It Uninhabitable
Shaun King, Oct 28, 2025
[CAIR, via Naked Capitalism 10-28-2025]
Dallas Rabbi Who Pushed Fake Palestinian Rape Claims Arrested for Felony Child Molestation
Shaun King, Oct 26, 2025
Oligarchy
Aurelien [via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2025]
I don’t follow the traditional media’s coverage of the war in Ukraine very much—I leave that to those with stronger stomachs—but it’s impossible to ignore the two mixed and confused messages they broadcast about the chances of ending that war more-or-less peacefully. On the one hand, “talking to Putin” should be a capital crime, and any move suggesting that the West does so is a form of treason. On the other, newer and better wonder-weapons must be sent to Ukraine to “force Putin to the negotiating table.”
I’m not going to try to reconcile these messages, because I don’t think it’s possible, and anyway it would be a a waste of effort. Rather, I’m going to treat them both—and other things I’ll discuss as well—as examples of the fundamental incoherence, narcissism and superficiality of thinking and expression which typifies today’s Professional and Managerial Caste, (PMC) including political leaders and those who advise them and write about them….
In the West as a whole, we haven’t really had that kind of coherent context since the Reformation, but at least it was possible until recently to identify shared patterns of belief, and understand why a party of the Left would generally behave differently from a party of the Right once in power. That’s no longer the case, but neither has there been a blanket replacement with an organised ideology of extreme social and economic liberalism, even though that’s part of it. Rather, the current western ruling class, like the Party in 1984, has no ideology in the traditional sense. It is interested in power and wealth, and it has factions which are obsessed with various social objectives and causes, but it is incapable of thinking in a coherent fashion, and doesn’t really see the need to do so. Today’s ruling class thinks of itself less as Ruling than as Managing, complete with its yellowing MBA textbooks….
Yes, Everything Crashed–Just Not For You
Charles Hugh Smith [via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2025]
…But since the top 10% dominate the media, both legacy and social media, and they’ve done splendidly in the Everything Bubble that’s been inflating for the past 16 years, then they don’t see the crash the 50% have experienced, for the top 10% live in a completely different world from the bottom 50%, whose experience tracks a third-world country far removed from jetting around the world and complaining about high taxes….
An American physician with nearly 50 years of experience brought me up short when he reported that for many Americans, the healthcare they receive is equivalent to what third-world residents receive. Third World–which evokes grinding poverty, inescapable immiseration, failing infrastructure, a neofeudal divide between the few wealthy and the many poor, a society with no limits on exploitation and profiteering ruled by elites that are not merely corrupt but also incompetent–has been replaced by the sanitized developing world, but the point here isn’t the trend to sanitize repellent realities with textual tropes, it’s the refusal of America’s top 10% to acknowledge that for many of the bottom 50%, America under their leadership is a third world nation.
The top 10% cling to the soaring stock market and rising GDP as markers of the nation’s robust economy and success to avoid dealing with lived reality, as if their fairy-tale belief that soaring stocks means life is good is actually real….
While the top 10% busy themselves with using AI to improve work flow, obsessing over geopolitics and the decay of the perks of their Titanium credit card, other Americans are concerned with finding a second or third side-hustle as the soaring costs of utilities, rent, auto insurance and repairs, childcare and healthcare are forcing choices nobody wants to make: what not to pay.
As the cracks widen, it gets harder not to avoid falling into one. So much of everyday life in America is now a parody of precarity that is right out of a black-comedy script of a nation blindly telling itself that all is well because AI is amazing and we’re going back to the Moon ….
Felonomics
US debt trap: How libertarian Javier Milei is selling Argentina to Wall Street – for $82 billion
[Geopolitical Economy Report, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2025]
Trump Aims To Infect Your Credit
Luke Goldstein & Helen Santoro, Oct 27, 2025 [The Lever]
The Trump administration will issue guidance tomorrow prohibiting states from wiping medical debt from consumers’ credit ratings, according to an unpublished public notice posted on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s website.
The guidance deems that federal law overrides any state law that limits the inclusion of medical debt on individuals’ credit reports. The move could exacerbate the crippling effects of skyrocketing medical costs and hand financial industry groups a potential assist in their ongoing lawsuits to block these state-level protections.
Despite the fact that more than 90 percent of Americans have health insurance, medical debt in the United States has risen to an estimated $220 billion, larger than the entire economies of many states and impacting around 100 million Americans….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
America Doesn’t Have Enough Weapons for a Major Conflict. This Is Why.
[Politico, via The Big Picture, November 01, 2025]
This summer, employees at several big defense companies went on strike. Their grievances highlight a much larger problem brewing beneath the surface….
…America is trying to surge its military capacity to produce more munitions, missiles and ships, but to do so, it must rely almost entirely on a group of five Fortune 500 defense companies. And none of these companies seem to be on war footing.
Instead of hiring more workers and paying workers more in an effort to retain them, these companies are far more focused on meeting the demands of Wall Street, trying to entice investors and boost their stock price by cutting costs, as well as using billions of dollars in revenue to pay handsome dividends and buy back shares of stock. Last year, for example, Lockheed Martin gave $6.8 billion in buybacks and dividends directly to its shareholders, which amounted to nearly 10 percent of the company’s total revenue and was larger than the $5.3 billion it kept in profits. The same year, RTX (formerly called Raytheon) paid $3.7 billion to shareholders, General Dynamics paid $3 billion and Northrop Grumman paid $3.7 billion. The billions of dollars they send back shareholders each year means that there is less money to go toward paying, hiring or retaining their employees….
How the UK Lost Its Shipbuilding Industry
[Construction Physics, via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2025]
Health care crisis
Monopoly Round-Up: Obamacare Is Cooked. What’s Next?
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2025]
What a ‘Private Equity Government’ Means for Public Health
[MedPage Today, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-2025]
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 10-30-2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Inside the Trump family’s global crypto cash machine
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2025]
Trump Is the Shitcoin President
Kyle Torpey, October 27, 2025 [gizmodo.com, via Naked Capitalism 10-28-2025]
Trump ran as the bitcoin president, but stablecoins and crypto grifting have taken priority.
Here’s What Trump’s Ballroom Donors Want
David Dayen, October 28, 2025 [The American Prospect]
The cost of Donald Trump’s garish ballroom that’s replacing the East Wing of the White House keeps increasing, from $200 million to $300 million and now $350 million in a matter of days. That’s because the cost of construction isn’t nearly as important as having an inventory of donations available for corporate America to pony up. These contributions—or if you prefer, bribes—work in two directions. One, they represent cash that companies can give to secure favors from the government. Two, they serve as a disciplining function from Trump: People giving to his ballroom can’t easily speak out against his abuses of power….
Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim, Oct 30, 2025 [dropsitenews]
Hacked emails show how Jeffrey Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak tried to engineer a Russian-led solution to remove Bashar al-Assad.
Disrupting mainstream economics
‘Abundance’, De-regulation, and the Demolition of Democracy — Centrists laid the groundwork in the US and Europe.
Ann Pettifor [via Naked Capitalism 10-28-2025]
….
Regulation is democracy at work
Regulations, including international rules, are a consequence of open, democratic debate and agreement. When a society purporting to be a democracy settles on the introduction of a new regulation after lengthy debate, experience and evidence – that society is exercising its democratic rights. If a new rule is introduced, say, the obligation to use seat belts when traveling in cars – that regulation is the outcome of society-wide debate and agreement. I know because I grew up in a world where drivers boasted about not tightening their belts, and then lived through endless debates on whether seat belts really could save lives. Later I endured the intolerable, choking smokiness of London’s underground trains while citizens debated at length whether to ban smoking. At first smokers were banned from all but one carriage, but very soon and thankfully for the health of our lungs, even that concession to a deregulated atmosphere was dropped….
Ronald Reagan’s Speech Gets Tariffs Wrong
Dougald Lamont, Oct 27, 2025
Tariffs didn’t cause the Depression as Reagan claims. The economic policies he recommended did: as the Black Monday crash later that year showed….
The Great Depression wasn’t caused by the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. The Wall Street bubble – which was global was because of conditions exactly like today: we have a massive global asset bubble, especially in real estate, but also in stocks. Ultra low interest rates to stimulate the economy has not gone to productive investment: the world has been flooded with a tsunami of low-interest credit. In short, people are borrowing money to gamble. The crash became a Depression because instead of reflating the economy, governments pursued austerity….
The U.S. became wealthy partly through protectionism and tariffs. Until the 1930s, the U.S. had tariffs of over 30%. That is why the Smoot-Hawley tariffs didn’t have such an impact. Tariffs were already in place, and they had policies to support American industry.
Every rich country got rich first through protectionism and building itself up domestically, then turning to free trade. Whether it was Great Britain, Japan, South Korea, Canada, the U.S., infant industries were protected and supported with “industrial policy,” capital, R & D, training….
The 1970s Friedmanite revolution resulted in 50 years of stagflation for many, and the current, insanely unstable current moment. Having created the crisis in the first place, the same ideas are then used to forbid and dissuade people from taking the only steps that will resolve the crisis – having government restore order.
Reagan, Friedman and many others have always had the goal of undermining the federal government, thinking that it was the source of their ills. Now Trump is dismantling it, Americans are all but at war with each other.
This has happened before, in Canada and the U.S. Extremism started to rise before the crash of 1929. The stock market isn’t the first sign of a crisis, it’s the last sign of the crisis.
The real problem with Canada’s economy, which is also the problem with the global economy: too much private credit has been extended to inflate an asset bubble that cannot possibly deliver the returns needed to cancel the debt.
We are already in a full-blown economic crisis. Trump’s weaponized tariffs are bad, but they are only the detonator for a much larger private debt bomb. The crash is already underway. The bailout in Argentina and collapses in crypto are just the visible signs of a much deeper problem….
Steve Keen, Nov 01, 2025 [Building a New Economics]
There’s a famous saying attributed to Mark Twain that:
“It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So.”
Apparently Twain did not in fact say that, but for this post, I’m going to behave like an economist and just assume that he did, because it is certainly true about economists. In fact, there are so many things that economist “Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So”, that economics should have a “Mark Twain Award for Confident Falsehoods”. It would be awarded for statements that are provably false, but which are confidently asserted to be true by economists.
Disrupting mainstream politics
[Deseret News, via Naked Capitalism 10-26-2025]
In the years before Trump’s election, voices on the right were beginning to critique what both parties had become, and to chart a path forward. In 2012, the American Enterprise Institute’s Charles Murray published “Coming Apart,” which depicts a bicoastal elite detached from a fraying working class in middle America. Murray cited the explosion in CEO pay — which doubled from $1 million in 1970 to $2 million in 1987, doubled again by 1992, again by 1998 and yet again by 2006 to $16 million. He decried Gatsbyesque homes and other “unseemly” luxuries. But Murray, too, was a bit early. When “Coming Apart” appeared in January 2012, Republicans were preparing to nominate a private equity investor worth more than $200 million whose four homes in four states included one in La Jolla, California, worth $12 million and equipped with a car elevator. If optics is messaging, the Republican message in 2012 was clear.
Two more American Enterprise Institute scholars dropped related books in 2016. Yuval Levin published “The Fractured Republic.” “The poor,” he wrote, “are more isolated — economically, culturally, and socially — than they used to be in America.” Levin’s solution was a “mobility agenda.” Meanwhile, Nicholas Eberstadt’s “Men Without Work” noted that from 1965 to 2015, millions of prime-age male workers simply exited the workforce. “It is imperative for the future health of our nation,” Eberstadt wrote, “that we make a determined and sustained commitment to bringing these detached men back: into the workplace, into their families, and into civil society.”
Vice President JD Vance’s bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” also published in 2016, became a runaway smash. His story of Middletown, Ohio, became a metaphor for the forgotten working-class voters already buying up MAGA hats….
Days after the election, Smith’s polling firm Blueprint, in a survey of over 3,000 confirmed voters, found that undecided voters broke for Trump, 52 percent to 38 percent. Asked what pushed them, five of the top eight responses were immigration related. But when asked which issues were most decisive, “swing voters ranked the Democratic Party’s perceived focus on cultural issues over middle-class concerns as their top criticism, even above inflation and immigration.”
As Millions March Against Fascism, NYT Warns Against Progressives
[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2025]
Cora Currier, November 6, 2025 issue [New York Review]
Richard Beck’s Homeland charts how four presidential administrations managed to evade moral responsibility for the “war on terror” by hiding behind legality and process.
Reviewed:
Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life
by Richard BeckCrown, 556 pp., $33.00
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Thomas Neuburger, Oct 30, 2025 [God’s Spies]
It’s hard to forget last year’s Lebanon pager attack…. Deadly stuff. Israel most likely pulled off the attack by infecting the manufacturing supply chain….
The method of exploiting a USB-C cable is explained in a well-illustrated thread on Twitter/X by Jon Bruner. The full thread with video illustrations is here. Click here for the TreadReaderApp version….
Last year we CT scanned a top-of-the-line Thunderbolt 4 connector and were astonished to find a 10-layer PCB [printed circuit board] with lots of active electronics. A lot of people saw the scan and wondered whether malicious electronics could be hidden in a tiny USB connector.
Pluralistic: Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death (27 Oct 2025)
Cory Doctorow, October 27, 2025 [Pluralistic]
Shake Shack has changed the terms of service for its app, adding a “binding arbitration” clause that bans you from suing the company or joining a class action suit against it:
https://shakeshack.com/terms-conditions#/
As Luke Goldstein writes for Jacobin, the ToS update is part of a wave of companies, including fast-food companies, that are taking away their customers’ right to seek redress in the courts, forcing them to pursue justice with a private “arbitrator” who works for the company that harmed them:
https://jacobin.com/2025/10/shake-shack-arbitration-law-terms-service/
Now, obviously you don’t have to agree to terms of service just to walk into a Shake Shack and order a burger (yet), but Shake Shack, like other fast food companies, is on a full-court press to corral you into using its app to order your food, even if you’re picking up that food from the counter and eating it in the restaurant. This is an easy trick to pull off – all Shake Shack needs to do is starve its cash-registers of personnel, creating untenably long lines for people attempting to order from a human.
Forcing diners to use an app has other advantages as well. Remember, an app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it, which means that whenever you use an app instead of a website, you are vulnerable to deep and ongoing commercial surveillance and can be bombarded with ads without you having any recourse:
That surveillance can be weaponized against you, through “surveillance pricing,” which is when companies raise prices based on their estimation of your desperation, which they can infer from surveillance data. Surveillance pricing lets a company reach into your wallet and devalue your money – if you are charged $10 for a burger that costs the next person $5, that means your dollar is only worth $0.50:
Pluralistic: Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth (24 Jun 2025)
But beyond surveillance and price-gouging, app-based ordering offers corporations another way to screw you: they can force you into binding arbitration. Under binding arbitration, you “voluntarily” waive your right to have your grievances heard by a judge. Instead, the corporation hires a fake judge, called an “arbitrator,” who hears your case and then a rebuttal from the company that signs their paycheck and decides who is guilty. It will not surprise you to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of their employers and even when they rule in favor of a wronged customer, the penalties they impose on their bosses add up to little more than a wrist-slap:
This binding arbitration bullshit was illegal until the 2010s, when Antonin Scalia authored a string of binding arbitration decisions for the Supreme Court, opening the hellmouth for the mass imposition of arbitration on anyone that a business could stick an “I agree” button in front of:
https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1443&context=blr
Collapse of independent news media
Manufacturing Dissent: How America’s Most Popular “Opposition” Media Protects Oligarch Power
Christopher Armitage, Oct 28, 2025 [The Existentialist Republic]
…We cannot trust oligarch-owned media to advocate solutions that threaten oligarch power. Decreasing that power starts with awareness. Here are the billionaires who own major American media companies and what they control: ….
Independent Media Outlets Not Controlled by Billionaires….
Democrats’ political malpractice
How Can Corporate Dems Falsely Claim Medicare for All Is “Unpopular”?
Jeff Cohen, Oct 28, 2025 [LA Progressive]
This and other idiocy of the elites shows why the Democratic Establishment hasn’t learned a damn thing from losing to Trump—not once, but twice….
Shoddy research is required for The Welcome Team (which claims to “represent the middle”) to dismiss Medicare for All as an “unpopular” economic policy. It is, of course, clearly unpopular with the health insurance companies that fund and influence corporate “Third Way” Democrats.
- An Economist/You Gov poll of more than 1,500 adult citizens, conducted in July of this year, found that Medicare for All was supported by 59 percent of those polled (including 36 percent who “strongly support”)—and opposed by only 27 percent. Medicare for All was supported by almost every demographic group, including ideological “moderates” (67% to 17%) and those who identify as “independents” (57% to 24%/56% to 18%). The only demographics with a majority opposing it were Trump supporters, conservatives or Republicans/Republican-leaners….
Hunter Lazzaro, October 29, 2025 [unchartedblue.com]
The Lingering Delusion
Fintan O’Toole, November 20, 2025 issue [New York Review]
Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days succeeds at least in distilling the evasions and weaknesses of the modern Democratic Party.
[TW: O’Toole excels at identifying the inflections of policies and events that define history. I highly recommend this article.]
A lot of Americans think the Democratic Party is out of touch
[Tri-State Alert, via Naked Capitalism 10-30-2025]
How Jack Smith’s strongest case against Donald Trump collapsed
Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig, Oct 27, 2025 [The Washington Post]
…Smith and his top deputies had concluded that trying the case in Florida put them on firmer legal ground, reducing the risk of the most serious charges being overturned on appeal. And members of their team had initially calculated that there was just a 1 in 6 chance that a case in Florida would land in Cannon’s courtroom….
This behind-the-scenes account reveals new details about the inner workings of Smith’s highly secretive team as he pushed it to complete a historic investigation in record time, including the venue choice that led to the unraveling of the most clear-cut criminal charges that Trump faced. It lays bare previously unreported dissension on the Smith team over how to manage the classified-documents investigation. And it recounts for the first time Smith’s effort to remove Cannon from the case, an idea that a top Justice Department official rejected and that Smith never presented to Attorney General Merrick Garland….
Dean Obeidallah, Nov 01, 2025
…But when you are desperate like Cuomo, you lean into what you think is working. That is when Cuomo surprised co-host Jonathan Capehart by saying, “diversity is our strength, but it can also be a weakness.”
After he finished his answer, Capehart’s co-host Eugene Daniels—who is also Black—said he wanted to make sure Cuomo didn’t misspeak in his earlier comment. So he then asked Cuomo what he meant by “diversity being a weakness?” That is when Cuomo doubled down, saying, “Diversity can be a weakness if you have antipathy among groups, Jonathan.”
Resistance
Letters from an American, October 31, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Oct 31, 2025
Yesterday a reporter asked Representative Joe Neguse, a Democrat of Colorado, about the administration’s withholding of reserve funds Congress intended would fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). “If we come to November first, and these contingency funds haven’t been released, if nothing has been accomplished in restoring SNAP benefits, will you call on your Democratic colleagues to reopen the government and deal with these shutdown crises immediately?”
Neguse called out the dynamic in which observers refuse to hold President Donald J. Trump and MAGA Republicans to account and instead demand Democrats step in to fix whatever crisis is at hand. “The basis for your question is, and maybe the better way to state it would be, if the Trump administration continues to violate the law, if the Trump administration unlawfully refuses to release funds so that families in Colorado don’t go hungry, if the Trump administration refuses to follow the law, as they have for the better course of the last nine months, violating statute after statute, if in that scenario these actions unfold, then how will Democrats respond?” Neguse answered….
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Oct 28, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
…How do we learn from the past in ways that can equip us to face an unprecedented crisis?
I wanted to share two resources if these are the kinds of questions you’re asking:
The first is a book by Aran Shetterly about Nelson and Joyce Johnson, two of the most important moral leaders I’ve had a chance to learn from in my life. I reviewed Shetterley’s fabulous book, Morningside, for The Christian Century magazine. The full text is below….
With my colleagues at Yale Divinity School’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy, I teach a course each year on the history of moral movements in America. Starting with the abolitionists, we look closely at how people of faith have pushed this nation toward a more perfect union. It’s an inspiring journey, but it’s also a difficult one, because I know students are going to have to grapple with the question of where is God in the backlash. When White legislators refuse to seat Henry McNeal Turner in the Georgia legislature during Reconstruction; when vigilantes run the elected government of Wilmington, North Carolina, out of town in 1898; when the moral leaders of the civil rights movement are assassinated while the FBI is paying preachers to discredit them in public—when the movements inspired by truth and love and mercy are crushed by the brute force of power and violence—where is God? ….
Here’s How You Fix Political Corruption in America
[Team Zeteo, Oct 29, 2025]
David Sirota talks to Mehdi about his new book, ‘Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America,’ AIPAC, the NYC mayoral debate, and lays out real ways to stop the oligarchy.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The Conservatives Who Think Trump Isn’t Going Far Enough
David Austin Walsh; October 22, 2025 [Boston Review]
…for all the seeming signs of unity, the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination illustrates deep insecurities within the MAGA coalition. Some key supporters of MAGA in 2024 are now openly expressing anxieties about what happens if the movement fails, or even saying it is failing. Tech right political blogger and neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin has suggested that he is contemplating fleeing the country. “Everyone involved with this revolution needs a plan B for 2029,” he wrote recently, because if the Democratic Party recaptures the White House, or even Congress in 2026, it will enact wholesale “vengeance” on Trump supporters….
Dean Obeidallah, Oct 26, 2025
…Some have rightfully flagged that Johnson is doing this because once Grijalva is sworn-in, she will be the final signature needed on a discharge petition in the House to force a vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. I agree that is part of why Johnson refuses to honor the will of the voters. …
However, there is another aspect to this that demands more attention given it warns us of a far bigger issue with today’s MAGA Republican party and what we will be confronting in 2026 and beyond. And that is their rejection of elections when they don’t agree with the results together with using any means necessary–including illegal actions and violence–to retain power.
Speaker Johnson’s history is relevant in explaining why he refuses to swear in Grijalva. He is not just an election denier, he “was the congressional architect of the effort to overturn the 2020 election” so that Trump could remain in power despite losing. Then just a rank-and-file member of Congress, Johnson sent an email to all House GOP members pressuring them to join a brief in support of Texas AG Ken Paxton’s BS lawsuit to invalidate the results in various swing states—which was later rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. Johnson even included a threat in his email plea to House Republicans saying that Trump “will be anxiously awaiting the final list” of who signs on….
[Bruce Mehlman’s Age of Disruption, via The Big Picture, November 01, 2025]
The President’s party loses seats in midterm elections (18 of the 20 since WWII). States redistrict once per decade following the Census & reapportionment. Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requires the creation & maintenance of majority-minority districts.
‘Startup City’ Groups Say They’re Meeting Trump Officials to Push for Deregulated ‘Freedom Cities’
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 11-01-2025]
Mark Lilla, November 6, 2025 issue [New York Review]
The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.
Reviewed:
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
by John GanzPicador, 428 pp., $20.00 (paper)Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right
by Laura K. FieldPrinceton University Press, 406 pp., $35.00…In the Age of Trump, our ideological boxes are in bad need of rearranging. Over the past decade we have accumulated piles of unfamiliar ideas, passions, and movements, all linked through new means of communication and mobilization. Which boxes to put them in? Consider a new human type among us: the Silicon Valley tech bro who wants to cut taxes and end censorship of the Internet, dreams of post-human immortality, belongs to a reading group studying Leo Strauss, listens to Peter Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist, and posts anonymous misogynistic rants on 4chan. Is he a libertarian? A liberal? A conservative? A reactionary? He would probably call himself a revolutionary, though to what end he seems not to have considered….
The South Rises Again
Doug Bock Clark, October 30, 2025 [ProPublica]
In early 2023, Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, gave the state and the nation a demonstration of the stunning and overlooked power of his office.
The previous year, the court — then majority Democrat — had outlawed partisan gerrymandering in the swing state. Over Newby’s vehement dissent, it had ordered independent outsiders to redraw electoral maps that the GOP-controlled legislature had crafted to conservatives’ advantage.
The traditional ways to undo such a decision would have been for the legislature to pass a new law that made gerrymandering legal or for Republicans to file a lawsuit. But that would’ve taken months or years.
Newby cleared a way to get there sooner, well before the crucial 2024 election.
In January — once two newly elected Republican justices were sworn in, giving the party a 5-2 majority — GOP lawmakers quickly filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to rehear the gerrymandering case. Such do-overs are rare. Since 1993, the court had granted only two out of 214 petitions for rehearings, both to redress narrow errors, not differences in interpreting North Carolina’s constitution. The lawyers who’d won the gerrymandering case were incredulous….
Stephen Prager, Oct 30, 2025[Common Dreams]
Republican Party officials are now using their “connections” to the Trump administration to threaten journalists into dropping critical coverage.
That’s what Doug Bock Clark, a reporter for ProPublica, recently discovered as he worked on a feature-length story on the rise of Paul Newby, the Republican chief justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court, who has become one of the most quietly influential jurists in the nation….
Voting rights battles heat up across the states
Jordan Zakarin, Oct 27, 2025 [Progress Report]
…A total of 16 states have passed 29 regressive laws restricting voting rights this year, nearly equaling the record highs set in 2021, when 17 states passed 32 anti-voter laws. That earlier rush of voter suppression laws was prompted by Donald Trump’s spurious claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, which failed to overturn the presidential race but provided political cover to GOP legislators who wanted to limit turnout.
Whereas this year’s crop of voter suppression laws and appoint have not been as expansive as the 2021 batch, they are explicitly informed by the right-wing anti-democracy infrastructure that formed around Trump’s attempts to thwart the transfer of power….
Utah Republicans are also pursuing a series of constitutional changes that would devastate democracy in the state. As their effort to institute a new gerrymander pends in court (a decision is due November 8th), the party has focused on an effort to repeal Proposition 4, the constitutional amendment that banned gerrymandering….
The speech North Carolina Republicans don’t want us to hear
Thomas Mills, Oct 27, 2025 [PoliticsNC]
Sen. Michael Garrett laid out how the recent gerrymandering is tied to rising authoritarianism.
Last week, Republicans in the North Carolina legislature stole another Congressional district to give the GOP an additional seat the U.S. House of Representatives. Protected themselves by gerrymandered legislative districts, they had no fear of accountability for a virtually unprecedented mid-decade redistricting. The only thing they have to fear is the judgment of history and they are trying to avoid that, too.
As Republicans moved to redistrict the competitive First Congressional District held by Democrat Don Davis, state Senator Michael Garrett rose to give a floor speech condemning the action. Garrett told the truth on the Republicans.
In 18-minutes, Garrett laid out the stakes of extreme gerrymandering, saying “Democracy dies when we politicians rig the game when we draws lines to choose our voters instead of letting voters choose us…That’s not democracy, folks. That’s tyranny with a prettier name.” He laid the blame on Republican leaders more beholden to Donald Trump than the people they’re supposed to serve. It’s a powerful and eloquent speech.
Apparently, Republicans didn’t want to hear it. They don’t want their children and grandchildren to hear it, either. When state Senator Lisa Grafstein asked for the remarks be entered into the record, GOP Senator Buck Newton opposed the measure. A floor vote fell along party lines, killing the measure and keeping Garrett’s words out of the permanent record.
In other words, the Republicans in the senate not only oppose democracy, they oppose free speech, too. They want to control the way history is written….
A Very Hard Truth About Christian Trump Supporters
Pat Kahnke, October 29, 2025 [Culture’ Faith, and Politics]
[TW: Particularly distressing is a Public Religion Research Institute poll Kahnke discusses which found that just over 50 percent of respondents lean toward authoritarianism. Fifty years of feeding read meat to the base…. ]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Democrats must make reforming the corrupt GOP Supreme Court a top priority!
Dean Obeidallah, Oct 29, 2025
…To give you some perspective on how often Trump has used the shadow docket, Obama and Bush made only eight requests combined to the Supreme Court to hear cases via the shadow docket in 16 years. Under Biden, his administration made 19 requests in four years—or about five per year.
How many has Trump’s regime made in just ten months? Twenty-two. Yep, more than Biden did in four years. Worse, the GOP Supreme Court justices have been only to happy to approve Trump’s requests to hear these cases in an expedited, secretive fashion.
Of these 22 cases, how many times has the GOP Supreme Court ruled in favor of Trump either in full or in part? Nineteen—yes, 19 out of 22 or nearly 90% in favor of Trump. That is a statistical impossibility if the justices were adhering to the law—especially given so many GOP appointed judges in the lower courts had ruled against Trump. And in seven of these cases, the GOP justices gave us no reasoning at all for why they ruled for Trump—just like the Star Chambers of the 1400’s….
Civic republicanism
Tyranny Is Downstream From the Economy
Brian Kettenring, October 30, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
While the root causes of modern authoritarianism have been hotly debated, studies increasingly point to income inequality as the prime culprit….
…A new and important book on democratic breakdown, Susan C. Stokes’s The Backsliders, connects the dots by illuminating the relationship between economics, polarization, institutional failure, and our Trumpist moment. Stokes shows that rising economic inequality, driven by globalization, explains why the world’s democratic recession is happening now. There are four major reasons why backsliding takes place: economic anxiety; cultural factors, such as immigration or race; failing institutions, including political parties; and the behavior of backsliding politicians themselves. But above all, The Backsliders makes a decisive, data-backed case for the role that economic inequality has played in bringing us to our unhappy moment—fueling popular resentment, distrust of institutions, and the rise of demagogues worldwide who pledge to sweep it all away….
Thompson, Michael J., The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America, New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2007.
The American idea of a democratic republic had always been premised on an antipathy toward unequal divisions of property because early American thinkers saw in those unequal shares of economic power echoes of what had been historically overturned: a sociopolitical order of rank and privilege; a static society that sought to crystallize power relationships and hierarchical economic and social relations characterized by corruption and patronage; in short, a feudal order where the exercise of power was arbitrary and the prospect of domination pervaded everyday life. The reason I trace the historical development and inevitable dissolution of the discourse on economic inequality in American political thought is to show that the American republican project was, in fact, deeply tied to the issues of economic inequality as a reaction to feudal social relations. Any political community that suffers from severe imbalances between rich and poor is in danger of losing its democratic character, and I will investigate this theme in detail in the pages that follow.
American political thought has therefore been characterized over the centuries by an overriding concern with the problem of economic inequality, and the reason for this should come as little surprise. Students of American political thought and political theory know the Enlightenment foundations upon which the American political project has always rested. Rooted in the political concern for equality and for democratic republicanism, it has also been marked by a liberal economic ethos and the rapid development of a capitalist economy, class conflict, and competing views of the “public good.” The clash between these two impulses in American political history occurs frequently. (p. 4)
…the contemporary tolerance of economic inequality is actually the result of liberalism and liberal thought itself. Although the liberal economic ethic was central in combating feudal forms of political and social life, liberalism—defined here as the political philosophy that emphasizes individualism and property rights—has become ascendant at the expense of republican themes in American political culture. Economic inequality needs to be seen not simply in terms of different economic outcomes; I argue that—keeping with the majority of American political thought on this topic—economic inequality must also be seen in political terms: in the ways that it creates new forms of hierarchy, social fragmentation, and constraints on individual liberty. American political thought was, at least through the beginnings of the twentieth century, a mixture of liberal and republican themes…. (p. 12)
…Historically, Americans were reacting against the memories and vestiges of aristocracy and feudalism. This formed part of a political-historical consciousness that militated against class divisions. The fear of the aristocracy and the destruction of America’s republican experiment were therefore at the core of early American ideas about inequality. The political moment was therefore always explicit, and this is something that has been lost in contemporary American attitudes toward economic power and class inequality. (p. 13)
NGG
Great weekly writeup!
Well — it looks like 40 Billion for Argentina – and no funds for SNAP.
Ain’t this the s—t. 42 Million Americans depend on SNAP to eat.
GrimJim
The United States at this point is just five or six Third World Nations, all at each other’s throat, all huddled together under a cast-off Rich Man’s Trenchcoat…
And said Rich Man left a couple Nukes in the pockets when he threw away the coat.