Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 23, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
“Riots Raging”: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops
[ProPublica, via The Big Picture, November 16, 2025]
After reviewing coverage from the network and hours of social media videos that preceded Trump’s decision, ProPublica found that Fox’s portrayal of “Portland rioters” routinely instigating violence was misleading.
The Comey Hearing: This Would Be Hilarious If It Weren’t So Scandalous
Harry Litman, November 20, 2025 [The New Republic]
…I was in the northern Virginia courtroom Wednesday for the argument before Judge Michael Nachmanoff on former FBI Director James Comey’s motion to dismiss the case….
Nachmanoff pressed the government lawyer about how Halligan could have been the decision-maker when she came to the case only a few days before she sought the indictment.
It was in chasing down the implausible timeline that Nachmanoff cornered the government into conceding that the grand jury had not even reviewed the actual indictment in the case.
It was a gobsmacking, Perry Mason moment of the sort that doesn’t happen in actual hearings; except it did. The spectators emitted a kind of silent gasp while Judge Nachmanoff pursed his lips and remained silent for several seconds.
The bizarre and unprecedented chain of events happened because the grand jury declined to return the first of three charges in the government’s proposed indictment (and it approved charges two and three by reportedly very narrow margins). But instead of presenting to the grand jury a new indictment with the two approved counts—not only standard procedure but the only conceivable one—Halligan and her colleagues simply cut and pasted the original indictment, removing the first charge and renumbering the remaining two….
It’s hard to convey how consummately boneheaded it was to try to slip a revised indictment past the court rather than presenting it to the grand jury. Earlier in the week, Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick had referred to the situation as “uncharted territory.”
As this all spilled out, Nachmanoff summoned Halligan to the podium to confirm that when the second indictment was presented, the full grand jury wasn’t in the courtroom. Halligan acknowledged it, and Nachmanoff curtly dismissed her….
…Perhaps more seriously, the [Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick’s] opinion outlined two fundamental misstatements of law that Halligan made to the grand jury, each in response to juror questions. The opinion redacted the statements but described them sufficiently to reveal more breathtaking prosecutorial malpractice.
Halligan mischaracterized Comey’s Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in a way that could have suggested to jurors that the burden of proof lay with him. And she told them that if the government’s evidence appeared thin, they need not worry—additional evidence would come out at trial….
In its filing yesterday, the government did little to dispute the facts, arguing instead that if Halligan misled the jury, dismissal would be inappropriate unless the court found prejudice. That may be true in the abstract, but nothing about these errors feels harmless: The misstatements were grave, fundamental, and, given the grand jury’s already narrow votes, plainly consequential.
And on this score, another malefactor surfaces: Attorney General Pam Bondi. DOJ filings assert that Bondi reviewed the grand jury proceedings and materials and, on that basis, ratified both the indictment and Halligan’s authority. If so, she necessarily signed off on the very misstatements Judge Fitzpatrick highlighted. Her willingness to act as a shill for Halligan implicates her directly in the ethical and constitutional violations….
What Happens When The Government Loses Its Credibility: The Comey Prosecution
Joyce Vance, Nov 18, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
…The Judge called what happened here “a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding” and granted Comey’s request for access to all of the grand jury proceedings. He ordered the government to turn over those materials by 3 p.m. on Monday. Predictably, the government pushed back….
The Trump Administration’s Favorite Tool for Criminalizing Dissent
Quinta Jurecic, November 18, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Federal prosecutors have charged more than 100 people with Section 111 violations. Was their crime anything more than opposing Trump’s immigration policies?
The videos have become commonplace. Federal officers wearing masks and bulletproof vests subdue a moped driver in the middle of a busy D.C. street. A 70-year-old protester in Chicago is pushed to the ground by an armed Border Patrol agent holding a riot gun. In Los Angeles, an agent shoves away a demonstrator.
These videos capture the aggressive tactics of immigration officers under the second Trump administration. But they share something else, too. In each instance, following documented violence by federal officers toward protesters and immigrants, the Justice Department pressed charges—against the victim of that violence. Those three people, according to the DOJ, had all broken a law prohibiting “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officials….
Michael Steele’s [Malcolm Nance’s] GRAVE WARNING about Trump Will Give You CHILLS
[Your Daily Political Fix, November 18, 2025, YouTube]
1:14
…we are at the point of danger now. Uh, this administration has convinced themselves based on their own fantasies wrapped within their heads watching footage that’s five and 10 years old … they want to kill Americans that other American citizens now need to be designated as equal to a foreign terrorist group or armed vigilante gang or armed gangs in El Salvador in an effort to poison the mind of onethird of the electorate to attack and potentially kill another third of the electorate.If that sounds familiar, that’s what Adolf Hitler did. He won with 33% of the vote. He got the other 33% to join together to try to wipe out the democratically elected 33%. We are in a very very very dangerous place right now. Well, I don’t know what else you call it when you’re sending red state, you know, troops into blue states without their permission. That feels inciting of a a civil war or whatever you want to call it. when you openly say insurrection act … and even a Trump judge says it has no relation to reality.
2:44
Well, what we’re seeing here is quite simple. It’s military occupation. And he’s sending forces from people who he thought from states that were supposed to be Trump supporting. Let me tell you
something. These guardsmen go where they’re ordered because that’s their their job for the weekend, right? So when they get mobilized and activated, they’ll go there. But with few exceptions, this the force is 40 to 45% African-American, Latino, and women. And they’re not going to go out and start shooting people. We haven’t even seen any evidence of where they actually are other than doing support. It’s ICE, the secret police, the new American Gestapo. And I will call them that professionally because what they are doing is the technical term in my manual that is used throughout the world. The terrorist recognition handbook is state terrorism where all instruments of government and law enforcement the intelligence apparatus carry out acts of terrorism in order to intimidate the entire nation into a state of fear.
White House blew past legal concerns in deadly strikes on drug boats
Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel and Alex Hortonibe, Nov 22, 2025 [Washington Post]
President Donald Trump and his top White House aides pushed for lethal strikes on Western Hemisphere drug traffickers almost as soon as they took office in January, and in the past 10 months have repeatedly steamrolled or sidestepped government lawyers who questioned whether the provocative policy was legal, according to multiple current and former officials familiar with the debates….
Thomas Mills, Nov 21, 2025 [PoliticsNC]
Earlier this week, I wrote a piece about the Border Patrol’s invasion of the state, citing their assault and abduction of an American citizen in Charlotte. I concluded the piece asking, “Where are the lawyers?” Well, one attorney replied.
John Runkle sent me a letter he had written in July addressed to Governor Josh Stein and Attorney General Jeff Jackson. In it, he reminded them that Republicans passed a law banning masks in public with few exceptions. The Customs and Border Patrol agents in the state are brazenly defying it.
John writes, “It is clear to me that ICE agents wear a mask solely to hide their identities and operate through threatening tactics. On its face our Mask Law prevents these actions.”
The Republicans who passed that law should be outraged. People from outside of North Carolina are flaunting their disregard for the state’s laws and the GOP’s deeply held conviction that masks should not be worn in public. Republicans were so committed to that belief that they overrode then-Governor Roy Cooper’s veto. Now, they need to either demand that the law be respected and enforced or admit that it was a political stunt to satisfy their base that believed COVID was a hoax.
In addition to the masks, who thought wearing military-style camo gear is a good idea? These guys aren’t in the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of Vietnam. They’re in the Home Depot parking lot. They are supposed to be carrying out police actions, not military ones….
The south rises again
Trump, Border Patrol Retreat in Failure from Chicago
Garrett Graff, November 17, 2025 [Doomsday Scenario]
In the last few days, roving Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino decamped from Chicago, where his military-style raids have terrorized that community for weeks, for Charlotte, North Carolina — a somewhat inexplicable new target (more on that below) — and a move that underscores what has to be the growing conclusion of the now six-month-old campaign of “acting president” Stephen Miller to turbocharge immigration enforcement: It’s failing. Bigly.
The Border Patrol retreated from Chicago in defeat, not victory.
Writing about the Border Patrol a decade ago, I referred to it as a “fiercely independent agency—part police force, part occupying army, part frontier cavalry,” and watching Bovino’s tactics, I’ve come to believe the analogy has even more truth in the current moment.
Bovino is basically leading a rebel cavalry, a la Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who raided and terrorized communities in Kentucky and Tennessee in the Civil War. That latter analogy holds up particularly well in one specific respect: Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. In many ways, in fact, Bovino’s shock troops have the most in common with the Klan “night rides” of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era South, where hooded Klan members on horseback — often “respectable” leaders of the White community like the local sheriff — terrorized Black families and abused their civil rights. Bovino seems focused on becoming the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Trump immigration era, complete with the blatant racism, illegal tactics, and ignominious losing place in history….
Here are five important conclusions we can better understand now, six months into the increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement efforts nationwide:
1. Trump and Bovino face diminishing half-lives.…
2. The politics aren’t working….
3. The data shows Trump’s lies — these aren’t the worst of the worst….
4. Most of the arrests are being rounded up in “Kavanaugh Stops.” ….
5. Operation CHARLOTTE’S WEB is horrid, ahistorical, and anti-American.…
Strategic Political Economy
Why do professionals hate change?
Richard Murphy, November 17 2025 [Funding the Future]
There’s a puzzle, and the puzzle is, why do top-tier professionals always resist change?
Whether they’re accountants, economists, lawyers, financiers, civil servants, politicians even, and medics as well, all top-tier professionals cling to norms that they know are failing. Even persuasive new evidence that things have to change is met by them with defensive silence. And this isn’t about ignorance. These aren’t stupid people after all. It’s about fear, it’s about habit, and it’s about their hatred of the idea that they might lose their purpose….
…professional people define themselves by mastering existing systems, their education, their careers, and their authority rests on knowing the current rules. To admit the system that they know is wrong is to question themselves, and even their personal identity. Change feels to them like personal failure, so they defend the order that exists because that defines them….
[TW: Inherent resistance to change and clinging to what is known are the two most powerful arguments against a “free market” especially when combined with the desire to avoid competition and monopolize.
[Yet change is paramount to survival. As Jared Diamond has explained in his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, societies collapse as they exhaust their known stock of resources. What Diamond does not discuss is that the development of science and technology allows society to expand and increase its known stock of resources and use and recycle those resources less wastefully (more efficiently).
[The absolute need for change in science and technology is why the mainstream economics focus on equilibrium is so errant and dangerous. Economics should not be about allocating scarce resources; economics should be about developing society’s capacity to overcome scarcity.
[First USA Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wrote in his December 1791 Report on Manufactures: “Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the [most] ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance and by slow gradations. The spontaneous transition to new pursuits, in a community long habituated to different ones, may be expected to be attended with proportionably greater difficulty… To produce the desireable changes, as early as may be expedient, may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government.”
[When I use this excerpt from Hamilton, I like to point out it gives the lie to the Marxist tenet that laws and government are determined by the economic basis of production. In the Hamiltonian system, it is laws and government which foster new developments in the basis of production.]
Meta Wins Antitrust Case as Big Tech Moves from a Monopoly to a Macro-Economic Problem
Matt Stoller, Nov 20, 2025 [BIG]
The basics of what the judge decided are worth understanding, but it is less meaningful than the larger context of the increasing economic importance of generative AI which Trump demonstrated with his attempt to shield the company from public control. In a sense, big tech used to be about a rogue monopoly engaging in extractive behavior, which was when the antitrust suit was brought. Today, it has morphed into a macro problem jeopardizing our economy, and it’s become clear that antitrust isn’t nearly enough to tame it.
Is the political order collapsing?
Richard Murphy, November 20, 2025 [Funding the Future]
Wherever you look, governments are collapsing under their own incompetence.
Right now, governments are failing everywhere.
There is a political crisis emerging right across the West, and the far-right response to this is already falling apart.
This is a moment that requires political imagination. My question is, has anyone got that imagination that is required at this moment to deliver the policies of change that we really require?
Idrees Kahloon, November 19, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Global power shift
China’s New Photonic Quantum Chip Promises 1,000-Fold Gains for Complex Computing Tasks
[Quantum Insider, via Naked Capitalism 11-16-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Palestinian deaths in Israeli custody have surged. A prison guard describes rampant abuse
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 11-18-2025]
Shaun King, Nov 17, 2025
When Israeli prison workers themselves confess torture, starvation, amputations, and routine death, the world has no excuse left.
Tensions rise as Israeli troops attack UN forces in southern Lebanon
[Arab Weekly, via Naked Capitalism 11-18-2025]
Jonathan Cook, Nov 21, 2025 [defenddemocracy.press]
…In the book Publish It Not (1975), Michael Adams, The Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent in the late 1960s, sets out his struggles to persuade the paper to believe his accounts of systematic Israeli brutality following its military occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. His editors, like the rest of the media, preferred to believe Israel’s claim that its occupation was “the most enlightened in history.”
When Adams tried to challenge that assumption, by reporting on Israel’s ethnic cleansing of three Palestinian villages under cover of the 1967 war — the villages were destroyed and would later become a green space for Israelis called Canada Park — he was pushed out of the paper. He recounts that his editor told him “he would never again publish anything I wrote about the Middle East.”
Then there was Donald Neff, Time Magazine’s bureau chief in the 1970s. He was eased out after reporting in 1978 on Israeli soldiers savagely beating Palestinian children in Beit Jala, a West Bank community near Bethlehem. It was a very tame story by today’s standards, given that we now have actual footage of Israeli soldiers committing crimes against humanity, often posted on their own social media. But then such a report had the power to shock.
Neff’s bureau staff — all of them Israeli Jews — responded in open revolt to his story. Official Israeli sources refused to speak to him. The Israel lobby in the U.S. began a public campaign against Neff and Time. His editors were unsupportive, and the story was ignored by other US media. Isolated and exhausted from the attacks, Neff left his post….
I submitted stories to both The Guardian — where I had previously been a staff journalist for many years — and the International Herald Tribune, now refashioned as the International New York Times.
Let me quickly illustrate an example I had with each.
The Guardian repeatedly shied away from running an investigation I had conducted that revealed how an Israeli sniper had knowingly shot dead a British U.N. official, Iain Hook, in the West Bank city of Jenin in 2002. I was the only journalist to travel to Jenin to see what had happened. Chris McGreal, the paper’s recently arrived Jerusalem correspondent, lobbied for the story on my behalf. After weeks of stalling, the paper finally, and reluctantly, agreed to run the piece on a full page.
When it appeared, however, it had been cut in half without warning. The heart of the investigation, showing how the sniper had killed Hook, had been removed. Editors claimed they had been forced to take a last-minute ad — something I knew to be impossible, because I had earlier worked in a production role at the paper. They never had any intention of running the investigation. They had duped not only me but their own Jerusalem bureau chief….
Chris McGreal’s time in Jerusalem in this period was revealing too. He had been a highly distinguished South Africa correspondent for The Independent and The Guardian newspapers during the apartheid era. He won many awards.
He arrived in Jerusalem for The Guardian in 2002 and recognised immediately that Israel was operating a similar apartheid system. However, it was only when he left the post in early 2006 that the paper agreed to publish a lengthy, two-part feature on the similarities between the South African and Israeli varieties of apartheid….
AIPAC Donors Back Real Estate Tycoon Who Opposed Gaza Ceasefire for Deep-Blue Chicago Seat
Akela Lacy, November 22 2025 [The Intercept]
Progressive Rep. Danny Davis rejected AIPAC cash at the end of his career. Now the Israel lobby is coming for his seat.
Oligarchy
How billionaires took over American politics
Beth Reinhard, Naftali Bendavid, Clara Ence Morse and Aaron Schaffer, November 21, 2025 [Washington Post]
[First of an eight part series]
…In an era defined by major political divisions and massive wealth accumulation for the richest Americans, billionaires are spending unprecedented amounts on U.S. politics. Dozens have stepped up their political giving in recent years, leading to a record-breaking surge of donations by the ultrarich in 2024. Since 2000, political giving by the wealthiest 100 Americans to federal elections has gone up almost 140 times, well outpacing the growing costs of campaigns, a Washington Post analysis found.
In 2000, the country’s wealthiest 100 people donated about a quarter of 1 percent of the total cost of federal elections, according to a Post analysis of data from OpenSecrets. By 2024, they covered about 7.5 percent, even as the cost of such elections soared. In other words, roughly 1 in every 13 dollars spent in last year’s national elections was donated by a handful of the country’s richest people….
Billionaires didn’t acquire their influence in D.C. overnight. President Bill Clinton aggressively courted Wall Street, then signed a sweeping financial deregulation bill and a trade deal strongly backed by wealthy Americans. President George W. Bush also relied heavily on affluent donors, then pushed through tax cuts that benefited the rich, as well as the Troubled Asset Relief Program to bail out big banks. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first presidential candidate in the post-Watergate era to reject public campaign financing, opting out of the system’s spending limitations and instead raising huge sums from private donors.Bush’s TARP and Obama’s Great Recession stimulus package ignited a populist backlash that persists to this day, paving the way for Trump’s message that despite his wealth, he shares ordinary Americans’ fury at a rigged system. Yet under Trump, the first billionaire president, the ultra-wealthy have set up shop inside the corridors of government more openly than ever before.
Americans Want Billionaires Out Of Politics—And Think They’re A Threat To Democracy, Poll Shows
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2025]
Josh Bivens, November 17, 2025 [Economic Policy Institute]
The System That Produced Dick Cheney Honors Dick Cheney
Thomas Neuburger, Nov 21, 2025 [God’s Spies]
…Elites honor each other to keep the whole game alive. As I wrote when the first George Bush died:
“From lesser lights to greater, from murderers to comedians, the praise continues.
”As usual, the network of those who run the world we merely inhabit have nothing but respect for each other. And why not? They may pick each other off from time to time (both Saddam Hussein and Moamar Khaddafi were once in high favor), but over the long haul, keeping each member of the ruling circle in a reverential spotlight keeps them all — keeps the circle itself — in reverence as well. Since they operate as a system, the system is honored each time its members, no matter how deadly, are honored as well. And the system sees that the system is always honored.”
Elites and elites. By honoring each other, they honor eliteness itself, their place in the world. And nothing’s more important to elites than their place in the world….
Is This Finally and Blessedly the End of the Larry Summers Era?
Dean Baker, November 20, 2025 [The New Republic]
It seems Jeffrey Epstein’s tentacles reached much further than any of us could have imagined, with Larry Summers, one of the nation’s most prominent economists, being caught in the web. I have nothing to add to the specifics of his involvement with Epstein. It would have been better if his removal from public life had been caused by his more than three decades of wrongheaded policy advice.
Larry Summers has been at the center of economic policy debates since the early 1990s, when he took a top position in the Clinton Treasury Department after a brief stint as the chief economist at the World Bank. There, he was one of the architects of Clinton’s economic policy, from which we are still seeing the fallout today….
On trade, Clinton first pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, over the objection of the vast majority of Democrats in Congress. In his last year in office, he got Congress to admit China to the World Trade Organization, again over the objection of the vast majority of Democratic members of Congress.
China’s admission to the WTO, along with the high dollar policy pushed by the Clinton Treasury Department, led to a massive loss of manufacturing jobs over the next decade. In the 10 years from December 1999 to December 2009, we lost 5.8 million manufacturing jobs, more than one-third of the country’s total. These job losses devasted whole communities, where one or two factories were the major employers. Many have not recovered even today.
Dissolving America: Peter Thiel, Chaos, and the “Hard Reset”
Jim Stewartson, Nov 22, 2025 [MondWar]
What appears to be random Trump-regime chaos and cruelty is actually a deliberate strategy of dissolution. Understanding this process clearly and providing the right kind of countermeasures is crucial to the survival of our basic humanity.
The nexus of this strategy is anchored in the unlikely triangle of Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein, and the Santa Fe Institute for complexity science….
Creating chaos is the same as dissolving order—literally un-solving solutions. This is just as true in politics as it is in chemistry: taking a well-ordered salt crystal and putting it in water is the same dynamic process as taking a well-ordered society and bathing it in hate and ignorance. Both lead to chaos—to dissolving of the system….
In 2012, at a libertarian student organization, Peter Thiel laid out the playbook.
“As a society we may have to still go through one last really crazy bubble but when this one is over it will be time to sort of reassess the entire history of the last 200 years and I think the only thing left standing will be something like a libertarian account of what’s going to happen. When the government bubble breaks the people in this room will be the people who will be the only people who have been right all along.
“You know, the residual part of it is, of course, the education bubble, which is a very important, subcomponent of the government bubble… you have to keep in the back of your mind the idea that there’s something deeply flawed with it.”
Make no mistake, he meant it literally. Peter Thiel believes that the Enlightenment is a failed project. When he said to “Students for Liberty” that after the “government bubble” bursts “it will be time to sort of reassess the entire history of the last 200 years,” he meant to question not just democracy, but liberalism, pluralism, and equality as worthy principles upon which to build a civilization….A pluralistic democracy is a system in a state of complex order, which means it is both highly structured and constrained. If you want to replace complex order with something simpler, you can’t just go straight there; you have to add chaos….The sustainability of a complex system comes from its ability to take chaos and convert it to order through adaptation without destroying itself. A democracy without protest and debate is not a democracy at all. A human who does not wrestle with competing thoughts is not a free-thinking person….
Felonomics
The Patent Office Is About To Make Bad Patents Untouchable
[Electronic Frontier Foundation, via Naked Capitalism 11-22-2025]
[Yves Smith: “This is a call to action. If you have any interest in patents, please read this article and submit a comment opposing the proposed US Patent Office rule change.”]
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has proposed new rules that would effectively end the public’s ability to challenge improperly granted patents at their source—the Patent Office itself. If these rules take effect, they will hand patent trolls exactly what they’ve been chasing for years: a way to keep bad patents alive and out of reach. People targeted with troll lawsuits will be left with almost no realistic or affordable way to defend themselves.
We need EFF supporters to file public comments opposing these rules right away. The deadline for public comments is December 2. The USPTO is moving quickly, and staying silent will only help those who profit from abusive patents….
Trump Administration Plans to Defund MEPs Next Year, Ignoring Congress’ Allocation
Laura Putre, Nov. 18, 2025 [IndustryWeek]
President Donald Trump is once again planning to defund Manufacturing Extension Partnerships. After drawing swift, bipartisan opposition to that plan in April, he backed down. But since then, the administration has failed to send checks to organizations for 2025 and is warning that all MEPs will be defunded in 2026.
The 50 Manufacturing Extension Partnerships, or MEPs, are nonprofit organizations that provide business development and support to small- and medium-sized manufacturers across the country. Some have cut staff and are not hiring for open positions as they wait for their payments, said Carrie Hines, president of the American Small Manufacturers Coalition, the trade association for MEPs.
America’s corporate meltdown: 655 big firms bankrupt as 2025 crisis surges to 15-year high
[Economic Times, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2025]
McDonald’s core customer base drops by double digits in Trump economy
Lesley Abravanel, November 16, 2025 [Alternet, via RawStory]]
Suhauna Hussain, Nov. 16, 2025 [Los Angeles Times]
…A report released this year by researchers with Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University found that half of all renters, 22.6 million people, were cost-burdened in 2023, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities, up 3.2 percentage points since 2019 and 9 percentage points since 2001. Twenty-seven percent of renters are severely burdened, spending more than 50% of their income on housing.
As rents have grown, the amount families have left after paying for housing and utilities has fallen to record lows. In 2023, renters with annual household incomes under $30,000 had a median of just $250 per month in residual income to spend on other needs, an amount that’s fallen 55% since 2001, with the steepest declines since the pandemic, according to the Harvard study….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Why car insurance costs have soared (and what drivers are doing about it)
[NPR, via The Big Picture, November 17, 2025]
On average, premiums are up 55% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Almost all of that increase came between 2022 and 2024.
Predatory finance
Wall Street Is Paywalling Your Kids’ Sports
Luke Goldstein, Nov 18, 2025 [The Lever]
…As the $40 billion youth sports industry comes under private equity control, corporate-owned facilities and leagues — from hockey rinks to cheerleading arenas — have begun prohibiting parents from recording their own kids’ sports games.
Instead, parents are forced to subscribe to these companies’ exclusive recording and streaming service, which can cost many times more than the streaming costs for professional sporting events. Meanwhile, the firms’ exclusive contracts have prohibited alternative video services from being made available.
In some instances, parents have been threatened that if they choose to defy the rules and record the game, they may end up on a blacklist that punishes their kids’ teams. Those threats were even reportedly made to a sitting U.S. Senator….
Is it Happening All Over Again?
Eric Salzman, Nov 17, 2025 [Racket News]
Lax risk management, an incurious Federal Reserve, credit rating agency shopping, greed and garden-variety stupidity. Welcome to what could be the next great financial crisis.
The Harvard Endowment’s Biggest Public Investment is Now Bitcoin
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2025]
How Wall Street Killed Single-Family Home Building
[The Economic Populist, Economic Liberties, Nov 18, 2025]
…a new Economic Liberties paper sheds light on a leading culprit that has received little attention: a shift in how homebuilding is financed that ultimately favored Wall Street profits over Main Street’s housing needs.
“Capital Crunch,” by Research Manager Laurel Kilgour, begins with an overview of the ingenious New Deal model for homebuilding finance that powered the American Dream in the 20th century. The key supply-side method involved backing a robust network of community banks and savings and loan associations (“S&Ls” or “thrifts”). Government legally required thrifts to channel local deposits into financing for local homebuilders, geographically restricted their financial exposure to a 50-mile radius, and specified that their ownership be broadly dispersed among community members….
[TW: This is a very, very welcome counter to the “Abundance” argument of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who argue that by attempting to mandate fairness and equity, liberals of unintentionally created a burden of regulations that prevents economic production and thus artificial scarcities. Not once in their book do Klein and Thompson ever discuss the speculation, usury, and extraction burden imposed by Wall Street and the financial system, which I suspect now reaches at least a full one third of GDP.]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
We Should All Be Epstein Conspiracy Theorists Now
Mehdi Hasan, Nov 17, 2025 [Zeteo]
…The great irony, of course, is that the MAGA movement spent the past decade furiously insisting that a secret cabal of politicians has been covering up child sex crimes, and it turns out they may have been right, but what they didn’t realize is that the cover-up is coming from inside the house. Yet the same conservatives who accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of murdering their opponents now have little to say about the ridiculously suspicious death of Jeffrey Epstein in federal (read: Trump) custody….
Matt Taibbi, Nov 17, 2025
Steve Bannon advised Jeffrey Epstein for years on how to rehab his reputation, texts show
[The Guardian, via The Big Picture, November 20, 2025]
Pair devised responses to public outrage about Epstein’s criminal history, his treatment by the justice system and his friendships with powerful people.
Jeffrey Epstein Pursued Swiss Rothschild Bank to Finance Israeli Cyberweapons Empire
Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain, Nov 18, 2025 [Drop Site News]
The Blast Radius of Jeff Epstein
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2025]
With a focus on Larry Summers and his fabulous career.
Dean Obeidallah, Nov 16, 2025
[International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Nov 17, 2025]
- READ: Crypto giants moved billions linked to money launderers, drug traffickers and North Korean hackers
- READ: From Dubai to Toronto, inside the crypto-to-cash storefronts fueling money laundering’s new frontier
- READ: The Russian crypto guru’s Hollywood gambit
- EXPLAINER: From trading bans to total embrace, a global guide to crypto regulation
- WATCH: A two-minute introduction to The Coin Laundry
- WATCH: Cryptocurrency exchanges, explained
- ABOUT: About The Coin Laundry investigation
- FAQS: Answers to questions about ICIJ’s reporting
Restoring balance to the economy
What Mamdani Can Learn from Past and Present Public Grocery Projects
[FoodandPower.net, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2025]
…American cities used to play a more direct role in food retail. Through the 19th century, cities built public markets where food hawkers and farmers could rent stalls to create a more accessible, sanitary, and efficient alternative to street vendors. Many of these markets still exist, including Seattle’s Pike Place Market, Boston’s Quincy Market, and New York’s Essex Market. A longstanding produce store in the Essex Market, Viva Frutas, told The New York Times that it’s able to keep prices lower for its predominantly low-income clientele because the city offers it below-market rent….
Maintaining a market where vendors can rent low-cost space is a different public project than maintaining a grocery store. But we know the latter can be done effectively, because as long as there have been private self-service grocery stores, there have been government-run grocery stores for military families and veterans.
The Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) runs 178 stores in the U.S. and 57 stores abroad that sell groceries for roughly 25-30% less than conventional U.S. stores, saving military families an estimated $1.6 billion per year. The commissary system benefits from economies of scale and federal negotiating power to buy goods at a low price. Then the DeCA sells these goods to military families for just 5% more than what they paid for them, compared to a typical grocery store, which marks up goods around 30%.
DeCA can keep its markup so low because taxpayers subsidize some of the commissaries’ operating costs, notably store labor. The federal government spends $1.2 billion annually on DeCA operations and labor (approximately $5 million per store). Policy makers argue that this subsidy is worth the cost to provide additional benefits to service members….
[TW: In 1710, a grain and bread shortage had been artificially created in Boston by the town’s most wealthy merchant, Andrew Belcher. “He lived in a mansion, rode around Boston in an elegant carriage and owned many slaves and ships. His son, Jonathan Belcher, would serve as royal governor.” In the midst of Queen Anne’s War — the second of the French and Indian Wars fought in North America — Belcher has used his position of commissary general to speculate by buying and hoarding all the wheat in the surrounding countryside. When word spreads that one of Belcher’s ships was about to sail carrying 6,000 bushels of grain, a group of 50 men attacked the ship and destroyed the rudder. They were arrested, but a grand jury refused to indict them.
[Three years later, Belcher tried it again, intending to ship the grain to the Caribbean slave plantations, which were desperate for grain and willing to pay much higher prices. This time, the 1713 Bread Riots erupted in Boston. Several hundred men broke in warehouses owned by Belcher, and carried away every barrel of grain they could find. When the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts tried to one group, someone shot him. The riots forced the colonial legislature to pass regulations against speculation and hoarding of food:
Boston selectmen returned to the legislature with a petition for an emergency law “with respect to the Scarcity of Provisions.” This time they were successful. The new act prohibited merchants from exporting grain when it was in short supply. All ships docking in Boston were required to sell their grain to 15 identified bakers for a set price. Later Boston officials standardized the size and cost of a loaf of bread. In 1714 the town established a public granary where the poor could buy grain at below market prices.
[A more thorough account of the Boston public granary and its intended role of counteracting hoarding and speculation to secure adequate food supplies for the people, would be very useful in debunking the “free enterprise” myth of the origins of the American economy. For example, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-century America, (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1996) William J. Novak wrote:
“Licensing left little in the early American economy untouched. Indeed, it turned several occupations and trades into veritable offshoots of the state or municipality. In all cases, licensing established the predominant public interest in policing the economy. Licensed activities were privileges, not rights, and were subject to police regulation when the public health, safety. and welfare demanded.
“Extensive as licensing and inspection statutes were, they still made up only part of the array of
regulatory technologies used to control the public economy.” — p. 94 ]
New York Gets Serious About Food Prices
Emma Janssen, November 21, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…THE CONSUMER GROCERY PRICING FAIRNESS ACT, sponsored by state Assemblymember Micah Lasher and state Sen. Cordell Cleare, is essentially a state-sized version of the Robinson-Patman Act. If passed, it would empower New York’s attorney general to sue distributors who offer unfair discounts (as defined in the bill) to big-box stores without offering them to smaller retailers. Under the law, business owners could also bring civil suits against companies engaged in unfair practices, but Lasher said he expects the lion’s share of enforcement to come from the state attorney general.
Enforcement would be a major help to independent grocers across the state. Small grocers have been struggling to keep up with big-box stores for decades; the six biggest grocers now control 60 percent of all sales, and suppliers are heavily concentrated as well. The mutual back-scratching of these oligarchical giants leaves independent competitors out in the cold. This has accelerated—or, arguably, caused—the rise of food deserts across America, in both urban and rural areas….
Disrupting mainstream economics
Economic questions: the Thomas Paine question
Richard Murphy, November 22, 2025 [Funding the Future]
Thomas Paine was one of the most radical minds of the eighteenth century. He was a man whose writings helped ignite the American Revolution, inspired democratic uprisings across Europe, and challenged the very foundations of monarchy, hierarchy, and inherited privilege. Yet Paine was not only a political revolutionary; he was also a visionary of economic justice. In Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice, he argued that true freedom could not exist in a society where people lacked the means to live decently.
For Paine, the greatest threat to liberty was the economic insecurity that made ordinary people vulnerable to exploitation, dependency and fear. Political rights, he insisted, are hollow when those who supposedly possess them are denied the material conditions necessary to exercise them.
Hence, the Thomas Paine Question: If political liberty is meaningless without economic security, why do we still pretend that freedom can exist alongside poverty, dependence and deprivation?
[TW: There has never been, so far as I know, a book written on the political economy of republicanism. Paine may be an excellent starting point, especially since he had a very public dispute with Edmund Burke, the supposed father of conservatism. On Paine versus Burke, see Thom Hartmann, January 18, 2023, “Is the Reason Some Wealthy People Oppose Democracy Deeper Than We Think?” ]
Re-moralising economic life is not an optional extra
Richard Murphy, November 22, 2025 [Funding the Future]
In summary, I think that when the acquisition of wealth ceases to be judged morally, society loses its ability to judge morality at all.
That thought has been developing for some time, because if there is a thread running through many of the issues that I have campaigned upon, it is that they are connected by the idea that we have stripped morality out of the process of acquiring money, and the consequences are now unfolding across our politics, our economy and our society.
We should, I suggest, no longer talk about “making money”, partly because that is confusing in the context of modern monetary theory, and more importantly because much of what is now called wealth creation involves no creation at all. It is, instead, too often an act of extraction, whether that be from labour, from land, from artificially inflated assets, and from speculative transactions that add nothing of value. Despite this, our society has come to treat this extraction as if it were a virtue. The more a person accumulates, the more we are told to admire them, regardless of how they acquired that money. Some obvious thoughts flow from that.
First, this means we have normalised the belief that the pursuit of wealth is at least morally neutral. The financier who distorts a housing market is called innovative. The corporation that avoids tax is considered efficient. The monopolist is just profit-maximising. None of this language is accidental. A deliberate effort has been made over decades to separate money from morality, as if economic choices existed outside the sphere of ethics….
…inequality becomes entrenched. If accumulation is celebrated and extraction is unchallenged, the gaps in income and wealth widen relentlessly. That is not the result of market forces alone; it is the consequence of a moral framework that rewards taking more than either giving or creating….
Secondly, we need accountability for those who accumulate wealth. Taxes must be paid. Regulation must curb extraction. Speculation must not be rewarded as if it were productive work. Wealth gained by harming others must be recognised for what it is, which is a social cost, and not a social contribution.
Second, the moral scrutiny that has been removed from the wealthy has been displaced onto those with the least….
Disrupting mainstream politics
Eric Blanc, Nov 17, 2025 [Labor Politics]
In 1910, Milwaukee’s socialists swept into office and they proceeded to run the city for most of the next fifty years. Though ruling elites initially predicted chaos and disaster, even Time magazine by 1936 felt obliged to run a cover story titled “Marxist Mayor” on the city’s success, noting that under socialist rule “Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the US.” ….
Nowhere in the US were socialists stronger than in Milwaukee. And Wisconsin was the state with the most elected socialist officials as well as the highest number of socialist legislators (see Figure 1). It was also the only state in America where socialists consistently led the entire union movement — indeed, it was primarily their roots in organized labor that made their electoral and policy success possible, including the passage of 295 socialist-authored bills statewide between 1919 and 1931…..
Team Zeteo and Mehdi Hasan, Nov 19, 2025 [Zeteo]
Mamdani’s NYC Can’t Afford NYPD Commissioner Tisch
Spencer Ackerman, 17 Nov 2025 [Forever Wars]
…It’s not a question that Jessica Tisch’s background has equipped her to answer. A scion of one of New York’s oligarch families—think Tisch School of The Arts at NYU, the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery at the Met, and the Loews Corporation, notable for its insurance and fracking pipeline holdings—the Tisches of the world can always count on the police. It’s one of the messages she sent when she created the spectacle of surrounding a subdued, orange-jumpsuited Luigi Mangione with heavily armed and armored men. The man Mangione is accused of killing, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, could have been her father, or her grandfather. If you had difficulty relating to Thompson—or found that you sympathized not with the victim but the alleged killer or, at least, his cause—then you were part of Tisch’s audience.
But that’s all somewhat abstract. Far more concrete is the case of Leqaa Kordia. Since March 13, ICE has held the 32 year-old Kordia, a New Jersey resident from the West Bank, at its Prairieland, Texas detention facility and portrayed her as a terror supporter….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
This App Lets ICE Track Vehicles and Owners Across the Country
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 11-18-2025]
We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds
[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 11-18-2025]
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
Dean Obeidallah, Nov 19, 2025
Ellisons Tap Saudis to Fund News Media Takeover
Harold Meyerson, November 20, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media?
[Harper’s Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 11-16-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa
[Climate Drift, via Naked Capitalism 11-17-2025]
Chapter 3: Turning Products Into Services: The PAYG Breakthrough
This is the unlock. This is the thing that makes everything else possible.Here’s the model:
- A company (Sun King, SunCulture) installs a solar system in your home
- You pay ~$100 down
- Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months
- The system has a GSM chip that calls home
- No payment = remotely shut off
- Keep paying = keep power
- After 30 months = you own it, free power forever
The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system. You’re replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene) that’s cheaper AND gives you better light, phone charging, radio, and no respiratory disease.
The default rate? 90%+ of customers repay on time….
Let’s do the math on how big this can get.
- 600M people without reliable power in Sub-Saharan Africa
- 570M smallholder farming households in Africa
- 900M people in Africa use traditional cookstoves ….
Democrats’ political malpractice
WOULD YOU EVER GO ON VACATION TO A PLACE LIKE THAT?
Seymour Hersh , via Naked Capitalism 11-21-2025] A conversation with Thomas Frank.
…TF: Yeah, well, that was Obama’s cabinet. Do you remember Obama had the most amazing cabinet of all time? It’s like they had every prize. He had a Nobel Laureate in his cabinet. He had Genius Grant winners. He had Pulitzer Prize winners. I think Biden, and I hate to say this because it came to such a bad end. But there’s only a handful of people in the Democratic Party leadership that understand what’s gone wrong. And Biden was one of them. Biden is old enough to remember, not the New Deal, but certainly the tail end of all that in the ’60s. He knew what the Democratic Party used to be. A lot of these people don’t.
SH: They have no idea. They don’t read anything.
TF: But he wasn’t able to turn it around. I mean, he was obviously not the man for that job.
SH: My theory about Biden anyway, is that his decline came earlier than people know—during the second year. And the Mandarins, the Ron Klains and the lawyers and the Donilans, they’re running the government. Why tell the world he’s defective when they’re running the government? In Obama’s years, he made the decisions. So everything was on his desk. He was very hands-on. And Biden then sort of left it to the boys. And my theory is that the real reason they didn’t own up to what was going on is what a chance they had. They could run it, make the decisions, all of them bad. Anyway, so here we are….
TF: The Democrats are always going to do fine in New York City. What bothers me is this turning of working people away, towards conservatism. I wrote a book about Kansas because that’s where I grew up. But there’s other examples that are much more poignant. West Virginia. This is really sad. When I was young, oh, my God, there was no more democratic place than West Virginia up until the ’80s or ’90s, and now it’s flipped. If I were running the Democratic Party, I would make them all go on bus trips there, do a huge project where they have to investigate, find out what went wrong. And really find out, not just invent a reason that is flattering to themselves. But to actually look into it. And you look now at North Dakota—it wasn’t all that long ago that North Dakota had Byron Dorgan as a US senator.
SH: South Dakota had McGovern, remember?
TF: Yes, yes. And now look where they are. What the hell? ….
SH: And it’s happened before. It’ll probably happen again. And he doesn’t pay a price for what he does. That’s the thing that bothers me. He doesn’t pay a price.
TF: I feel like we’re now so far beyond that. I was looking at fundraising. I was trying to remember who Clinton’s and Obama’s top donors were in 2008, 2012, and 2016. And then I went to the present, and the numbers were not that large—like a couple of million dollars or something like that from Silicon Valley. Obama fundraised a lot from Wall Street banks and universities. But then you go to the present, to the latest round, Trump 2024. Elon Musk gave Republicans $290 million. It’s just off the charts. The numbers are so large. The price tag is so great. There’s no accountability. We’re in a place where they just retreat into their money….
TF: The Democrats are not a left-wing party. They’re a centrist party, but the left is their heritage. They were a party of the left from William Jennings Bryan up to Lyndon Johnson. And you can’t have a party of the left where the main constituency that you care about is highly educated people, experts. It just doesn’t work. The party has to be organized around the aspirations and the needs and so on of ordinary people.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Many Top MAGA Trolls Aren’t Even in the U.S.
Rachel Kahn, November 23, 2025 [The New Republic]
Elon Musk’s latest feature on X has had some shocking and unintended consequences.
Starting Friday, X users were able to use a new “about this account” feature to see what country accounts were based in. And for many “America First” posters, this revealed an inconvenient truth, as reported by The Daily Beast.
For example, one account literally named “America First”—with 67,000 followers—seems to be based not in the U.S., but in Bangladesh.
Another popular conservative account, MAGA Nation, with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio that reads, “Standing strong with President Trump 🇺🇸 | America First | Patriot Voice for We The People,” is apparently based in Eastern Europe.
And an Ivanka News fanpage with 1 million followers that posts things like, “Does the spread of Islam on American soil concern you?” is based in Nigeria….
The difference between us and them in two sentences.
tjlord, November 23, 2025 [Daily Kos]
Just heard the perfect answer to how Dems are different from the GQP.
“Majorie Taylor Green has been hated by the left for more than 5 years; she has been hated by the right for three days.
“She has now had to hire security for death threats from the right — she never had to do that before.”
MAGA’s State-by-State Plot to Butcher Democracy
David Daley, November 20, 2025 [The New Republic]
Political insiders, GOP legislators and governors, the president, even the Supreme Court—they’re all in on the flagrantly unconstitutional conspiracy to destroy democracy by the way they draw lines on a map.
MAGA Disarray And The Accumulated Debt Of Corruption
Brian Beutler, Nov 21, 2025 [Off Message]
…Why were these men, some of whom had done real things in their earlier lives, willing to go dirty? Why did they post up at the Willard Hotel and plot a coup after the election? After Trump had wrecked the economy and cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their lives? Political fanaticism can only explain so much. By the end of that year, even many Republicans were relieved that Trump would give way to an experienced public servant.
These men weren’t patriots with warped ideological priorities. They were afraid for their freedom. They were prepared to collapse the whole republic to avoid the accountability they feared was coming.
As it happened, they had little to fear. Joe Biden came to power and appointed an attorney general who shelved or slow walked investigations of the outgoing criminal regime. The main legacy of Merrick Garlandism isn’t failure to mete out justice for past crimes; its that he created incentives for future ones. If they could transgress as far as they did and get away with it, why not go further? A mile is a sum of inches. The accountability void allowed Trump to recover politically, and win office again. A yer in, American public life has become a bacchanal of corruption.
This is the lurking danger as Trump unravels in term two.
The immediate danger is incitement of violence. When Trump is hindfooted, he does things like call for Democrats in Congress to be hanged….
It’s three years until the election, but two years from now, if not sooner, a much larger and wealthier entourage of criminals will devote their efforts to election theft on the theory that:
- if they lose the election, they’ll face legal risk;
- if they try to steal the election and succeed, there will be no consequences;
- if they try to steal the election and fail, they can run their impunity playbook again and hope for the best.
This is why the insurrection risk is so much higher than it was in term one….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Right-Wing Legal Movement Made Trump a King
Ryan Cooper, November 21, 2025 [The American Prospect]
One of the core tenets of the conservative legal movement over the past half-century has been that presidents should have more power. The “unitary executive theory” developed by John Yoo, then an attorney in George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, holds that the president has nearly unlimited authority in the conduct of foreign policy, to the extent that he could legally order the testicles of a child to be crushed.
Naturally, Republican judges and justices always discover a sudden allergy to presidential power whenever a Democrat is occupying the White House; both Barack Obama and Joe Biden spent their entire terms getting their domestic agendas hamstrung by hyper-tendentious lawsuits and partisan hack rulings. Nevertheless, thanks in part to the conservative legal movement, the powers of the presidency have tended to grow over time. It was Obama, after all, who had several American citizens assassinated without trial….
The most immediate problem with kings is that they are liable to abuse their power. In his decision anointing Donald I, first of his line, Roberts argued that a president worried about being prosecuted won’t exercise power freely enough, and the public will be deprived of the great benefit of his bold and vigorous leadership. “The hesitation to execute the duties of his office fearlessly and fairly that might result when a President is making decisions under ‘a pall of potential prosecution,’” Roberts wrote, citing another case where the Court unanimously repealed a bunch of anti-corruption laws, “raises ‘unique risks to the effective functioning of government.’”….
The long game: Breaking up Big Tech is a long-run project.
Cory Doctorow, 20 Nov 2025 [Pluralistic]
Well, this fucking sucks. A federal judge has decided that Meta is not a monopolist, and that its acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp were not an illegal bid to secure and maintain a monopoly:
https://gizmodo.com/meta-learns-that-nothing-is-a-monopoly-if-you-just-wait-long-enough-2000687691
This is particularly galling because Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly, explicitly declared that these mergers were undertaken to reduce competition….
Let me take a step back here. During the Reagan years, a new economic orthodoxy took hold, a weird combination of economic theory and conspiracy theory that held that….
It wasn’t always this way. In the trustbusting era, enforcers joined with organized labor and activists fighting for all kinds of human rights, from universal sufferage to ending Jim Crow, to smash corporate power. Foundational to this fight was the understanding that concentrated corporate power presented a serious danger: first, because of the way that it could corrupt our political process, and second, because of the difficulty of dislodging corporate power once it had been established.
Then came the project to dismantle antitrust and revive the monopolies. Corporatists from the University of Chicago School of Economics and their ultra-wealthy backers launched a multipronged attack on economics, law, and precedent. It was a successful bid to bring back oligarchy and establish a new class of modern aristocracy, whose dynastic fortunes would ensure their rule and the rule of their descendants for generations to come.
A key part of this was an attack on the judiciary. Like other professionals, federal judges are expected to undergo regular “ongoing education” to ensure they’re current on the best practices in their field. Wealthy pro-monopolists bankrolled a series of junkets for judges called the “Manne Seminars,” all-expenses-paid family trips to luxury resorts, where judges could be indoctrinated with the theory of “efficient monopolies”:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
40% of all federal judges attended a Manne Seminar, and empirical studies show that after graduating, these judges changed the way they ruled, to favor monopolies:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjaf042/8241352?login=false
Civic republicanism
AI, Antitrust, and the Future of the Marketplace of Ideas
Maurice Stucke, Nov 17, 2025 [Institute for New Economic Thinking]
AI was sold as a tool to broaden the marketplace of ideas. Instead, a handful of platforms now control how truth travels, shaping what we see, starving journalism, and locking new AI rivals out of the data democracy needs to survive. Into that void step private firms, selling data built for profit, not truth. Experts warn: when public facts vanish, the economy runs on spin.
The Unraveling of the Justice Department — Sixty attorneys describe a year of chaos and suspicion.
Emily Bazelon and Rachel Poser, Nov. 16, 2025 [New York Times]
Prosecutor, Capitol Siege Section: It was inconceivable to me they’d fire people for no reason except they’d worked on cases that were now disfavored. People like me, who are career attorneys, work within a structure. We don’t have much latitude. To be told that you are being punished for your decisions, when you were following guidance created by very talented and skilled prosecutors above you, which judges blessed for the most part — it’s completely bizarre. It flipped the culture of the institution. It’s a culture now of fear. And they are losing people all the time, very good people, who were the future of the department.
….
Mike Romano, Jan. 6 and PIN: Then Bove instructed the acting chief of PIN, John Keller, to dismiss the case. He resigned, effective that day.
….
…the administration was saying they wanted to go after Perkins Coie because of Trump’s commitment to ending discriminatory D.E.I. policies. The idea of the investigation was that Perkins Coie supposedly engaged in illegal discrimination against white men. But Perkins Coie is an extremely white firm — only 3 percent of the partners are Black. When my colleague pointed that out, the leadership didn’t care. They’d already reached their conclusion. They continued instructing my colleague to just find the evidence for it.
Our job wasn’t to engage in fact-finding investigations; our job was to find the facts that would fit the narrative that the administration already had.We also had a racial-discrimination case involving the sole African American attorney working for the Mississippi State Senate, who, during the years she worked there, was paid less than half of what her similarly situated white colleagues were making. It was as clear-cut a case of disparate racial treatment you could find. The Senate stalled the case until Trump’s appointees could come in and order our section to drop it. When you talk about the rule of law and treating people fairly and equally, that’s obviously a slap in the face.Peter Carr, senior communications adviser: I had never seen prosecutors targeted simply because the case they brought was something that current D.O.J. leadership did not like. How can you take these very difficult and challenging cases involving high-profile individuals with the knowledge that at some point in the future, someone is going to end your career because of it?
How the Powell Memo, Project 2025, and the Right’s long game expose the deep cultural beliefs that keep rolling back progressive wins.
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