Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 30, 2025

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 30, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

Trump not violating any law

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

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

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

Legal Experts Accuse Hegseth of ‘War Crimes, Murder, or Both’ After New Reporting on Boat Strike Order

Julia Conley, Nov 30, 2025 [CommonDreams]

The Moment to Pick a Side Has Come [Civil Discourse]

Joyce Vance, Nov 30, 2025

…on Black Friday, the Washington Post ran with an exclusive story about the September 2, 2025, attack on a boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, the first of a series of attacks that have involved strikes on at least 23 boats to date. The Post reported that in advance of the strike, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”

That’s what the special operations commander overseeing the attack did. After the initial hit, live drone feed showed two survivors clinging to the wreckage. The commander “ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions … The two men were blown apart in the water.” The video Trump released later that day did not include the second strike.

The Post quoted Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who had advised special operations on the illegality of the order: “Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight ‘would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime.’” ….

There is a price to be paid for confirming a man as the Secretary of Defense who fails to understand the role he is being called upon to serve in, instead, relishing the title “Secretary of War.” Hegseth received a Bachelor of Arts in politics from Princeton in 2003 and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2013. He joined the Army National Guard as an infantry officer afterward. Nowhere along the road does he seem to have learned the fundamental lessons any Secretary of Defense should have known: The lesson of the Peleus trial.

In 1944, the captain of the U-boat U-852 sank the Greek steamer Peleus in the South Atlantic. There were 12 survivors, including an officer, who was given assurances they would be rescued the following day by Allied forces. But the U-852’s Kapitänleutnant Heinz Eck suddenly ordered his crew to fire on the 12 survivors and attack them with grenades when machine gun fire didn’t suffice to sink their life rafts.

Eck and four others were subsequently charged with war crimes. The charges were in connection with “the act of firing at the survivors and not the original sinking of the ship.” Eck argued “operational necessity,” claiming the survivors could have rallied and attacked the submarine. But all of the men were convicted.

It’s clear that even in wartime, an attack like the one on September 2 is a crime. If we are not at war—an issue the experts are now hotly debating and that we will track with Ryan Goodman in the morning—it’s quite simply murder….

A CIA trained killer who Trump granted asylum to killed a National Guard member — We need answers!

Dean Obeidallah, Nov 28, 2025

Disappeared to a Foreign Prison

Sarah Stillman, November 24, 2025 [The New Yorker]

…Just months earlier, one of these men had a job with UPS in Chicago. Another had lived in Houston, where he worked for his mother’s catering business, composed R. & B. music, and babysat his little brothers. Some had lived in the U.S. from an early age. Jim, a political refugee, had come to Miami from Liberia in the early nineties, when he was twenty-three, after his parents were murdered for their tribal and political affiliations during the country’s civil war. Others, including a twenty-one-year-old woman who had fled Togo fearing genital mutilation, had arrived in the U.S. recently, seeking asylum.

All of them had been taken from the United States against their will. Nearly all had been granted forms of legal relief that bar the government from deporting them to their home countries. At the heart of the protections they’d received was one of the most basic and sacrosanct concepts in both U.S. and international law: non-refoulement. This principle means that no nation should intentionally deport or expel people to a place where they are likely to face torture, persecution, death, or other grave harms….

Mica Rosenberg, Mario Ariza, McKenzie Funk, Jeff Ernsthausen and Gabriel Sandoval, November 24, 2025 [propublica.org]

Under a zero tolerance policy, the first Trump administration separated immigrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. New data suggests separations are happening all over the country, often after little more than a traffic stop.

What Pam Bondi and Lindsey Halligan did was not incompetence–It was intentional misconduct. They both must be disbarred.

Dean Obeidallah, Nov 25, 2025

The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine 

Seth Stern, November 23 2025 [The Intercept]

Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.

There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.

But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech. The case demonstrates the administration’s intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump announced in September that he was designating “Antifa” as a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t exist for domestic groups — following the killing of Charlie Kirk….

U.S. Military Documents Indicate Plans to Keep Troops in Caribbean Through 2028

Sam Biddle, Nick Turse, November 25 2025 [The Intercept]

Strategic Political Economy

The UK is cursed: how finance destroyed our economy [applies to USA also]

Richard Murphy, November 28, 2025 [Funding the Future]

For more than 45 years, the UK has suffered not one, but two economic curses: the resource curse and the finance curse. Both were chosen, primarily by Margaret Thatcher, and both inflated the pound, destroyed industry, and left Britain dependent on hot money and speculation. In this video, I explain how we got here — and what we must do to rebuild a real economy based on work, fair reward and democracy.

The hypocrisy of bankers needs to come to an end

Richard Murphy, November 27, 2025 [Funding the Future]

Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City

[moneyontheleft.org, via Public Banking Institute, Nov 26, 2025]

Public Banking Institute email:

“Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City” is a must-read for anyone who believes that our cities can—and should—be financially empowered to serve their people, not Wall Street. The essay reframes how we think about money itself, arguing that it should be treated not as a scarce private commodity but as a public tool for collective prosperity. By redefining money as “public credit,” this vision breaks from the austerity-driven mindset that has long stifled local progress and instead positions finance as a democratic force for housing, jobs, and sustainability.

At the heart of this vision is the call for public banking and civic payments infrastructure that would allow New Yorkers to access fair, transparent financial services—free from the extractive practices of private banks. A municipal public bank and “Public Venmo” system would ensure that credit flows directly into community priorities such as affordable housing, small business growth, and green energy, rather than into speculative markets. This isn’t just economic reform—it’s about returning power to the people and ensuring that city wealth circulates locally.

Global power shift

How Resilient is BRICS in the Storm of Geopolitics? – Part 2

Peter Haenseler, 30 November 2025 [sonar21.com]

Today’s second part focuses on the environment in which BRICS must develop as the most important organization in the Global South. We assess the general circumstances of war, the great danger that a nuclear war would constitute, and the unpredictability of the geopolitical situation, which leads us to describe the current situation as a “storm.” ….

Has World War III Already Begun?

How the current geopolitical situation is characterized and described depends on the perspective of the observer. It is fair to say that, from a purely military point of view, World War III is already in full swing. We already made this claim in February 2023 in our article “Sleepwalkers at work: World War III has probably already begun.” The situation regarding Western involvement has become even more pronounced since the article was published. Direct involvement—such as supplying the Ukrainian army with target information with the help of personnel on the ground—is no longer even seriously disputed. Thus, the question of whether World War III has already begun from a military point of view has been answered, even though the Russians are not stating this openly for reasons of de-escalation.

There are other arguments that could be used to justify the start of World War III. First of all, there is the geographical spread of attacks of all kinds. Secondly, the nature of warfare has changed completely. War can be waged not only kinetically, but also on an economic level or as cyberwarfare….

China unveils ‘world’s first’ autonomous drone that can hunt submarines: Report 

[Interesting Engineering, via Naked Capitalism 11-23-2025]

China’s top scientists chart the future of space exploration 

[CGTN, via Naked Capitalism 11-23-2025]

A Looming Mexican Coup?

Kit Klarenberg, Nov 24, 2025 [Global Delinquents]

…Furthermore, former Mexican President Vicente Fox attended the protests, and posted extensively on social media in support of the demonstrators. In 2001, he was bestowed NED’s Annual Democracy Award. Another prominent supporter was oligarch Ricardo Salinas Pliego, Mexico’s third-richest man. In March 2023, in conjunction with the shadowy Atlas Network, he launched Universidad de la Libertad, to “advance free-market principles, business development, and innovation” in the country.

Atlas Network comprises a web of libertarian think tanks, bankrolled by major US corporations, with deep and cohering ties to Western foundations and intelligence cutouts, including NED. The Network itself doles out millions annually “supporting pro-freedom organizations” worldwide. A longtime beneficiary of its largesse is the Venezuela-based Center for the Dissemination of Economic Information (CEDICE), which operated at the forefront of the April 2002 US-orchestrated coup that temporarily ousted elected President Hugo Chávez….

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

German Scientists Count Over 100,000 Palestinians Slaughtered in Gaza

Shaun King, Nov 25, 2025

In the German publication, DIE ZEIT, journalist Christian Endt reports on research from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Researchi n Rostock. Demographers Ana C. Gómez-Ugarte, Irena Chen, and their colleagues pulled together Gaza Health Ministry data, an independent household survey, and death notices from social media. They used methods that have been peer-reviewed in the journal Population Health Metrics.

Their conclusion: in the first two years of this genocide, between roughly 100,000 and 126,000 people in Gaza have been killed, with a central estimate of 112,069 Palestinians. That’s not propaganda. That’s not a slogan on a protest sign. That’s careful, conservative demographic modeling from one of the most respected research institutes in the world….

UN Report Details Israel’s ‘De Facto State Policy’ of Torturing Palestinian Prisoners

Julia Conley, Nov 29, 2025 [CommonDreams]

Jeffrey Epstein Aided Alan Dershowitz’s Attack on Mearsheimer and Walt’s “Israel Lobby”

In March 2006, the Harvard Kennedy School published a working paper, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by influential political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The paper, which ran in the London Review of Books and became the basis for a book published the following year, was an unflinching analysis of the impact of pro-Israel advocacy and lobbying groups on the U.S. political system, and the role of organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in shaping U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East.

Mearsheimer and Walt described a loose coalition of philanthropists, think tanks, advocacy groups, and Christian Zionist organizations that routinely pulled U.S. policy toward the Middle East away from America’s national interest….

Even before the Kennedy School posted the paper online, the project had already spooked editors at The Atlantic, who originally commissioned the essay in the early 2000s. In an interview with Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Mearsheimer revealed that the editor of The Atlantic offered them a “$10,000 kill fee” if the publication didn’t print the article….

The paper was written by two highly esteemed scholars of international relations; Walt had been serving since 2002 as Academic Dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as prestigious an appointment as exists in the field, and Mearsheimer taught at the University of Chicago. But the backlash against it was swift, intense, and unusually public in the world of academia. A wave of news articles described the authors as antisemites, while the Anti-Defamation League weighed in to denounce what they called an “anti-Jewish screed.” The pressure became so intense that the Kennedy School removed its logo from the paper and added a disclaimer distancing the institution from its arguments.

Unknown at the time, Jeffrey Epstein gave feedback on talking points to discredit Mearsheimer and Walt, and used his extensive social network to circulate allegations of anti-semitism against the two scholars. Details of Epstein’s role in the backlash to the “Israel Lobby” paper come from a trove of emails obtained by the non-profit whistleblower organization Distributed Denial of Secrets and provided to Drop Site News….

Oligarchy

Boss preppers

Cory Doctorow, 22 Nov 2025 [Pluralistic]

…In Douglas Rushkoff’s 2022 book Survival of the Richest, he describes a surreal “futurism” consulting gig in which a bunch of wealthy investor types asked him to help them figure out how to keep their mercenaries in line after “The Event” (the end of the world):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

These guys had the idea that what a fallen civilization needed was bosses, you see, but they were self-aware enough to recognize that the people who survived the apocalypse might not recognize their unique genius and simply fall into line. In order to assert their natural role as leaders after the shit hit the fan, these guys would need an army of heavily armed mercenaries. But again, these guys were self-aware enough to recognize that the mercenaries might also fail to recognize their unique fitness to rule and opt instead to slaughter them and raid their hoarded food, ammo and medical supplies.

So they wanted Rushkoff’s advice – should they fit the mercs with bomb-collars that were on a dead-man’s switch that would go off if the boss croaked? This was such a weird and revealing moment that Rushkoff got a whole book out of exploring the desire of the wealthy to both secede from the rest of us, and keep us all in line….

All of this has been very much on my mind lately because I’ve been reading Quinn Slobodian’s amazing Hayek’s Bastards, a closely researched history of the merger of the neoliberal wing of the conservative movement with its white nationalist faction, producing a conservativism obsessed with “hard borders, hard-wired human difference, and hard money”:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/472194/hayeks-bastards-by-slobodian-quinn/9780241774984

It’s a revelatory history, one that argues convincingly that the brooding, violent racism of MAGA isn’t so much a break with “Romney conservativism” of the “respectable” Republican Party as it is the attainment of the goals of the party’s longstanding dominant tendency….

Monopoly Round-Up: Why the Establishment Freaked Out Over a Mamdani-Trump Press Conference

Matt Stoller, Nov 24, 2025

The big news of the week is a change in the political establishment, based on two events. The first is the public exile of economist Larry Summers from polite society over his ties to notorious sex trafficker Jeff Epstein, the second is a surprising joint press conference of President Donald Trump and incoming New York City mayor, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.

Let’s start with Summers. As I noted last week, the powerful economist has been heavily involved in nearly every major economic policy decision since the Clinton Presidency, from the Mexican Peso Crisis in early 1990s to NAFTA and U.S.-Chinese trade liberalization, to deregulating derivatives to repealing Glass-Steagall to the bailout out of the banks after 2008 to the Biden economic framework. Of late, he was a foe of Lina Khan and anti-monopolists.

But his track record of poor statecraft is not why he has fallen from grace. What caused him to be ousted was that he embarrassed too many people by being such a pig for so long. So after emails came out showing a close relationship with Summers and Epstein, the word went out, Summers is persona non grata. Last week, he stepped down from his board position at OpenAI, as well as his positions at Bloomberg News, The New York Times, the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, the Center for American Progress, the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Yale Budget Lab. He is also under investigation by Harvard, where he is a University Professor.

There’s an attempt, in this fiasco, to pretend that Summers is a genius who was otherwise brought down by ego… In this narrative, his relationship with Epstein is an anomaly, a weakness of an otherwise great man.

I don’t think this narrative makes sense. When Larry Summers started his career, in the early 1980s, America was rich, confident and powerful, and the U.S. establishment had influence, wealth, and prestige. After listening to Summers for forty years, the U.S. establishment is enfeebled, disliked and regularly mocked, in no small part because they did listen to him….

Even the narrative of ‘brilliant man brought low by personal weakness’ is itself part of the problem. Anand Giridharadas has an excellent rundown of how this episode shows just how corrupt the elite world really is, and why they are rightfully despised….

… both Trump and Mamdani defeated the establishment in their own way, representing the hunger of voters on the right and left who want something different. If those sides could come together, well, that would be a sea change in how we organize our political economy. It’s not going to happen now. But Trump and Mamdani just gave us a very modest hint of what that might one day look like.

And that is why there was so much establishment gnashing of teeth over a simple set of images, it throws in their face their own failures to retain the respect of the American people….

How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails

Anand Giridharadas, Nov. 23, 2025 [New York Times]

As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to such prestigious institutions, succumb to this?

A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising. When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender, needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power elite practiced at disregarding pain.

At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims — and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect people against….

New “Who Owns America” Report Maps Corporate Ownership of Residential Land  

[Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2025]

A new report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS) reveals where corporations have gained a significant foothold in residential real estate across the United States. The analysis of corporate ownership of residential land finds that corporations now own 8.9 percent of residential parcels in 500 counties across the US. While this national share stands at roughly 1 in 11 parcels, corporate ownership exceeds 20 percent in communities including St. Louis, Missouri, Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Franklin County, Ohio, illustrating deeply uneven impacts across the country….

Felonomics

The Rent Is Too Damn High: Did Trump Just ‘Bless’ Using AI to Jack Up Rents?

Matt Stoller, Nov 25, 2025 [BIG]

Trump Antitrust chief Gail Slater ended the DOJ’s big antitrust case against alleged software rent-fixing conspirator RealPage. The company’s lawyer says the DOJ has now ‘blessed’ their product.

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Part 1: My Life Is a Lie

Michael Green, via Naked Capitalism 11-25-2025] YS A must read.

…This week, while trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment, I came across a sentence buried in a research paper:

“The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” ….

The formula was developed by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration. In 1963, she observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on groceries. Since pricing data was hard to come by for many items, e.g. housing, if you could calculate a minimum adequate food budget at the grocery store, you could multiply by three and establish a poverty line….

Orshansky’s food-times-three formula was crude, but as a crisis threshold—a measure of “too little”—it roughly corresponded to reality. A family spending one-third of its income on food would spend the other two-thirds on everything else, and those proportions more or less worked. Below that line, you were in genuine crisis. Above it, you had a fighting chance.

But everything changed between 1963 and 2024.

Housing costs exploded. Healthcare became the largest household expense for many families. Employer coverage shrank while deductibles grew. Childcare became a market, and that market became ruinously expensive. College went from affordable to crippling. Transportation costs rose as cities sprawled and public transit withered under government neglect.

The labor model shifted. A second income became mandatory to maintain the standard of living that one income formerly provided. But a second income meant childcare became mandatory, which meant two cars became mandatory. Or maybe you’d simply be “asking for a lot generationally speaking” because living near your parents helps to defray those childcare costs.

The composition of household spending transformed completely. In 2024, food-at-home is no longer 33% of household spending. For most families, it’s 5 to 7 percent.

Housing now consumes 35 to 45 percent. Healthcare takes 15 to 25 percent. Childcare, for families with young children, can eat 20 to 40 percent.

If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.

It becomes sixteen.

Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200.

It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000….

It Works, If You Work It.

America’s Undoing, via Naked Capitalism 11-25-2025] YS Yes a second must read, trust me.

Trump owns the economy now. Voters just told him they’re still broke and they’re blaming him for it.

But here’s what matters more than any election. From Tennessee to New York, voters are asking the same question. Why can’t I afford to live well?

This is why Trump won twice. Why we elected Barack Hussein Obama promising hope and change, twice. Obama’s efforts were too little too late, and that led us to the Obama/Trump voters. We kept looking for hope and change in increasingly desperate places. Like an addict searching for our next fix, Americans are going to more and more dangerous places out of sheer desperation.

The reason is simple, and I can prove it with elementary school math. When experts claim today’s income can buy 252% more than our grandparents earned in 1950, and your life tells a different story, something’s wrong. By my math, we can’t buy 252% more of the essentials. We can afford 61% less….

Over the past two weeks, I showed you how Wall Street and the politicians rigged the economy and how the government hid it. Reagan legalized stock buybacks in 1982 and turned corporations into ATMs for executives. Wall Street privatized the technology we paid to invent. The Boskin Commission in 1995 embedded statistical tricks that make inflation disappear on paper while it crushes us in reality.

Now let me show you what it actually cost us. How does this impact our lives? Not in abstract economic terms. In the most concrete measurement there is. How much of our lives we have to trade just to survive….

[X, via Naked Capitalism 11-25-2025]

1. Aging populations do not consume capital – they crystallize it.

People over 70 rarely take risk, rarely rotate into high-beta assets, and almost never sell unless forced.Their equity holdings behave like dark matter – invisible, immobile mass that dictates the entire gravitational field.

2. When 38.9% of all household equities are held by people 70+, the market stops being a price discovery machine and becomes a liquidity preservation machine.That’s why corrections keep getting rescued.That’s why the Fed panics at every tightening cycle.That’s why volatility gets mechanically suppressed.You’re watching macro bend to the survival needs of a generation that refuses to sell….

5. You are staring at the structural reason the Fed can never meaningfully tighten again.If asset prices fall 30%, the people holding 40% of all equities are the exact people who vote most consistently, donate most reliably, and age-dependent systems crumble catastrophically.The Fed doesn’t protect markets.The Fed protects the demographic that is the market.6. The younger generations are not falling behind because they’re lazy.They’re falling behind because they are trapped in a liquidity regime built to keep Boomers solvent.

Every policy choice for 30+ years has been designed around:

•Asset inflation

•Pension stability

•Retirement portfolio growth

•Housing scarcity•Low yields

•High valuations

This is the architecture of the modern economy.

Ahead of Black Friday, Report Reveals Attacks on Garment Workers’ Right to Organize

Julia Conley, Nov 27, 2025 [CommonDreams]

With clothing companies that will be offering discounted Black Friday deals this week relying heavily on the labor of tens of millions underpaid and overworked garment workers across the Global South, two reports by the human rights group Amnesty International make the case that ensuring these employees are afforded the right to organize their workplaces is key to ending worker exploitation across the fashion industry.

The organization interviewed 64 garment workers in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan from 2023-24, including 12 union organizers and labor rights activists, for its report titled Stitched Up, about the denial of freedom of association for workers in the four countries….

U.S. Dams, Levees, Stormwater, and Wastewater Systems Get D To D+ Grades, Need Almost $1 Trillion in Upgrades

Yves Smith, November 26, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]

“America’s infrastructure is the foundation on which our national economy, global competitiveness, and quality of life depend,” begins the 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, or ASCE, a trade group.

The report, issued once every four years, gave America’s infrastructure an overall grade of C, up from a C- grade in its 2021 report. ASCE credited the improvement to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021, plus federal partnerships with state and local governments and the private sector.

But dams, levees, stormwater, and wastewater infrastructure components received D to D+ grades. That’s concerning given that climate change is increasingly stressing dams, levees, wastewater, and stormwater systems through heavier precipitation events. What’s more, the federal government has shown little interest in sustaining the funding needed to continue improving infrastructure.

Predatory finance

Economic questions: the Eugene Fama question

Richard Murphy, November 25, 2025 [Funding the Future]

Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama‘s so-called Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is one of the most influential ideas in modern finance. It claims that markets instantly incorporate all available information and therefore price assets correctly at all times. According to Fama, there are no mispricings to exploit, no bubbles to inflate, no systemic distortions that experts can foresee. Markets, in this view, are not just efficient; they are omniscient.

The elegance of the theory gave it enormous power. It justified deregulation. It encouraged the rise of passive investment. It offered intellectual armour to those who believed markets should be left alone, and it helped entrench the worldview that finance requires liberation, not scrutiny.

But EMH has been tested repeatedly — and reality has failed to conform. The 2008 crash should have buried it. Instead, it continues to define the architecture of global finance.

Hence, the Eugene Fama Question: If the theory that financial markets are perfectly rational collapses every time reality intrudes, why do we still allow it to shape the policies, products and institutions that govern our economic lives? ….

A theory refuted by the world it claims to explain

The history of financial markets is a record of everything EMH says should not happen:

• Bubbles
• Panics
• Herd behaviour
• Irrational exuberance
• Crashes triggered by rumour and fear
• Markets that inflate asset prices far beyond any plausible value….

EMH as the intellectual foundation of deregulation

Fama’s theory became the perfect justification for dismantling controls on finance. If markets are assumed to be rational, then regulation is seen as a distortion to be eliminated. If prices encode all information, then fraud is self-correcting. If bubbles do not exist, oversight is unnecessary.

From the 1980s onward, EMH provided the academic muscle behind:

• The repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act
• The growth of shadow banking
• The expansion of derivatives markets
• The ideology of “self-regulating markets”
• And the belief that financial innovation always improves welfare….

What answering the Eugene Fama Question would require

To take the failures of EMH seriously and to rebuild financial systems that serve society rather than destabilise it would require:

• Recognising markets as social institutions, rather than as natural phenomena, and that they are shaped by law, power, incentives, information asymmetry and manipulation.
• Embedding regulation in the reality of human behaviour, including uncertainty, panic, herd dynamics, fraud and short-termism.
• Reasserting public oversight because the claim that markets self-correct has been disproven at catastrophic cost.
• Redesigning investment systems to prioritise long-term social value, not speculative churn.
• Replacing the mythology of perfect information with the truth of radical uncertainty.
• Building financial architecture around resilience, and not supposed efficiency, building in redundancy, buffers, and limits on leverage.

These reforms would not stifle markets. They would, however, make markets safe for everyone else, and not just for those who profit from their volatility….

Economic questions: the John Christensen question

Richard Murphy, November 24, 2025 [Funding the Future]

John Christensen has spent decades illuminating what the world of mainstream economics, for far too long, preferred not to see: that the global financial system operates through an architecture of secrecy designed to free the wealthy from the obligations that bind everyone else. As co-founder of the Tax Justice Network, Christensen mapped the offshore world not as a scattering of exotic anomalies, but as a coherent system — a network of secrecy jurisdictions, trusts, shell companies, nominee directors and permissive regulators bound together by one purpose: to hide wealth from accountability.

His work exposed how these structures distort markets, undermine states, and erode democratic power. For Christensen, the offshore world is not a side-show; it is the operating system of modern capitalism. And because secrecy enables the rich to opt out of obligations to the societies that sustain them, it fuels a downward pressure on standards — a global race to the bottom in which governments are pitted against each other for the favour of those who can move their money, but not their responsibilities.

Hence the John Christensen Question: If the wealthiest actors in the global economy can hide their money from scrutiny and responsibility, how can the race to the bottom be avoided and democracy survive the power that secrecy creates?

It’s a Racket! Cryptocurrency has largely managed to remain free of government regulation, and as a result has often become a vehicle for fraud and criminality.

Jed S. Rakoff, December 18, 2025 issue [The New York Review]]

Jed S. Rakoff is a United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York.

Private equity moves into clinical trials 

[Private Equity Stakeholder Project, via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2025]

Investors are making a killing from soaring house prices 

[Red Flag, via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2025]

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

The intel scandal behind Prince Andrew’s twisted Epstein exploits 

[The Grayzone, via Naked Capitalism 11-23-2025]

Sally Jo Haxby

November 25 at 7:32 PM

·

Just when we think it can not get worse:

Stars & Stripes Scoop

November 19 at 4:04 AM

·

Thought the video was gone? Oops!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=DeLoTf9QUqI

BREAKING: The banned 1994 video of Trump’s 13-year-old accuser Katie Johnson just ripped its way back onto the internet at the worst possible moment for him—and what she whispers will freeze your soul.

A terrified teenage girl stares dead into the lens, claiming Donald Trump assaulted her because she “looked exactly like Ivanka at that age,” while Jeffrey Epstein seethed with jealousy that Trump took her virginity first. This gut-wrenching testimony vanished years ago, scrubbed from existence—until tonight, when it detonated online just as the sealed Epstein files begin to crack wide open. Republican leaders are in full panic as Rep. Thomas Massie delivers a chilling ultimatum: shield Trump now and by 2030 you’ll be remembered as the politicians who protected pedophiles. The empire that once seemed untouchable is suddenly trembling, haunted by a child’s voice rising from the grave of buried secrets. This is the moment the myth dies—watch the forbidden footage everyone fought to silence before it’s erased forever.

Africa loses over $50bn yearly to illicit financial flows – Dr. Aliyu 

[APA News, via Naked Capitalism 11-23-2025]

Restoring balance to the economy

Enshittification Nation — Author and activist Cory Doctorow has a grand unifying theory of why everything sucks now — and how to fix it.

David Sirota, Ariella Markowitz, Nov 25, 2025 [The Lever]

From flying to online shopping to using social media, everything seems to be getting worse. It’s all — pardon our language here — shittier.

According to today’s Lever Time guest, that’s no accident. Cory Doctorow is the author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. In this episode, Doctorow explains how enshittification works, how it’s infected our online spaces, and what we can do to stop it.

Disrupting mainstream economics

Distribution Matters: Flawed Welfare Foundations in Classic Free Trade Arguments

Mark Glick and Gabriel Lozada, Oct 27, 2025 [Institute for New Economic Thinking]

The argument that free trade is always the correct policy is based on a flawed welfare analysis. Free trade results in winners and losers and economists are not competent to analyze the impact on well-being as a whole or the spillover social consequences of the discontent of the losers….

[TW: An example of “spillover social consequences” — nothing to do with trade — but certainly overlooked by mainstream neoliberal and classical economists: ]

Mercenaries in America — A private army with a prison apparatus is a threat to us all.

Donald Cohen, November 14, 2025 [In the Public Interest]

MMT in the NYT

Cory Doctorow, 10 June 2020 [Pluralistic]

…here’s the shortest possible summary I can give:

Money issuers (sovereign states) have a different relationship to money and debt than money users (everyone else: people, companies, local governments).

Governments don’t spend our taxes. Governments spend new money into existence and tax some of it back out of existence. Governments get new money from the same place Starbucks gets new gift-card codes: by typing entries into spreadsheets.

Governments aren’t “monetarily constrained.” If something is for sale in a currency the government prints, it can buy it. Governments are constrained by resources – that is, which things are for sale in its currency: labor, resources, manufacturing capacity….

MMT and the quantity theory of money

Richard Murphy, November 29, 2025 [Funding the Future]

Time and again, I am being told at present that money creation — which is what Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) quite correctly says happens every time the government spends money — must always lead to inflation .… The logic behind this claim is based on the so-called “quantity theory of money”, promoted by someone who might be considered one of the earliest neoliberal economists, Irving Fisher, who was writing more than a century ago, and who might fairly be called the godfather, if not the founder, of monetarism.

The problem with Fisher’s claim is that, like a great deal else within neoclassical and neoliberal economics, what it suggests is wrong. To explain this, I have added the following entry into the glossary associated with this blog, in the hope that this explains why the claims made about Modern Monetary Theory are incorrect….

Is MMT as dangerous as its opponents claim?

Richard Murphy, November 28, 2025 [Funding the Future]

That line, or something very close to it, is now appearing with weary regularity from left-wing economists and commentators James Meadway, Grace Blakeley, and Paul Mason, and the circle of commentators around Novara Media….

Why is so much of the left economically incompetent?

Richard Murphy, November 25, 2025 [Funding the Future]

LabourList published an article last week under the headline “Bond markets explained: How in hock are we – and can we break free?”

The article began with a question that should trouble anyone who cares about democracy: Who governs Britain?

The suggestion made was that the bond markets have become so powerful that even elected politicians must now fear their displeasure….

They then set out to explain this supposed power. But in doing so, they simply reinforced the neoliberal, antisocial economic mythology that has crippled progressive politics for more than a generation. And this matters, because if the Left continues to accept the framing of market power, it will continue to fail the very people it supposedly exists to serve.

To examine this, I summarised the article’s core arguments. They are that:

• Markets discipline governments
• Market credibility/trust matters
• Debt/GDP and sustainability matter
• Growth is key to fiscal health
• Financial markets price risk objectively
• State intervention should be modest/cautious
• Government must compete in market terms

The trouble is that these are all neoliberal/antisocial to their core….

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

Thanksgiving Dinner Headed for Tragedy as Disastrous AI Recipes Devour Internet 

[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 11-26-2025]

Food bloggers and recipe developers are warning home cooks to be wary of AI-generated recipes that could turn this year’s Thanksgiving dinner into a tragedy.

As Bloomberg reports, they’ve watched in horror as AI slop has made searching for a reliable recipe on sites like Google, Facebook, and Pinterest a potential minefield.

The publication spoke with 22 independent food creators, who said that “recipe slop” is damaging their businesses — while misleading consumers into cooking up monstrous and often inedible dishes.

It’s a sad state of affairs, once again highlighting how AI slop is choking out reliable information on the internet — while simultaneously undermining the livelihoods of those whose content is being overwhelmed by competing AI slop.

Google steers Americans looking for health care into “junk insurance”

Cory Doctorow, 25 Nov 2025 [Pluralistic]

…Google is sending people searching for health care plans to “junk insurance” that take your money and then pretty much just let you die:

https://pluralistic.net/junk-insurance

“Junk insurance” is a health insurance plan that is designed as a short-term plan that you might use for a couple of days or a week or two, say, if you experience a gap in coverage as you move between two jobs. These plans can exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions and typically exclude niceties like emergency room visits and hospitalization:

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Broader-View_July_2020.pdf

Crucially, these plans do not comply with the Affordable Care Act, which requires comprehensive coverage, and bans exclusions for pre-existing conditions. These plans only exist because of loopholes in the ACA, designed for very small-scale employers or temporary coverage.

The one thing junk insurance does not skimp on is sales and marketing. These plans outbid the rest of the market when it comes to buying Google search ads, meaning that anyone who uses Google to research health insurance will be inundated with ads for these shitty plans. The plans also spend a fortune on “search engine optimization” – basically, gaming the Google algorithm – so that the non-ad Google results for health insurance are also saturated with these garbage plans….

Executive Order Provides For Bailout Of Overextended AI Companies 

[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 11-26-2025]

What’s Driving the Electricity Price Hike and What Can We Do About It?

Richard Heinberg, Nov 29, 2025 [Common Dreams]

Across the US, electricity prices are rising more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living. The main driver of costs is the enormous electricity demand of over 1,000 new data centers, built mostly for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Each data center, depending on its size, requires anywhere from a few kilowatts up to 100 megawatts of power (enough to power a medium-sized city). Installations of new data centers are growing at more than 10% annually; at that rate, the total number of data centers will double in less than seven years. Indeed, the International Energy Agency expects global electricity demand from data centers to double by the end of this decade, when it will total more than the entire electricity demand of Japan.

Hello Barbie Security: Part 1 – Teardown

[somersetrecon.com, via Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic, 24 Nov 2025]

Mattel, with the help of San Francisco startup ToyTalk, recently released an Internet of Things (IoT) enabled Barbie doll that children can talk to, responding with over “8,000 lines of recorded content.” To produce all of this content it relies on a constant connection to the internet.

Utilizing a user’s home Wi-Fi network, it sends audio recordings to ToyTalk’s servers for analysis and to generate a response. Every audio clip is stored in the cloud where parents can later review and share them online. This data being mined and used for marketing purposes is a big privacy concern, but so is the possibility of this data or the device itself being susceptible to hackers. However, Mattel assures users that they are “committed to safety and security”and that the doll “conforms to applicable government standards”. The release of the doll has already stirred up some controversy on the internet, but until now it has all been speculation.

As security researchers we thought it prudent to explore whether or not Mattel was able to achieve the level of privacy and security that they claim. If they did, then how? And if not, what implications are there for future devices? The first step was to disassemble the doll and identify the chips that might allow us to analyze the doll’s firmware….

PHOTO — the chip board hidden inside the “Hello Barbie” doll

‘

The precedent is Flint’: How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis 

[Food & Environment Reporting Network, via Naked Capitalism 11-26-2025]

Collapse of independent news media

You Don’t Hate The Mass Media Enough 

Caitline Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 11-24-2025]

Climate and environmental crises

Antarctica’s Fastest Glacier Collapse on Record Alarms Scientists 

[SciTech Daily, via Naked Capitalism 11-23-2025]

The world lost the climate gamble. Now it faces a dangerous new reality 

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 11-23-2025]

Africa’s forests transformed from carbon sink to carbon source, study finds 

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 11-29-2025]

The deepest parts of the Arctic Ocean are warming now too 

[Barents Observer, via Naked Capitalism 11-29-2025]

The Thing with Rivers 

[Dublin Review of Books, via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2025]

Violent conflict over water hit a record last year 

[Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 11-29-2025]

Coal Ship Turns Back After Protesters Block Shipping Channel at Major Australian Port

Reuters, November 29, 2025 [via gCaptain]

Democrats’ political malpractice

Democrats caving on health care is worse than you think 

Stephen Semler, via Naked Capitalism 11-26-2025]

Hakeem Jeffries Is Practically an AIPAC Employee, But Lies About the Millions He Gets From Them

Shaun King, Nov 26, 2025

On WNYC he pretended they give him $10,000. In reality, they’ve been flooding his campaign with earmarked cash….

The journalists David Moore and Donald Shaw at Sludge went and did what too few people bother to do: they followed the receipts.

Here’s what their investigation shows:

• AIPAC’s PAC has earmarked more than $1 million for Jeffries’ campaign committee since February 2022 — the vast majority in the 2024 cycle.
• On top of that, hundreds of thousands more have been steered into his joint fundraising committees.
• Over his career, according to OpenSecrets, AIPAC’s PAC has been his top contributor by a factor of three, raising over $900,000 for him even before this latest flood.

So when Jeffries goes on the radio and says, “AIPAC can only give $5,000 or $10,000 per cycle,” he’s technically referring to one little pool inside AIPAC’s PAC — the small part they give directly as a traditional PAC contribution.

What he very carefully does not talk about is the conduit operation that AIPAC has built around him.

How AIPAC Launders Influence Through “Conduit” Donations

Here’s how this scam works, in plain language….

Resistance

Trump’s Washington Is Ghosting States and Cities — It’s time for state and local governments to think outside the box about how to respond. Here are some ideas that are already helping and some that could.

Philip Rocco, Jay Rickabaugh, and Jen Nelles, November 27, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

…As researchers studying American federalism and intergovernmental relations, we believe there is a better way forward for states and local governments. While there is no reason to let the feds off the hook, governors and mayors can build partnerships to provide mutual aid and penalize the federal government for shirking its commitments.

Already, state and local authorities are innovating and experimenting, developing new playbooks to stand up for their constituents. LA County’s Board of Supervisors declared a local emergency due to ICE activity, allowing it to seek state funding to help families and businesses in neighborhoods affected by raids. Delaware’s governor has used the same tactic to redirect state funds to fill the SNAP gap. In the Washington Monthly, Markos Kounalakis recently recommended that California, where he is Second Gentleman, try to join the G-7, the COP 30 climate summit, and other fora where the world’s fourth-largest economy could reestablish American leadership.

Meanwhile, the gutting of many federal agencies has left states searching for new ways to deliver crucial services. Several states have united to fill the void left by a depleted CDC, such as the Northeast Public Health Collaborative and the West Coast Health Alliance. Legal scholars like Aziz Huq and Zachary Clopton have also catalogued numerous ways states might collaborate, from a mutual aid pact to allow for interstate borrowing to regional weather services to compensate for dramatic cuts at the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)….

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

5 Examples of How Language Shapes What We See — How Word Choice Has Been Used to Divide, Mislead, and Erase the Truth

Sharon Kyle, Nov 27, 2025 [LA Progressive]

…What stopped me cold was how the commentator described a young African girl being taken into slavery. She said the girl had been “captured.” ….

What disturbed me most was that a modern, educated person in 2018 could casually describe the violent seizing of another human being, a child really, as being “captured” — a verb we reserve for fugitives, enemy soldiers, or wild animals. That word didn’t “slip out” because the commentator lacked knowledge. It flowed because centuries of ideology have trained us to hear the kidnapping of African people as something other than a moral crime — as something that doesn’t deserve empathy and certainly doesn’t require recompense.

She would never describe the Lindbergh baby as having been “captured.”
She would never say a kidnapped white child was “captured.”
The word would sound monstrous in that context.

But applied to Africans? It rolled off her tongue without hesitation.

That was what made my stomach turn — not the historical content, but the fact that someone today, in the 21st century, still echos the worldview of enslavers without even stuttering. That one word, and truth be told, so many others, exposes how deeply the old hierarchy still lives in our language, our minds, and our unexamined assumptions….

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Corporations Say It’s Their First Amendment Right To Hide

Veronica Riccobene, Katherine Li, Nov. 24, 2025 [The Lever]

Powerful business lobbyists are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to use the First Amendment to block California from requiring corporations to publish their emissions data.

Pro-industry trade groups and their lawyers argue that new transparency and disclosure requirements violate businesses’ free speech rights….

Tech Giant Says AI Has A First Amendment Right To Raise Your Rent

David Sirota, Nov 26, 2025 [The Lever]

Days after ExxonMobil began pressing the Supreme Court to give corporations a First Amendment right to hide pollution, tech giant RealPage has now filed a federal lawsuit asserting that artificial intelligence companies have the same constitutional right to help landlords collude to raise rents.

RealPage’s case, filed Wednesday, asks a federal court to overturn New York’s landmark state law aiming to halt algorithmic rent-fixing by artificial intelligence software. In a court filing reviewed by The Lever, the company calls the law “a sweeping and unconstitutional ban on lawful speech specifically intended to outlaw software developed and sold by companies like Plaintiff RealPage, Inc. that provide information and advice to owners and managers of rental properties.”

[TW: The purpose of free speech, in a democratic republic, is to ensure that the search for truth is not hindered, obstructed, or limited. Because the search for truth is a fundamental to self-government, citizens must have access to knowledge, ideas, and public discourse in order to form judgments about the state of society had how it is being governed. If anything, because corporations have much greater economic resources than individual citizens, and routinely use that economic advantage to command immense political power, it is a dangerous and ill-advised idea, to extending speech rights to corporations. The arguments being made by ExxonMobil and RealPage are gross perversions of the reasons for free speech, and should be not just rejected outright, but punished in some way. Who are the attorneys responsible for scheming this perversion of a core principle of civic republicanism?]

Flock Safety’s CEO Garrett Langley just calls the transparency activists “terrorists.”

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2025]

Civic republicanism

The Neo-Right’s Multi-Front Revolt Against America — A political theorist traces the intellectual history of the various strains of a movement gone rogue

William Galston, Nov 23, 2025 [theunpopulist.net]

Although Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is not a short book, I found myself compelled to read it twice—one time for the ideas, the other time for the author’s story. As I discovered, they are related…. the “long, slow process of extricating myself from the world of conservative intellectualism.”

This is how the two readings of her book come together: it is a deeply researched account of the rise of the MAGA New Right during the past two decades braided with the narrative of her break with it, a process sparked and shaped by what Field argues is the new movement’s increasingly blatant misogyny and obsession with masculinity….

When I say “deeply researched,” I mean it. The book’s 59 pages of footnotes, set in type so small that my aging eyes could barely cope, bear witness to the extraordinarily persistent inquiry that informs it. This inquiry is more than archival; Field attended countless academic panels and New Right conferences (until the National Conservatives eventually barred her from entering) while tracking the online activities of leading New Right figures. The result is something rare—intellectual history that is not just researched but also reported, a vivid narrative that sweeps the reader along. You’ll really want to know what happens next.

The story begins in the 1970s, with the rise of the conservative “fusionism” pioneered by William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan. It rested on three pillars—social conservatism, free market economics, and anti-communist internationalism—and it dominated the Republican Party well into the current century….

But this book is more than a compelling narrative. Because Field is a well-trained political theorist, she offers a lucid analytical template of New Right thought, along with penetrating analyses of some of its major figures such as Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, and Adrian Vermeule.

She divides these intellectuals into four groups—the Claremonters, Postliberals, National Conservatives, and what she dubs the Hard Right Underbelly….

Unlike the Claremonters, the Postliberals do not believe that the United States was well-founded. Patrick Deneen became well-known for arguing that America’s founding creed—Lockean liberalism—led inexorably to a hyper-individualized way of life that dissolved the social bonds and traditional values needed for a decent and purposeful existence.

To fill the void liberalism creates, many Postliberals are drawn to “integralism,” usually inspired by Catholicism, that rejects the distinction between public and private life, state and society, and advocates a form of community guided throughout by religion. Some integralists embrace theocracy, while others are willing to settle for non-coercive persuasion toward a society suffused by a single creed. Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule tries to bridge the gap between integralism and the U.S. Constitution with what he calls “common good constitutionalism.” Catholicism provides the substance of the common good, and promoting the common good, so understood, suffices to determine the legality of a law or action. Unlike legal liberalism, Vermeule writes, “[C]ommon good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits.” In this vision, America’s founding commitment to liberty as an unalienable right disappears and, as one of Vermeule’s followers, Josh Hammer, put it, citizens’ own perceptions of what is good for them become “constitutionally irrelevant.”

The third principal stream feeding the New Right is National Conservatism, sparked by Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism. Hazony argues for the nation as the best form of political community and sees a world of independent nation-states as superior to internationalism and imperialism, terms he deploys so broadly as to include the European Union. He embraces John Stuart Mill’s vision of independent nations as the best protection for pluralism among ways of life and endorses history and tradition as legitimate bases of national particularism.

How a Government Think Tank Trained The First Generation of US Software Developers 

[Construction Physics, via Naked Capitalism 11-28-2025]

Trump Delivers Darkest Thanksgiving in US History

Thom Hartmann, Nov 28, 2025 [Common Dreams]

A story from the nation’s founding to bring us hope in these terrible times. There is a way out of this.