Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 11, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War on voting
Neil Abrams, October 7, 2026 [The New Republic]
… The institutionalists who once stymied Trump’s authoritarian ambitions are long gone. In their place are MAGA flunkies committed to doing the president’s bidding. With their help, he could conceivably defy any resistance from Congress and the Supreme Court.
Leading experts agree that the U.S. has transitioned to authoritarianism during Trump’s second term. The days when constitutional checks and balances were enough to keep a rogue president in line are over. What’s more, defeating a Republican at the ballot box no longer guarantees that he will accept defeat.
Still, Trump is not some omnipotent demigod casting thunderbolts at will upon his hapless subjects. No dictator can rule without the people’s consent. Withdraw that consent, and he is just another guy with a spray tan and a chancy comb-over.
Nonviolent rebellion—the strategic use of protests, strikes, and similar methods—has paralyzed authoritarian regimes and forced despots from power the world over. It can work in America too….
If the conventional political process is not sufficient to restore democracy, nonviolent rebellion remains the most effective tool. To counter GOP election theft, Americans might have to mount a rebellion of their own. The good news is that our fellow citizens have already produced one such movement during Trump’s second term.
When jackbooted federal thugs began forcing Minnesotans into unmarked vans, Minneapolitans responded. First, they got organized. Activist groups trained citizens in specific resistance tactics. They also established support networks for immigrant families who had been forced into hiding….
Joyce Vance, Oct 09, 2026 [Civil Discourse ]
Trump is calling in the election-denier faithful to meet with him in advance of the midterm elections. We know this in part because people like Ed Martin have said so. He announced that Tina Peters, the Colorado elections clerk who went to prison for election crimes and was recently pardoned, met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss election integrity and “the plans” for the upcoming midterm elections.
According to a local Colorado reporter, Peters’ attorney said the plan involved “seizing ballots nationwide” and a “strategy for a potential civil war,” although there’s no word on whether those topics were actually discussed and what the President’s views on them are….
Tina Peters Has Trump’s Ear on the Midterms
John Light, 10.07.26 [Talking Points Memo]
President Donald Trump is, apparently, being advised on the midterms by former Colorado elections clerk Tina Peters. The two met Monday at the White House.
Peters was convicted in 2024 of a series of state crimes related to a plot to undermine the results of the 2020 election. Colorado’s Democratic governor then commuted her sentence earlier this year amid a pressure campaign by Trump.
After the meeting on Monday, former DOJ official and longtime conservative gadfly Ed Martin helpfully blabbed about what the two discussed, enthusing to the MAGA news outlet Real America’s Voice he was “going to break some news.”
“There is local control,” Martin said of U.S. elections. “However, the laws that govern the system, like safety and national security, are federal laws. So Tina Peters, famous Colorado clerk, was in the Oval Office today just two hours ago talking about this question. The president’s taking it seriously.”
Martin claimed that voting machines are compromised by foreign governments (a familiar, baseless allegation), and suggested that Peters and the president were discussing what he could do about it.
“If the Congress won’t pass the Save America Act, and they won’t, the president’s going to have to do what he’s going to do,” Martin said. “And it’s not a local issue when it’s national security, and it’s clearly national security. So we’ll see how it plays out. But again, four weeks from today, we have an election that has to be safe, has to be secure.”
Hafiz Rashid, October 8, 2026 [The New Republic]
Docs Reveal New Details About Dramatic Admin Efforts to Substantiate the Non-Citizen Voting Myth
Khaya Himmelman, 10.08.26 [Talking Points Memo]
We got new details this week about exactly what the administration has been up to thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Over the past year, ICE has reviewed millions of records and investigated hundreds of nonprofits suspected of helping noncitizens register to vote, according to internal records that were obtained by the nonprofit Democracy Forward. “The information revealed in the documents should concern all Americans and is further evidence of an alarming attempt by the executive branch to undermine our elections,” Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.
The records note that these investigations were, in part, meant “to identify specific organizations that may be predatory in nature, particularly those suspected of illegal registration and voter encouragement.”….
Military Mobilizes for Upcoming Elections
Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2026]
… “Foreign malign influence” is the U.S. government’s official euphemism for censoring tweets, Facebook posts, TikTok videos and myriad other online speech thought to imperil Americans’ ability to think correctly. This is part of what the military will be doing with growing intensity as election day nears….
Both major parties, whatever their disagreements, share a consensus view that Americans’ beliefs and even voting decisions are not their own, but rather the result of shadowy foreign influence campaigns. So much so, in fact, that Congress has codified in law a definition of “foreign malign influence” that of course focuses on “public opinion within the United States.”
Even if there’s the best of intentions, the government using “public opinion” and “malign” in the same sentence is dangerous….
Republicans’ New Plan to Save the Senate: Start a Race War in Minnesota
John Light, 10.09.26 [Talking Points Memo]
As polls show Republicans doing poorly in safely red states, the party is looking toward blue states in which its candidates might have a chance. One such state is Minnesota, where Senate candidate Michele Tafoya (R), a former sideline reporter for Sunday Night Football, is polling well. And so I can only guess it is with the election in mind that President Trump is trying to stir up some racial tension, going so far as to encouraging Minnesotans to “fight back” against their Somali immigrant neighbors.
The state has been “taken over by Somali Immigrants” he wrote on Truth Social yesterday. “There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back.”
He want on to attack Governor Tim Walz (D) as “an incompetent thief who doesn’t want to get involved” before concluding “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back!”
The attacks rest on the same panic about fraud investigations in the state that prompted last winter’s federal invasion of Minneapolis, leaving two American citizens dead. Republicans have returned to those talking points after an 18-year-old American citizen born to Somali immigrant parents was arrested earlier this week after allegedly plotting an attack on the Mall of America with an assault rifle, inspired by ISIS. It’s unclear how realistic his plan was. Tafoya, the Republican Senate candidate, has leaned hard on the details of that arrest, while also describing voter concerns about “crime” and supposed “Somali gangs.”
Elsewhere, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), who represents a red seat northwest of Minneapolis, offered the idea that his constituents were facing “enemy combatants.”
“This is another one that you’re going to hear at the ballot box,” he said on Fox Business. “Democrats […] are not talking about it, they are not offering solutions, and they are not holding these fraudsters or these criminal gangsters — which I would argue are enemy combatants, more than anything — they’re not holding them accountable.”….
Meet the second-year lawyer defending Trump’s plans to seize ballots” [American Doom].
[American Doom, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261006]
“On Sept. 20, the Justice Department responded to allegations contained in a Democratic National Committee lawsuit that the agency was planning to seize ballots in November. The DOJ then said it would need until just a few days before Election Day to respond.” More: “In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ argued that all of that background material — Trump wishing he had seized voting machines, endless threats to arrest election officials, the removal of the DOJ guidelines for active elections — was “impertinent” to the FOIA requests demanding information about ballot seizure plans. That’s certainly one interpretation. Another is that all of that background is entirely pertinent to the issue of whether records regarding ballot seizure plans exist, and whether the DOJ has to release them under FOIA. The response was simply remarkable, I thought. Who wrote it? I wondered.”
ICE probed hundreds of voter registration groups across the U.S.
[Democracy Docket, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2026]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [Mediaite]
Can the Sherman Act Be Used To Silence the Press? Apparently, Trump’s DOJ thinks so.
Joyce Vance, Oct 10, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
Saturday night, The New York Times reported that the Trump Justice Department is investigating whether the major television networks that participate in the White House pool—ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox—violated the law by refusing to cover Donald Trump for a brief period after he suspended the White House hard passes for CNN, MSNOW, and Politico. The Time report was based on six sources. The Washington Post has now confirmed that report….
Drop Site Daily, October 9, 2026
Trump’s August financial disclosure lists 517 purchases and sales totaling roughly $74.3 million to $273.3 million, according to a CNBC analysis, with purchases of at least $44.2 million and sales of at least $30.1 million. The largest was an August 21 purchase of $5 million to $25 million in Meta stock.
On August 18, Trump’s accounts bought $1 million to $5 million in senior unsecured SpaceX notes at 5.35 percent, maturing in 2031. Two days later, he signed a national space transportation policy calling for more than 1,000 launches and reentries a year by 2030. SpaceX is a major Pentagon contractor and NASA launch provider.
On August 26, his portfolio bought $15,001 to $50,000 of Tyson Foods the same day he signed a proclamation expanding low-tariff imports of lean beef trimmings. The disclosure does not show whether the trade came before or after the signing.
Trump’s 2025 annual disclosure showed more than 21,000 trades across eight accounts holding at least $858 million, which contrasts starkly with the 86 stock transactions he made during the first year of his first term, in 2017.
Whistleblower says Trump demanded FBI probe of anti-ICE protesters over a TikTok video
Drop Site Daily, October 7, 2026
Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, alleges in a whistleblower complaint to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the bureau opened preliminary investigations into anti-ICE protesters in Southern California in early 2025 after demands from President Trump and other officials, in violation of law and FBI policy.
In one case, after a February 2025 protest in Alhambra, her squad was ordered to run pre-assessment checks on two to four protesters seen in a TikTok video using bullhorns to warn neighbors about immigration agents, though FBI policy bars investigations based solely on First Amendment activity and there was no evidence of a crime. Her lawyers’ letter says FBI Director Kash Patel told senior leaders Trump “was angry about the incident, and he wanted those protesters investigated and arrested.”
The complaint describes a second incident weeks earlier in which then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove demanded an investigation of protesters outside a federal building in California. When Fields raised concerns, a superior told her it had to happen. She says she was later stripped of her team, lost leadership support, and resigned.
DOGE
A Mysterious Nonprofit Run by SpaceXAI’s Top Lawyer Is Paying the Salaries of Government Workers”
[Wired, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261011]
[Lambert Strether: “Hat tip to Wired for terrrific reporting on DOGE , as usual….. ”Worth reading for the incredible machinations DOGE gooners go through to get into government. Why the complications, one can only wonder.”]
“As with DOGE before it, who exactly is a part of [National Design Studio (NDS)]—and what they’re working on—often remains opaque. But a WIRED investigation has found that at least two members of NDS are on loan to the government and are actually employed by a recently formed nonprofit, the America by Design Foundation.” See, it’s like dual citizenship in the DoD. Nothing wrong with that: “This entity appears to be run by James Burnham, a former member of DOGE and the current general counsel of SpaceXAI, the artificial intelligence space company founded by Musk. It is not clear who is funding the foundation or how much money it has.” More: “These findings raise questions about whether NDS, like DOGE, is skirting rules and regulations to bring its chosen staff into government and is functioning as an arm of the tech industry as much as a government initiative.” And: “Documents reviewed by WIRED indicate that two members of NDS, Amittai Groot and John Cafazza, are actually employed by America by Design and have been detailed to the Office of Personnel Management. Both men reported to Christina Bonarrigo, who until last month was OPM’s chief of staff. According to her LinkedIn, she is now chief of staff at NDS. Bonarrigo did not respond to a request for comment.” More: “On his LinkedIn, Groot says he was previously an “IT cybersecurity expert” at the Social Security Administration from July 2025 to April 2026. Cafazza, according to his LinkedIn, works as a senior product designer with NDS and previously worked as a product designer at Trump Media & Technology Group.
‘Elon is my prophet’: how Musk’s Doge team took a wrecking ball to Washington
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2026]
Strategic Political Economy
William Lazonick and Matt Hopkins [Institute for New Economic Thinking, via TodaysWaterCooler20261009]
“If it appears that Rule 10b-18’s safe harbor permits NVIDIA’s executives to manipulate the company’s stock price with impunity, that is precisely what the Rule does. Adopted by President Ronald Reagan’s SEC, for the past 44 years Rule 10b-18 has provided senior executives of publicly listed U.S. business corporations with a ‘license to loot’ the corporate treasury. Our research group, the Academic-industry Research Network (AIRnet), has calculated that the 216 companies in the S&P 500 Index in January 2020 that were publicly listed from 1981 through 2019 distributed 49.7 percent of net income as dividends and 4.4 percent as buybacks in 1981–1983, but spent 49.6 percent of net income on dividends and 62.2 percent on buybacks in 2017-2019. Many companies, for years on end, distribute more than 100 percent of profits as dividends and buybacks by, for example, taking on debt, reducing cash reserves, divesting assets, and/or downsizing the labor force.” And: “In a large and growing body of work, AIRnet has shown that stock buybacks are a prime source of concentration of income and wealth among the very richest American households, while they undermine U.S. competitiveness in a range of critical technologies and erode employment opportunities for most of the population. In our view, one cannot address the “affordability” crisis in the United States without recognizing the damage to the economy wrought since the mid-1980s by trillions upon trillions of dollars in stock buybacks by the nation’s largest, and often most profitable, corporations.”
Worker-Managed Firms Curb Inequality and Promote Competitiveness –
10/09/2026 – Yves Smith [Naked Capitalism ]
Global power shift
BRICS and the Chronicle of a Multipolarity Foretold
Nel Bonilla [Worldlines, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2026]
Well worth a read.
Did China’s Type 055 Destroyer Just ‘Turn Off’ the USS Benfold During an Engagement?
[Military Watch Magazine Editorial Staff, October-9th-2026, Military Watch]
Oligarchy
Inside Larry Ellison’s Wide Web of Power, Money and Politics
[Vanity Fair, via The Big Picture, October 10, 2026]
Tom Dotan’s profile opens on Lanai, where a traffic-cone-orange Corvette and a private chef shopping for a crowd signal the owner is in residence. The $200 billion software titan has suctioned himself to many hubs of influence—from data centers to TikTok to Hollywood studios to the Oval Office itself.
Thoughts on the Mass Rape at Cornell University
Chris Hedges, Oct 04, 2026
… Universities in the United States have turned education upside down. They make war on scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy and the search for artistic and esoteric forms of expression — in short, the world of ethics, creativity and ideas. They cater to the demands of rich alumni, who censor curriculum and purge professors and programs. They perpetuate the elitism, racism and rigid definition of gender roles in male fraternities. It is a culture of conformity and intolerance.
Education in the U.S. is a mindless quest for collective euphoria. Students are taught that self-worth and self-fulfillment are found in crowds, in mass emotions, in status, rather than individual transcendence. Those who do not pay deference to the celebration of wealth, privilege and power are cast out as freaks.
It is a war on knowledge in the name of knowledge….
The corporate world sees football players, fraternity brothers and sorority sisters as prime recruits. Students are conditioned to join the team, to surrender moral autonomy, to accept and carry out acts of personal humiliation, to treat with contempt those who oppose them or who are different, to define their life by an infantile narcissism centered on greed and self-promotion and to remain silent about crimes they witness or take part in.
It is the very ethic of corporations.
The ruling elite sees in Greek organizations and college sports programs the training ground for an amoral class of speculators, bankers and corporatists who pillage the country. The goal is to train people to subsume themselves into the herd, to unquestioningly use technical and vocational skills to serve the system….
Felonomics
High Diesel Prices Bankrupted 16 Trucking Companies in Just 30 Days
Byron Hurd, Oct 5, 2026 [thedrive.com]
How Trump Enforcers are Sabotaging Efforts to Bring Down Drug Prices
Matt Stoller, October 10, 2026 [BIG]
The SEC Just Opened the Floodgates to Fraud
Timothy Noah, October 9, 2026 [The New Republic]
If you doubt that President Donald Trump is successfully trashing the administrative state, consider a rule change that the Securities and Exchange Commission announced with little fanfare that took effect on October 2. Under the new rule, the SEC, which effectively until now has required a quorum of three to conduct business, will now require a quorum of only one….
Weekly Rewind: 10/9/26 – Trump FTC Shrugs Off Antitrust Enforcement
Economic Liberties, Oct 09, 2026 [The Economic Populist]
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a major corporate pardon for America’s largest wine and spirits distributor, Southern Glazer’s. In late 2024, the FTC accused the company of charging mom-and-pop shops as much as 67% more than big chains for identical bottles. It was the first federal enforcement action in decades of the Robinson-Patman Act, which bans anticompetitive price discrimination.
Despite a strong case and a wealth of evidence, including documentation of employees explicitly discussing restricting discounts to big chains to prevent lower prices in “the rest of the market,” the FTC’s settlement appears to weaken existing protections while leaving Southern Glazer’s room to sidestep compliance. Indeed, the company’s Chief Legal Officer told Reuters that the settlement “does not outright prohibit Southern Glazer’s from engaging in any particular business activity” and that the company does “not anticipate material changes to… pricing practices.”
U.S. farm debt is at a record high. Official data might be undercounting it
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2026]
Trump Admits He Wants to Privatize Social Security
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2026]
WHAT CLEVELAND’S FIGHT REVEALS ABOUT CHALLENGING EXTRACTIVE OWNERSHIP
[SHelterforce, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2026]
NRC Wants to Bulldoze Workplace Radiation Protections
[Confined Space, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2026]
Trump’s Cascade of Canceled Corporate Enforcement Against Over 200 Corporations
[Public Citizen, October 2026, via Pluralistic]
Public Citizen’s Corporate Enforcement Tracker is an online resource for watchdogging the Trump administration’s cancellation of federal enforcement actions brought against corporations prior to President Trump’s second term. These enforcement actions include investigations, enforcement lawsuits, and other accountability measures for alleged lawbreaking by many of the largest and most powerful corporations, from Amazon to Zoom and hundreds in between. This updated analysis documents the extent of Trump’s retreat from enforcement against corporate crime and lawbreaking.
- So far, the Trump administration has canceled enforcement actions inherited from the Biden administration against 205 corporations. The canceled enforcement actions include federal investigations, enforcement lawsuits, prior settlements, and other accountability measures for alleged lawbreaking.
- Corporations with ties to Trump and/or the administration make up 44% (90 out of 205) of those benefiting from enforcement cancellations, and include….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Veronica Riccobene, Oct 6, 2026 [The Lever]
When All Else Is Out of Bounds, Zap Labor
[Dollars & Sense, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2026]
Health care crisis
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
We Investigated Starlink. The Corruption We Found Will Shock You
[More Perfect Union, Oct 06, 2026]
Monopoly Round-Up: How Seed and Pesticide Makers Act Like the Mafia
Matt Stoller
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
3D Printing Creator Chuck Hull on Additive’s Future
Dennis Scimeca, Oct. 8, 2026 [Industry Week]
Disrupting mainstream economics
If Our Government Makes Dollars, What Is the ‘National Debt’?
Thomas Neuburger, Oct 06, 2026 [God’s Spies]
… The source of all U.S. dollars is ultimately the government.
There’s no other source. The Fed creates dollars because the government says it can. Banks create dollars by lending beyond their reserves — lending cash they don’t have — because the government says it can. The government’s always in charge of dollar creation.
• Therefore, the government has no inherent need to borrow. Do airlines need to borrow “airline miles” to give them away? Of course not; they make them. End of.
• Each dollar spent by the government is a dollar in somebody’s pocket. No spending, no dollars.
• The Treasury is financed with bonds only because that’s the law. If those laws were repealed, the Treasury could just create dollars and buy what it needs.
• Treasury bonds are therefore a gift, offered to people with money. If you don’t have money, or not enough of it, you can’t buy government bonds. If you have money to spare, you can.
The ‘National Debt’
So what’s the “national debt”? It’s the sum of all Treasury bonds held outside the government. This includes bonds held by you, by mutual funds and the like, by banks and the Fed itself, and by foreign governments and their own central banks.
Thus:
• The “national debt” is the market for U.S. Treasuries.
• Because having a Treasuries market is voluntary, the “national debt” is really just an investment vehicle, a way to give money to people who already have money via interest payments.
• The “national debt” is therefore not a debt, but a gift….
If You Don’t Understand Government Debt, You Don’t Understand Money (YouTube video)
ProfSteveKeen, Oct 4, 2026 [YouTube]
The conventional wisdom is that excessive government debt, and large government deficits, are the roots of all economic evil. When you see the financial dynamics of the economy in an integrated way, the conventional wisdom is conventional stupidity. The mainstream textbook view that a government deficit is negative public saving, reduces total saving, crowds out private investment, and slows economic growth, is the exact opposite of the accounting truth. Using double-entry bookkeeping, I show a government deficit is a CRITICAL step in creating fiat-based money, and it actually increases the money available to the private sector, not reducing it as textbooks argue. Government bonds do not take money from the public, as textbooks assert, and of the three ways in which they could be sold–to the central bank, to private banks, or the non-bank private sector–the current system is the worst choice. I use simulations in Ravel to compare these three bond-sale arrangements using the same government deficit. I conclude that government debt and deficits need to be understood as part of the broader financial system rather than through a household-debt analogy, and from this perspective, they are not a “bug” of the system, they are a feature
How Mexico Proved Mainstream Economics Wrong
Jonathan Schlefer, October 06, 2026 [The Nation]
American analysts have long viewed inequality as a byproduct of technological causes. But Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena Party has boosted workers’ income without any technological tradeoffs.
Steve Keen, Oct 10, 2026 [Building a New Economics]
John Blatt87F[1] was an Austrian-born mathematician whose family emigrated to the USA to escape the Nazis, and who then emigrated from the USA to Australia to escape McCarthy’s anti-communist paranoia in 1950s America. He co-authored the definitive text on nuclear physics, which is still in print and in use today (Blatt and Weisskopf 1952). At the University of Illinois, he helped build the Illiac, the most advanced computer in the world at that time, and he followed up with the Siliac at Sydney University, before becoming the foundation Professor of Economics at the newly-established University of New South Wales (UNSW).
He was invited to attend an economics seminar at the UNSW by Murray Kemp, a leading Neoclassical trade theorist. At the end of his presentation, Kemp asked Blatt what he thought. Blatt, who was famously acerbic, replied “that was the greatest load of rubbish that I have sat through in my academic career. If that is advanced economics, then there is something seriously wrong with economic theory, and I intend finding out what it is. Good day”. He then walked out of the seminar.86F88F[2]
Some years later, Blatt published Dynamic economic systems: a Post-Keynesian approach (Blatt 1983). In stark contrast to the belief of Neoclassical economists that the economy must be modelled as an equilibrium system, the mathematician Blatt saw equilibrium modelling as a sign of the immaturity of economics:
The bicentenary of The Wealth of Nations has passed, and so has the centenary of the neoclassical revolution in economics. Yet the present state of dynamic economic theory leaves very much to be desired and appears to show little sign of significant improvement in the near future.
From the time of Adam Smith, economic theory has developed in terms of an almost universal concentration of thought and effort on the study of equilibrium states….
Disrupting mainstream politics
Paid for By – Judd Legum tells us about his new app for unmasking whose behind political ads
Joyce Vance and Judd Legum, Oct 08, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
If you missed Judd Legum’s explanation of his new online app, which you can find at paidforby.info, stop what you’re doing and watch this, or get to it as soon as you can. Judd tells you how to use the app to understand who’s behind the political ads you see online and the mailers you receive—what he calls the wild west of political advertising because it receives virtually no scrutiny.
This is an interactive tool that lets us all work together to push back against dark money and figure out who’s behind the PACs with innocuous sounding names like America PAC (that one is Elon Musk). One of my favorite parts of our conversation involved Judd identifying a add that made an utterly false claim about a conduct and calling to ask the advertiser about it, which led them to promptly back down and stop making the fake claim about a Democratic candidate….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Idle thought here, but why aren’t we using AI to replace entire management layers?
Comment by Lambert Strether [thejackpot.blog/node/WordsoftheDay20261009]
Thomas Neuburger, Oct 09, 2026 [God’s Spies]
… There are valuable lessons from this — hard truths for hard times:
- The smart phone world, where every device you own is connected to companies you can’t trust, is inherently dangerous. Not accidentally. Inherently….
Scoop: AI companies plot ‘the day after’
[Axios, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261009]
“Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event. These officials [they’re not officials!!] anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that shuts down access to financial services, internet connectivity, or even power and water. The first example of significant real-world harm caused by unsafe AI would turn an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as President Trump for his reluctance to regulate it.”
Cory Doctorow, October 06, 2026 [Pluralistic]
… In a world in thrall to financial power, expertise is the only substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. Moreover, expertise is the foundation of other forms of power, such as labor power, which is what we call it when experts band together to combat financial power.
This is why AI bosses are so violently allergic to the idea of hybridizing AI with symbolic systems that operate on models of the world. These models of the world must be constructed by experts, and the power of expertise cannot be reliably commanded by the power of wealth.
This is the political economy of theory-free AI. Without finance’s infinite hostility to expertise, there would have been far less capital for theory-free AI….
The joke’s on the oligarchy, though. Because theory-free inference doesn’t know about chessboards, chess pieces or the rules of chess, it can’t be prevented from sometimes putting a chess piece on a square that’s already occupied by one of its pieces. The “hallucinations” are intrinsic to and inextricable from theory-free inference….
A U.S. Strategy to Secure Geopolitical Advantage on an Uncertain Path to Superintelligence
[RAND, Sep 15, 2026, via [Talking Points Memo, The AI Panic and the Hunt for Reliable Narrators]
In this paper, the authors argue that seven archetypal strategies dominate the debate, that current evidence cannot resolve five pivotal uncertainties about the most feasible and sensible strategy, and that committing prematurely to any one of them, or deferring commitment too long, forecloses options.
Watch Footage of the Flock Search a Judge Ruled Unconstitutional
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2026]
[404, via The Big Picture, October 04, 2026]
19 Out of 21 Late-Model Cars Tested Shared Data With 3rd Parties, Including Big Tech
[Road & Track, via The Big Picture, October 04, 2026]
Infotainment screens and connected features are now standard, and a new study finds nearly every car tested is passing driver data along to outside companies. A new study from Northeastern University finds late-model vehicles and their companion apps are sending vast swaths of information out.
Federal judge calls Flock ‘indiscriminate mass surveillance’
[TechCrunch, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2026]
Amazon Warns Local Communities to Stop Defying Its Massive AI Data Centers
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2026]
Sam Altman to Decoded: ‘The world should accept some bad things happening’ for the benefits of AI
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2026]
Democrats’ political malpractice
No, We Cannot Agree to Disagree – On what you are asking me to overlook
Mike Brock, Oct 09, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
Resistance
Christopher Armitage, Oct 08, 2026 [Existentialist Republic]
… A self-coup happens when an elected leader uses illegal means to stay in office or to take powers the constitution gives to someone else. The political scientists who have recorded self-coups since 1945 found that most of the failures happened when two groups refused to go along: the military’s top officers and the top figures in the leader’s own party.
Trump and Hegseth identified both factors. They’ve spent nearly two years implementing the loyalty tests, and they have two more years of runway to ensure the next self-coup attempt doesn’t fail. By loyalty test I mean that a person’s command, promotion, federal job or party nomination depends on whether that person has gone along with Trump.
Over the course of this essay I intend to show you what stops a self-coup and who is being removed, and then I’m going to ask you to call your governor and tell them what you expect them to do about this increasingly urgent threat….
[Law & Crime, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261006]
“The NAACP’s lawsuit, filed on Friday against the DOJ Civil Rights Division and its Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, argued there is an “urgent need for the Defendant to produce and release the records and information” about a plan to deploy ‘1,000 election monitors.’” No doubt only in a few swing precincts in a few swing states. More: “The plaintiff alleged the Trump administration is ‘searching for evidence related to unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud’ instead of ‘ensuring access for voters.’” And: “ ‘The actions of the current Civil Rights Division’s monitors have raised widespread concerns from state officials and voters. For example, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon described the Justice Department’s monitors’ behavior during his state’s primary elections as ‘aggressive’ and ‘irregular,’ and that the monitors’ behavior seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was,” the complaint said. ‘There have been reported issues, too, of DOJ not providing notice and obtaining consent from state and local officials.’
Deport Republicans: A Practical Guide
Christopher Armitage, Oct 06, 2026 [Existentialist Republic]
… We can go so much further than finances.
Texas criminalizes reproductive healthcare? Their medical licenses become void in California. Florida persecutes doctors for treating trans kids? They can’t practice in New York. Red state medical schools lose accreditation partnerships. Their residency programs lose access to blue state hospitals.
Their doctors can’t get specialty training at Johns Hopkins or Mayo Clinic. Make the medical brain drain official: if you practice in a state that criminalizes healthcare, you can’t practice in states that protect it. Let red state governors explain why their best doctors are fleeing and their medical students can’t match at top residencies. Meanwhile, blue states fast-track licensing for any doctor fleeing prosecution for providing actual medical care.
Conservatives have spent decades demonizing blue states while leeching off our functioning economies and infrastructure. This must end….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Zachary Groz, October 6, 2026 [The American Prospect]
… Though the story of the corporate capture of America’s political institutions has lately fixated on the White House and Congress, cases like RealPage, where the federal courts have shielded corporations from accountability, have been reshaping the country for some time now. A decades-old legal movement shaped by conservative advocacy groups and corporations has made a concerted effort to turn the federal courts into a safe haven from regulators, lawmakers, and advocates, per a new report from the judicial reform group Demand Justice and progressive organization Groundwork Collaborative. Those efforts have paid dividends, especially in the last decade, as corporations sought to stymie Biden-era antitrust and worker protection regulation and enforcement and have capitalized on a friendly White House bent on tearing down federal agencies.
“It is not enough to elect a president and Congress committed to democracy, accountability, and equality,” the report states. “We must fix the courts to ensure they are no longer dedicated to obstructing progressive reforms designed to create shared prosperity for all.”
The report goes back to the authoring of the Powell Memo by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in 1971, which urged corporations to pay attention to political power and the courts, and continues through the work of the law and economics movement, which pays for lavish junkets for federal judges to indoctrinate them in business-friendly legal thinking. More recently, the behind-the-scenes financier of the conservative judicial movement Leonard Leo and the right-wing Federalist Society have assembled an extensive pipeline of judges guaranteed to protect the interests of corporations over the public.
[RealClearPolitics, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2026]
The Unitary Executive Theory in All of Its Historical Perversity
Jack Rakove, September 24, 2026 [Washington Monthly]
Civic republicanism
The War Against Accumulated Capital
Hamilton Nolan, Oct 07, 2026 [How Things Work]
The most important political task in America is clawing back the vast fortunes (and the vast power they create) of the ultra-rich. This task is more fundamental than all of the other important things—climate change, immigration, health care, you name it—because if we do not do it, then the path to democratic achievement of all of the other things will be permanently foreclosed.
Thwarted: Behold the awesome destructive power of a fully operational billionaire.
Cory Doctorow, October 09, 2026 [Pluralistic]
There are many ways in which every billionaire is a policy failure, but the most corrosive and destructive way in which billionaires are policy failures is this: billionaires, despite being unelected and unaccountable, possess the power to control – and ruin – millions of peoples’ lives.
Despite what the Prosperity Gospel and the Efficient Market Hypothesis would have you believe, having billions of dollars is in no way a reliable predictor that you also possess the wisdom to unilaterally dictate how thousands or millions of other people must live their lives, and that dictatorial power is most the tangible effect of being a billionaire.
Billionaireism is many things, but above all else, it is the power to do whatever *you* want to do, at the expense of whatever *other* people want to do. To be a billionaire is to live a life unthwarted, above the power of your workers, your neighbors, or your government and its laws. It is the right to get high on your own supply. It is the right to live a life in which no one ever calls you on your bullshit.
Billionaires aspire to live a one-sided libertarian fantasy in which they have the unlimited right to do whatever they want, and *you* have the right to do whatever they tell you to do….
This is what Peter Thiel meant when he wrote that “democracy is incompatible with freedom.” In a democracy, the people who you exercise coercive power over are able to band together to create public institutions that act as a check on your power. For Thiel to maximize his freedom (to do things like spying on us and crushing our journalistic outlets), he must prevent all of *us* from voting, lest we vote to take away those cherished freedoms of his:
https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/….
We let the most greedy, most ruthless people among us pursue their toddler’s quest for an unthwarted life to the expense of any semblance of competent administration, and now we are *fucked*. That’s why people are so angry about AI: there’s nothing wrong with the idea of automating some tasks through advanced statistical techniques, but the reason so much of the world’s scarce resources have been allocated to the AI buildout is that billionaires are infinitely horny for a technology that will let them sideline expertise in favor of money:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/#theory-free….
[AP-NORC, via Naked Capitalism 10-04-2026]
[BettBeat’s Newsletter, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261009]
“Empires do not fall because their leaders are mad. Empires produce mad leaders because they are falling. The pathology is downstream. When the historians of some future century, if there are any, sit down to describe our era, they will not waste much ink on the psychology of the men in the suits. They will describe the corporations. They will describe the algorithms. They will describe the extraction. And they will marvel, if they are still capable of marveling, at how long the population of the imperial core was willing to believe that the whole thing came down to one particularly loud man, and that if only he could be removed, the sun would come out again over the wreckage.”
The Greeks Without Tragedy – On Marco Rubio’s Athens Speech
John Ganz, Oct 09, 2026 [Unpopular Front]
On Monday, I wrote about how the right increasingly justified itself using paleoconservative rhetorical forms—tropes of national decline, decadence, and intra-civilizational struggle—even if it did not entirely adopt the paleo policy program. On Wednesday, we got Exhibit D in Marco Rubio’s speech at the Pnyx, the birthplace of Athenian democracy.
With a dramatic view of the Parthenon in the background, Rubio delivered 25 minutes of pure kitsch. It was the classics as learned through memes by a groyped-up staffer; someone who wouldn’t know what a Doric column was if it fell on their head, but whose notions of the Greeks come from clips of Zack Snyder’s 300. It represents the reduction of the cultural patrimony of Western civilization to grindset motivational quotes. It completely stripped the Greeks—the people who gave us the words “critic,” “dialectic,” and “tragedy” of anything fraught, contradictory, or tragic.
He starts his litany of classical examples in the worst possible place with Socrates: “We see this in Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth even at the cost of his own life.” Of course, Socrates was put to death for the very doubt and questioning of one’s own society that Rubio condemns as a shameful loss of civilizational self-confidence. What Rubio seems to regard as a symptom of Western decadence was one of the highest achievements of Western civilization. Then he misses the entire point of the Iliad, “…Achilles, who is offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life – but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory.” The first word of the epic is “rage,” and the poem is about how Achilles’s wounded honor brings destruction to his friends and countrymen.
Then Rubio invokes the word thumos, which he defines as “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride,” and identifies as the animating force of Western civilization. But in Book IV of Plato’s Republic, thumos, the spirited part of the soul, must be governed by reason. Plato turns to Homer to make the point, quoting a passage from the Odyssey in which Odysseus rebukes his own angry heart. Then, in Book VIII, Plato describes a political order governed by the love of honor, military glory, and competition: timocracy. Far from representing the pinnacle of civilization, timocracy represents the degeneration of the ideal republic. What Rubio offers as a cure for Western decadence, Plato describes as the beginning of political decline. And so it is. The principle of decline of our American civilization.
Plato’s Republic contains a further irony—another one of those subtle Greek virtues that the Romanate Marcus Rubius evidently lacks. The timocracy degenerates into oligarchy, the rule of wealth. As Plato puts it, the love of honor gives way to the love of money, until men come to “commend and admire the rich man and put him in office.” What could be a more fitting description of the political situation in which Rubio now finds himself: delivering grandiloquent speeches about honor, courage, and virtue in the service of Donald Trump, the real estate hustler whose name has become synonymous with gaudy wealth….
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