by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
What is Stephen Miller trying to accomplish in Portland and Chicago?
Dan Froomkin, October 7, 2025 [presswatchers.org]
…as we have all learned over the last several months, Stephen Milller is Trump’s operational lead – if not his puppeteer. Miller, the white nationalist who is Trump’s deputy chief of staff in charge of increasingly everything, is the one who makes things happen in Trump’s White House.
Unlike Trump, Miller is not stupid, nor does he suffer from dementia. He knows full well that what Trump is saying is not true. (He may well be the one encouraging Trump’s demented fantasies.)
So we know the answer for him is No. 3: He’s knowingly, intentionally lying.
And given what we know about him, from his own words, it’s not hard to figure out why: He wants a national cleansing.
He wants MAGA and the state to wipe out the opposition. He wants, in short, a civil war. And he thinks he can start one in Portland and Chicago.
“The issue before [u]s now is very simple and clear,” he tweeted on Saturday. “There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.” ….
New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (with whom I have had my differences) asked several experts about Trump and Miller’s intentions. The answers, published this morning, were revelatory.
“If Trump, Miller & Co. are not hoping to provoke violence, they sure act as if they are,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote in an email to Edsall. “It’s not simply about provoking violence, though, but inflicting it, as ICE has been doing all along. The spiral of violence usually begins with official violence.”
Barbara Walter, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego and the author of “How Civil Wars Start, explained:
”The quickest way to piss people off is to send soldiers into their neighborhoods especially when there’s no reason for them to be there. It’s inherently provocative, and Trump and his team understand this. Research by the political scientist Robert Pape shows that the single most powerful predictor of suicide terrorism is the presence of foreign troops on local soil. People hate, hate, hate that. They hate the humiliation, the powerlessness, the feeling of being occupied.
“Once citizens begin to view their own government’s security forces as an occupying army, violence becomes inevitable. Trump’s team knows this. In fact, that’s the point. They are not trying to restore order; they’re trying to trigger the very unrest that would justify further crackdowns. In the end, violence serves their ultimate end: They want to create the illusion of disorder so they can tighten control and stay in power indefinitely.” ….
John Harwood, Oct 09, 2025 [Zeteo]
Over four decades as a journalist, I’ve covered seven presidents, 20 Congresses, and thousands of staffers. I’ve never encountered one as sinister as Stephen Miller.
I see it in the darkness of his eyes, the venom of his words, the malevolence of his affect. And also by the deliberate brutality of his campaign from the White House to deport immigrants and crush dissenters….
The Dilemma: Do or Do Not — In the mind of our Stephen Millers, the time may be now
Thomas Neuburger, Oct 08, 2025 [God’s Spies]
Miller’s language … :
“[This is] Legal insurrection. The President is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not an Oregon judge. Portland and Oregon law enforcement, at the direction of local leaders, have refused to aid ICE officers facing relentless terrorist assault and threats to life. (There are more local law enforcement officers in Oregon than there are guns and badges in the FBI nationwide). This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself.”
“Legal insurrection … an organized terrorist attack on the federal government”. There are laws against that. Another example, Miller to Hannity:
“The Democrat party … is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat party is not a political party. It is a domestic, extremist organization.” ….
Let’s go back to Ben Collins above (emphasis mine): “they want to do it now, because even though they’re unpopular, they seem to believe this is the most popular they’ll be ever again”.
I think that’s wrong. A more correct statement would be “because this is the most power they’ve ever had before.”
The American Hard Right has never, ever been stronger. The feast is before them, all laid. They have the presidency. They have Trump, a master intimidator, and so they have Congress (look up “men fit to be slaves”). They have Roberts and most of his Court. They have power of the purse at last, and crime without price. They act like kings. They have a timid pretend opposition, so tied to their money and privilege they’re afraid to offend (by which I mean piss off their donors)….
I’m pointing out Trump’s position — he has all the power. No one stands up with force that prevents; the battlefield is his. In the minds of the Millers of the world — and there are many — the time to strike may be now, when their side is most strong….
Stephen Miller Accidentally Says “I” When Discussing Trump’s Powers
Malcolm Ferguson, October 10, 2025 [The New Republic]
Miller’s slip of the tongue reveals who’s really in charge.
Miller Speaks Truth, AI Tells Lies, and Music
Thomas Neuburger, Oct 10, 2025 [God’s Spies]
…Plenary authority is “complete and absolute power” with respect to an issue. (Latin: plenus means full. It’s the root of our word “plenty,” for example.) So when Miller says, “Under Title 10 of the U.S. code, the president has plenary authority…” he means that with respect to the military — the subject of U.S. Code Title 10 — the president can do, unquestioned, whatever he pleases.
He’s wrong, of course. Both the Constitution and Posse Comitatus contradict that assertion. Which is why he froze.
But also, he didn’t take it back. He wants to be right, wants badly to remake the world to make himself right. And I’m sure the talk at the table, the big one, where his minions gather to plan how to export their rage, words like plenary go unchallenged. The word fell from his lips like he uses it a lot.
Things to come? We’ll know soon, I think….
Batu El and James Zou ran an experiment at Stanford University (“Moloch’s Bargain: Emergent Misalignment When LLMs Compete For Audiences”) in which AI models were forced to compete to succeed….
From the paper:
- A 6.3% sales increase brings with it with a 14.0% rise in deceptive marketing.
- In elections, 4.9% gain in vote share comes with 22.3% more disinformation and 12.5% more populist rhetoric.
- In social media, a 7.5% engagement boost comes with 188.6% more disinformation and a 16.3% increase in promotion of harmful behaviors….
Republican Rep Claims Everyone at “No Kings” Protest Is a Terrorist
Robert McCoy, October 10, 2025 [The New Republic]
After House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise referred to the peaceful “No Kings” protest planned for October 18 as a “Hate America rally,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer went one step further, calling it a “terrorist” event.
Secretive Watchlisting Center Executing NSPM-7
Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2025]
DAVID MARCUS: Portland’s dystopia delusion coming to a city near all of us
[Fox News, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2025]
[TW: Just one example of the lies peddled by Fox. Just imagine if Rupert Murdoch had been ejected as an illegal alien, instead of being allowed to create a “media” empire in USA. Better yet, imagine Rupert Murdoch becoming understood by millions of Americans as one of the most powerful, dangerous and insidious agents of oligarchy and anti-republican demagoguery to have ever afflicted the republic.]
Trump Just Issued Two of His Most Dangerous Directives Yet
[Zeteo, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2025]
Joyce Vance, Oct 07, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
…After a loss in court in Oregon Saturday night, when District Judge Karin Immergut ruled that the administration could not federalize National Guard troops based on made-up complaints about crime (No, Virginia, Portland is not a war zone), the Trump administration flagrantly violated her order, threatening to send National Guard troops from both California and Texas into Oregon. That provoked a rare Sunday night emergency hearing. The administration threatened to send troops into Chicago, too….
Then there is Chicago. While there was reporting late today that a federal judge in Chicago declined to enjoin the administration from sending Guard troops to that city this afternoon, it’s important to understand the reason. Judge April Perry did so in order to take time to obtain more information about the situation, based on Illinois and Chicago’s recently filed complaint. In other words, she is building a record (necessary for a decision to stand up on appeal) before ruling, likely either during or shortly after a hearing she has scheduled on Thursday. The Judge described herself as “very troubled by the lack of answers” the government provided in court on the deployment. This is hardly a win for the Trump administration….
Trump is showing us what FASCISM looks like — We are at war!
Dean Obeidallah, Oct 06, 2025
Stephen Miller: Camp of the Saints Meets Weimar Solutions
Jim Stewartson, Oct 06, 2025 [MindWar]
The rush to execute a dictatorial takeover of the United States continues to accelerate into absurdist theater—and real-world violence. Trump adviser Stephen Miller is frantically trying to manufacture a scapegoat that can be used to deploy military resources into American cities at scale.
In the last two days, Trump-appointed federal judge Karin Immergut has blocked Trump from deploying National Guard three times.
- Blocked 10/4/25: Oregon National Guard → Portland (federalization/deployment)
- Blocked 10/5/25: California National Guard → Oregon/Portland
- Blocked 10/5/25: Texas National Guard → Oregon/Portland
Monday morning, Stephen Miller targeted Judge Immergut on social media for her rulings. Just the day before, another federal judge, Diane Goodstein, who had been targeted for her ruling by SCOTUS and the Trump regime, had her house burn down. Judge Goodstein’s family barely escaped with serious injuries.
Just a few hours before the fire, Stephen Miller referred to judges as “radicals” who “protect leftwing terrorists.” ….
In Political Theology (1922), German jurist Carl Schmitt diagnosed what he saw as a fatal flaw in liberal democracy—its dependence on procedures and laws which cease to function in times of crisis. His solution was the “state of exception”: the idea that a strong sovereign must have the power to suspend normal law in an emergency in order to preserve the state. Schmitt went on to collaborate with the Nazi government….
Jim Stewartson, Oct 09, 2025 [MindWar]
[TW: Yeah, Trump truly believes the nonsense he spouts. Because of manipulators like these.]
The Sinister Reason Trump Is Itching to Invoke the Insurrection Act
Natasha Lennard, Oct 07, 2025 [The Intercept]
Dirty Business: The Atlanta Narcotics Unit’s Deadly Raid on 92-Year-Old Kathryn Johnston
Collateral Damage
Police raid the wrong home, kill an innocent woman, then plant marijuana in her basement to cover up their mistake. In the debut episode of The Intercept’s new investigative podcast series, host Radley Balko highlights how Johnston’s killing is a case study in how the war on drugs is fought.
The End Of Non-Sequitur Politics
Brian Beutler, Oct 06, 2025 [Off Message]
Snaps of MIller’s messages
First Circuit Rules Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Executive Order is Unconstitutional
[Reason.com, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2025]
Stephen Miller says Trump has ‘plenary authority’ over military. What does that mean?
[USA Today, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2025]
The Chicago Rubicon and What Comes Next
[The Bulwark, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2025]
John Helmer [via Naked Capitalism 10-07-2025]
Important.
Jim Acosta: Corporate media is paralyzed with fear to report on Trump’s cognitive decline
Dean Obeidallah and Jim Acosta, Oct 09, 2025
… Acosta told us bluntly why: “It’s because the media, the corporate media in this country are paralyzed with fear.” He continued, “they’re worried that they’re going to get sued again and hauled into court.” Acosta even noted corporate executives are fearful that they will “get tossed by the wayside because some corporate giant is going to come in and take over a network and so on.”
In other words, Trump has succeeded at his goal of intimidating the corporate media to self-censor for the good of their bottom line….
Why we need to take Trump’s Drug War very seriously
[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-2025]
Memo to Future Historians: This Is Fascism, and Millions of Us See It
Michael Tomasky, October 10, 2025 [The New Republic]
Inside Stephen Miller’s Secret Plan to Normalize Trump’s Dictator Rule
Greg Sargent, October 8, 2025 [The New Republic]
Miller plainly believes there’s a latent majority out in the country that can be sleepwalked into authoritarianism. If Democrats sit this debate out, Miller has calculated, Trump’s deceptions can flood public information spaces, persuading low-info, low-attention voters that his autocratic encroachments constitute a proportional response to the civic unrest he keeps propagandizing about.
Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down
Siva Vaidhyanathan, October 7, 2025 [The New Republic]
How Linda McMahon’s latest “compact” would do deep and permanent harm to American higher education
If the University of Virginia agrees to the terms dictated by a memo sent last Wednesday by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, then this essay you are reading could cost the university all of its federal support—research funds, financial aid, everything.
“Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” states the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that McMahon sent to Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University, and the University of Virginia…..
[TW: Once the tide has turned and we turn to the task of repairing the damage, one lesson that will have to be taught is that “conservative ideas’ lead inexorably to economic carnage and political discord.]
Strategic Political Economy
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 10-08-2025]
I was studying other times in history when gold prices more than doubled in the reserve currency of the time, as they did in the past year: it’s rare and almost always a sign of a profound loss of confidence in the existing monetary and political order, going all the way back to the Roman empire (the so-called “Crisis of the Third Century”).And it often marked the transition from one era of power to the next: the fall of Rome, Spain’s decline from world power, the French Revolution and Terror, the end of Bretton Woods, etc. Interestingly, it’s often actually as much a cause as a sign of these episodes, as this is effectively a transfer of real wealth from the poor to the rich elites who protect themselves with gold – this being what ignites the political upheaval….
Argentina: the chainsaw breaks down
[CADTM, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2025]
Over the past months, there has been wild optimism in financial markets and among mainstream economists and international agencies that Milei’s self-styled ‘chainsaw economics’ was working. Since taking office, Milei had taken a ‘chainsaw’ to government spending in welfare and public services and sacked thousands of public workers. As a result, the government budget was put into balance….
Foreign investors and international agencies rushed to praise the free market economics aims and fiscal austerity measures of the Milei government as a successful alternative to ‘pink socialism’. With a pin of Javier Milei’s signature ‘chainsaw’ affixed to her jacket, during a press conference at the IMF spring meeting, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva urged Argentinians “to stay the course” and back Milei at the upcoming legislative elections in October. “It’s very important that they don’t derail the will for change,” she said.
Then the OECD followed up the acclaim. In its report on Argentina in July….
[TW: Then democracy got in the way]
But then the chainsaw broke, triggered by the provincial elections in Buenos Aires, the largest region in Argentina. Milei’s party was expected to do well, based on the apparent success of his economic policies. But instead – disaster. Milei’s party lost by a staggering 14 points and the opposition Peronist party won 6 out of 8 electoral jurisdictions, including three it hadn’t won in 20 years. Milei’s party’s vote share fell in all eight districts and he lost by 10 points in the crucial first district, which is both a bellwether and a major economic hub for the province….
…the huge cuts in government spending have led to high environmental risk, according to an index that considers the presence of pests, accumulation of garbage, and proximity to sources of pollution. Only 27% of homes are on paved streets, while 46% are on dirt roads. Half of households studied didn’t have a formal water connection and the figure was as high as 95% in some neighborhoods. Meanwhile, 63% were not properly connected to the power grid; and 41% of families rely on community kitchens, a figure that reaches 60% in some neighborhoods.
The Milei administration has defunded soup kitchens, accusing the social organizations that run them of being corrupt. So in Córdoba, a study found that 58% of families couldn’t afford the basic food basket in August. Half of households said they were skipping one of their daily meals, usually dinner. Two-thirds of Argentine children under the age of 14 are living in poverty….
[TW: The ruling principle in the political economy of civic republicanism is to promote the General Welfare. USA’s founders even wrote it into the Constitution — not once, but twice. Today conservatives and libertarians explicitly attack the concept of the General Welfare. In Capitalist magazine, February 2013, Brian Phillips, founder of the Texas Institute for Property Rights, wrote
“There is no such entity as “the public”, there are only individuals. These terms actually mean that some individuals take precedence over other individuals, that some may impose their values on others.”
[Readers may recognize that Phillips is merely echoing 1980s British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that “There is no such thing as society,” which in turn was an echo of Austrian economics ghouls Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.
[As Ian Welsh explained earlier this week, “Chinese documents about successes of government policy is that they almost never express success in currency.” In the case of Argentina, good policy that promotes the General Welfare would focus on streets paved, and most importantly, getting water and electricity to the over half of homes that don’t have them. Don’t wait for those impoverished households to somehow save the funds to get those connections on their own. There has to be an organized effort by society — i.e., by government — to fund and organize the program. And it will create millions of good jobs, and dramatically improve the economic prospects of the entire country — even including the reactionary rich and their ideological henchmen, like Milei, who hate the very idea of government funding to help the poor.
[And, it’s worth recalling here, that Thatcher diverted the British public’s attention away from the disastrous results of her economic policies, which began the rapid deindustrialization of Britain, by going to war against Argentina over the Falkland islands. ]
The neoliberal centre cannot hold
Richard Murphy, October 08 2025 [Funding the Future]
…Macron came to power selling the idea that France could be rescued from its old left-right divide by managerial competence, technocratic reason and a veneer of modernity. The market would be appeased, the unions pacified, and Europe reassured.
That idea depended on two things.
First, that there existed a stable, reasonable “centre ground” around which compromise could form.
Second, that politics could be treated as a matter of efficiency rather than conflict — a question of method, not ideology.
Both ideas are now dead.
Why the centre cannot hold
First, Macron hollowed out both sides of French politics, leaving nothing in their place. The traditional left and right parties were destroyed by his rise. But instead of replacing them with a genuine consensus movement, he built a personal vehicle for power that disintegrated once his charisma faded. With no real party base, Macronism is now an empty shell.
Second, his policies have alienated almost everyone. To the right, his reforms have looked timid and bureaucratic; to the left, they have been a full-frontal assault on social protection and democracy. He tried to be all things to all people, and now no one trusts him.
Third, the technocratic centre has no moral anchor. It claims to be pragmatic, but in practice it defends the status quo — the power of finance, corporate privilege, and EU budget orthodoxy. Macron’s governments have prioritised market “confidence” over social cohesion, and now find they have neither.
Fourth, fragmentation has replaced stability. Each new prime minister has served for less time than the one before. None has been able to command a parliamentary majority. Each collapse deepens the public’s cynicism and strengthens the extremes Macron claimed to restrain.
The result is paralysis: a political system in which no one can govern, no one can compromise, and no one can win.
The political economy of collapse
This is not simply about personalities. It is structural. The neoliberal centre — in France, the UK, and across Europe — is based on the belief that markets and managerialism can replace ideology. But politics is about power, and power cannot be neutral….
The US Population Could Shrink in 2025, For the First Time Ever
[Derek Thompson, via The Big Picture, October 11, 2025]
It’s a story with massive economic and political significance. But it’s receiving strangely little attention.
[Works in Progress Magazine, via The Big Picture, October 11, 2025]
Chinese dams will hold billions of people downstream to ransom. Could solar-powered desalination make them irrelevant?
Global power shift
China asserts control over entire global semiconductor supply chain
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2025]
This is a very big deal. China has asserted sweeping control over the entire global semiconductor supply chain, putting export license requirements on all rare earths used to manufacture advanced chips. If enforced aggressively, this policy could mean “lights out” for the US AI boom, and likely lead to a recession/economic crisis in the US in the short term.
Trump puts extra 100% tariff on China imports, adds export controls on ‘critical software’
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-2025]
[Unherd, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2025]
…I suspect that the folk in the US State Department and the Western foreign policy community are clinging on to statistics that measure the size of an economy in US dollars. According to that metric, the US is still top dog — and the combined West is far larger than the Brics. That metric has its economic merits, but it does not account for geopolitics. As part of its sanctions, the West cut Russia off from the dollar markets. China has capital controls. Dollars do not flow freely in and out of these countries. This is why you shouldn’t measure their economies in dollars, but in terms of what their local currencies buy. That’s what purchasing-power parity, or PPP, measures — the “bang for the buck”, in Russia’s case quite literally. The reason Western experts critically misjudged Russia’s capacity to build weapons and to sustain its war in Ukraine is because of their attachment to wrong statistics. If they had looked at PPP, they would have recognised Russia for what it really is: the fourth-largest economy in the world, larger than Germany and Japan.
In the West, delusions also persist about China’s strategy.…
Through his trade policies, Trump has driven the Brics countries, and parts of the Global South, closer together. Before Trump’s second term, the US was everyone’s favourite trading partner. It had a huge economy, with a single market and no internal trade barriers. Trump’s tariffs changed the picture. My interlocutors in Delhi were all talking about how Asian countries could trade more with one another to replace the trade with America that is now lost….
The Brics have already started to develop a payment system, Brics Pay, which is based on the same technology as crypto currencies. When it’s finally ready to be rolled out, it will make it easier, cheaper and faster for member countries to pay each other in their own currencies. The real appeal of Brics Pay, however, is that the more you can shift your invoicing into local currencies, the less vulnerable you become to US sanctions. In recent years, the US has used its dominance of global financial markets as a weapon to impose its political will on other countries — largely by threatening to cut off local banks from the US dollar markets. Even China is not immune to this. Right now, the US still enjoys what is known as an exorbitant privilege, but it is a privilege that depletes each time it is used….
Is China Winning the Race for Robotics?
[AI Insider, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Gaza plan: Looks Like peace, acts like occupation
[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 10-07-2025]
Trump’s Sham Peace Plan — There will be no peace in Gaza. Only the temporary absence of war.
Chris Hedges, Oct 10, 2025
…Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement. And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.” ….
Israel Paying Up to $4.1M to Brainwash Americans With VR, Target Churches With ‘Geofencing’ Ads
Chris Menahan, Oct. 04, 2025 [InformationLiberation
New FARA filings reveal that the Israeli government is paying an American firm up to $4.1 million to brainwash Christians with a virtual reality “October 7th experience” and target them with “geofencing” propaganda ads at their churches.
The millions are being paid to conservative activist Chad Schnitger’s new firm Show Faith by Works, according to FARA disclosures….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 10-07-2025]
Thanks for the question. The Israeli government is “geofencing” the physical boundaries of more than 500 churches during worship times in order to deliver “targeted pro-Israel content” on devices. If you are concerned about this, here is what you can do: 1) See if your church is being targeted – at the bottom of this tweet, I am attaching a FARA document. The list of churches that are being targeted for digital ads by the Israeli government starts on page 342) Disable location services – this is by far the most important thing you can do. Settings > Privacy > Location Services on iPhones3) Manage location services for specific apps – if you don’t want to turn off ALL location services, you can prevent geofencing by turning it off for specific apps, like Tik Tok or Instagram in your phone settings4) Let your congregation know – Even if some folks don’t mind, it’s better for your community to be aware that this is happening
John Mearsheimer [via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2025]
[In These Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2025]
Mossad ‘in contact from very beginning’ with killers of Italian PM, reporter reveals
Kit Klarenberg and Wyatt Reed [The Grayzone, via defenddemocracy.press 10-06-2025]
For years, Israel’s Mossad monitored and secretly influenced a violent communist faction that carried out the March 16, 1978 kidnapping and murder of Italian statesman Aldo Moro, veteran investigative journalist Eric Salerno has documented.
Having worked closely alongside multiple Italian heads of state during his 30-year career as a correspondent, Salerno published an expose of their secret relationship with Israeli intelligence in 2010 called Mossad Base Italy.
The reporter told The Grayzone that Moro, who was arguably Italy’s most important leader, became a thorn in the side of powerful forces who sought to keep his country firmly lodged in the pro-Western bloc. Salerno believes Italy’s long-term foreign policy would have developed differently if Moro had survived, adding, “that’s what they were afraid of in the United States.” ….
New CBS owner David Ellison met with top Israeli general in scheme to spy on Americans
[The Grayzone, via Naked Capitalism 10-07-2025]
Israel’s Secret Social Media War On Iran
Kit Klarenberg, Oct 07, 2025 [Global Delinquents]
On October 3rd, Haaretz published an extraordinary investigation, exposing how for years, the Zionist entity has clandestinely conducted dedicated “online operations” to promote the “public image” of Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran’s eldest son and pretender to the country’s now non-existent throne, locally and internationally. The efforts were highly sophisticated and wide-ranging, harnessing artificial intelligence, social media manipulation of every sort, and other online warfare techniques intended to convince audiences Pahlavi was Tehran’s exiled rightful ruler-in-waiting.
[TW: It should be clear that promoting the return of an oligarch is not acceptable, anywhere and anytime. Seriously, right to rule based on birthright? ]
Oligarchy
Robin McAlpine – The biggest threat we face? The rich
[Common Weal, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2025]
…We have been trained to understand the wellbeing of our entire society as being driven by the accumulation of wealth on the part of ‘wealth creators’. So what if I told you that actually the fall of the rich and powerful is better for most of us, not worse?
For example, everyone ‘knows’ that with the fall of the Rome, anarchy set in and the barbarians took over. Better a lifetime of tyranny than a day of anarchy and so on. Yet this is not really borne out by the facts. Actually, in the decades after the fall of Rome the evidence is pretty clear that this was a boom time for ordinary people.
Skeletal remain of ordinary people grew taller (a good proxy for a healthy, reliable diet) and older (suggesting reduced morbidity and conflict). There is very good evidence that the fall of Rome was great for the surrounding societies, that once Rome stopped extracting their wealth, the quality of their lives improved markedly.
And that is only one of a number of warnings about the threat of the rich which is available in history. In fact what if I told you that there is strong empirical evidence to suggest that the collapse of civilisations is almost always the fault of the very rich? That is the conclusion drawn by Dr Luke Kemp of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge in his book Goliath’s Curse….
Inside billionaire Peter Thiel’s private lectures: Warnings of ‘the Antichrist’ and U.S. destruction
Nitasha Tiku, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Gerrit De Vynck, October 10, 2025 [Washington Post]
The Washington Post reviewed leaked audio from four off-the-record lectures the tech investor delivered in San Francisco over the past month that fused beliefs about religion and technology.
Richard Murphy, October 11 2025 [Funding the Future]
… Thiel speaks as if democratic guardrails are satanic because they limit what the very rich may do, and he treats global standards on finance, the rule of law, and basic environmental responsibility as existential threats not just to humanity, but to the unconstrained reach of private capital.
This, in my opinion, is the thinking of a mind deranged by money and power. And he has power over us. He bankrolls political candidates in the US. He funds campaigns to roll back regulation. His firms win security and data contracts from governments. He wants the privileges of empire without the duties of citizenship, and the spoils of technology without the obligations that come with it….
Felonomics
US FREIGHT RECESSION is getting worse
[X, via Naked Capitalism 10-07-2025]
US FREIGHT RECESSION is getting worse: The Cass Freight Index, a key measure of freight volumes, fell in August to the lowest since the Financial Crisis.Weak consumer spending, housing, and industrial activity continue to hit demand.The real economy is in a recession…
Gold Is Booming and That’s Really Bad News
Timothy Noah, October 9, 2025 [The New Republic]
Add it to the growing pile of metrics documenting Trump’s economic mismanagement….
Since President Donald Trump took office, it’s risen by 50 percent; as I write this, gold futures exceed $4,000 per ounce…. This is not a sign of a healthy economy. When gold prices shoot up, it’s a sign that people are losing faith in the dollar….
The Trump Administration Is Rushing to Implement SNAP Cuts
Monica Potts, October 9, 2025
… It takes federal agencies and states many months, at minimum, and in some cases years to adjust to changes in such massive legislation (look no further than the implementation of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act). And yet, late last Friday, the administration quietly published guidance from the Agriculture Department saying that states must implement the new SNAP requirements by November 1, an impossibly tight deadline. The fast turnaround almost certainly means states will struggle to meet it and could make mistakes, kicking people off SNAP—commonly, if anachronistically, referred to as food stamps—even if they are still eligible to receive it….
Interior cancels largest solar project in North America
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-2025]
‘A fatal blow’: Italian producers fear effects of Trump’s ‘war against pasta
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-2025]
Why It’s Pointless for Democrats to Negotiate a Shutdown Deal
Jason Linkins, October 12, 2025 [The New Republic]
…But the reason things have dragged to a legislative standstill in October is essentially because Republicans in Congress willed it to be so when they returned to Washington to rejoin Trump as devoted supplicants. Their most fateful decision in that regard? Giving up one of the legislative branch’s core functions—the power of the purse. As NPR reported, by the first week of February, Republican lawmakers had already begun to master the art of explaining away why they were happy to surrender the power to appropriate money to Trump….
The White House’s position, as advanced by Vice President JD Vance and others, is that Senate Democrats should stop filibustering the appropriations bill now, and the matter of the subsidies can be negotiated later. The problem is that it’s impossible for a reasonable person to view that offer as sincere. Sure, Congress can go through the motions: meet in committee, hash out a deal, pass a bill, and send it to Trump’s desk. Trump can even sign that bill. But none of it matters when you know that Trump is likely to simply appropriate or not appropriate that money as he sees fit through pocket rescissions.
What we have here is a fully busted appropriations process; it is impossible to have faith in anything that Trump and his Republican cronies do with taxpayer dollars, even in instances in which bills have been negotiated, agreed to, and passed….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Monopoly Round-Up: Soy Boy America
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2025]
For older Americans, the cost of poverty is 9 years of life, study finds
[CBS News, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2025]
BNSF: UP+NS ‘Costly, Unnecessary, Anti-Competitive, Bad for the U.S. Economy’
William C. Vantuono, October 06, 2025 [Railway Age]
Though Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern have yet to file their formal merger application with the Surface Transportation Board, kicking off a process expected to take up to 18 months, the other four Class I railroads are getting a head start exercising their vocal cords in opposition. BNSF has produced one of the strongest public responses we’ve seen thus far.
Following Warren Buffett’s pronouncement that Berkshire Hathaway, parent company of BNSF Railway, is not interested in merging with CSX (a development that contributed to CSX President and CEO Joe Hinrich’s firing), BNSF Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Tom G. Williams fired off a Sept. 29 Customer Notification urging shippers to oppose UP+NS and “tell the STB to say no to unchecked market power and the loss of competitive options that you’ll never get back.” Williams’ letter provides customers a detailed “step-by-step” guide, “Preserve Rail Competition,” on how the merger process works, and how to file comments with the STB and/or raise concerns “confidentially” with the U.S. Department of Justice, among other measures. As well, “if you would prefer not to file the letter yourself, we can file it for you,” BNSF said, proving an email link, MessageUs@BNSF.com….
Health care crisis
No Surprises, But Plenty of Abuses: How Insurers Are Pulling the Strings on the No Surprises Act
[HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 10-10-2025]
Predatory finance
Claire Yubin Oh, 9/29/25 [Sherwood, via The Big Picture, October 06, 2025]
The “Madden” maker is set to join a growing group of listed companies that are deciding to drop out of exchanges.
[MarketWatch, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2025]
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 10-10-2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Dean Obeidallah, Oct 07, 2025
Eric Salzman, Oct 06, 2025 [Racket News]
I almost fell off my chair a couple of weeks ago when I saw a Bloomberg article titled “The Junk Bond King Opens a Shrine to Capitalism Near the White House.” My thoughts instantly turned to an episode of “The Sopranos” in which Tony and the crew discuss building the Newark Museum of Science and Trucking.
The $500 million Milken Center for the Advancement of the American Dream (MCAAD) is funded by such titans as Citadel Enterprise America’s CEO Ken Griffin, Carlyle founder David Rubenstein, music mogul David Geffen, Walmart multi-billionaire Alice Walton, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. MCAAD’s website highlights The David Geffen Hall of Dreams, The Kenneth C. Griffin Holodeck Experience, The Word Cloud and much more!….
Milken pleaded guilty in 1990 to six felony counts of securities fraud and reporting violations (for which Trump pardoned him in 2020) that resulted in nearly two years of prison, a $600 million fine, and a lifetime ban from the securities industry….
Restoring balance to the economy
[The Lever, Oct 11, 2025]
In what could set a major precedent for state-level trust-busting legislation, California has upgraded its antitrust laws for the digital age.
On Monday, California Gov. Newsom (D) signed a landmark bill aimed at curbing the use of price-fixing algorithms and software that artificially inflate prices and create false scarcity. The bill modifies the century-old Cartwright Act, the state’s primary antitrust law, to include pricing algorithms that use competitors’ data to fix prices….
The Hitchhikers Guide to Building A Lot of Subways
[The Transit Guyr, via Naked Capitalism 10-10-2025]
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
Physicists maneuver DNA molecules using electrical fields, offering real-time control
[Phys.org, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2025]
Global renewable power output overtakes coal for the first time, report says
[Reuters, via Clean Power Roundup, Oct 7, 2025]
Renewable energy sources generated more electricity than coal globally for the first time in the first half of 2025, driven by rapid growth in China and India, a report by think tank Ember showed on Tuesday….
NASA’s Voyager 1 Revealed A Stunning Discovery At The Edge Of Our Solar System
[BGR, via The Big Picture, October 09, 2025]
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has traveled farther than any spacecraft in human history. After more than four decades of silent endurance through space, it now sails beyond the orbit of the outer planets of the solar system. Its mission has transcended planetary flybys; it’s now humanity’s first direct way to explore interstellar space. NASA has used radio to talk to Voyager 1 as it stumbled upon something astonishing hiding at the farthest reaches of our solar system: a mysterious “wall of fire.”
Disrupting mainstream economics
The Quantum Essays: The quantum difference between work and speculation
Richard Murphy, October 12 2025 [Funding the Future]
This one is, I think, one of the most important so far. In effect, we provide a theoretical answer to why some work is of value to humankind, whilst other activity does nothing more than generate heat that contributes to entropy, but adds no real value to life. The perverse fact is that in our society, the former is undervalued, and the latter is massively overvalued because what we show is that the financial services sector is a work of no value, which only succeeds in destabilising society.
The Radical Potential of Consumer Financial Protection
Vijay Raghavan [66 B.C. L. Rev. 1345 (2025), via Just Money]
This Article offers a novel retheorization of consumer financial protection that surfaces its radical potential. That retheorization is motivated by two developments. The first is the rise of debtor movements over the last decade demanding the abolition or cancellation of debt, such as the recent national campaigns against student debt and medical debt. The second is an emerging view this Article identifies in sociological and legal scholarship. Recent scholarship understands consumer financial protection as in tension with the radical ambitions of debtor movements and neoliberal in its orientation: it operates to sustain market logics as opposed to contest them.
This Article’s retheorization undermines this second, pessimistic view. It begins by recasting consumer financial protection as a response to market domination facilitated by the legal and institutional design of our financial system. It then traces the various legal and institutional forms this response took over the course of the twentieth century. Retracing this history through this lens reveals that consumer financial protection has functioned both to affirm and contest the logic of our financial system. Consumer financial protection’s role as a counter logic is sharpest when it has an institutional presence in financial market governance and leverages this presence to reallocate governing power and redistribute burdens in financial markets. And its role is weakest when it has little institutional presence in market governance and seeks to merely manage the costs of the financial system at its margins.
This Article’s core argument is that consumer financial protection is justified and best functions as a counterweight to our regressive and antidemocratic institutional arrangements around money and banking. Thus, if we want to develop countervailing power in financial markets, it is sensible to grant consumer agencies broad powers to contest institutional actors that facilitate domination rather than distributing this authority. In our current political moment, this Article’s retheorization serves primarily as a partial defense of what was rather than a suggestion of what can be. But I conclude by considering how the themes surfaced in this Article might serve as the foundation for a reconstruction of what will inevitably be a broken future regulatory framework in consumer finance.
Monetarism is Dead. Bring On The Brand New Renaissance.
Dougald Lamont, Oct 08, 2025
The fatal flaw of our current dominant economic paradigm is a mistake about the fundamental nature of money. It’s not a medium: it’s a message….
Bell sets out the history of the Metallist position (Aristotle was one) before drawing a link to monetarism:
“The early Metallists and modern Metallists (or Monetarists) bear important similarities. Both treat money as irrelevant to ‘real’ analysis. In fact, “‘real’ monetary analysis derives from ‘metallist’ or ‘commodity’ theory” (Ingham, 1996). In its modern form (Monetarist), exchange can be analyzed as if it occurred in a simple barter economy where money is neutral, serving only as a lubricant to the exchange mechanism; all that matters are ‘real’ exchange values derived from highly abstract exchange relations based on rational maximizing behavior. In addition to this a social treatment, the methodology of each is plainly ahistorical.”
When I read that monetarists are metallists I thought “of course, that explains everything.” ….
There was an intellectual coup in economics where Keynes was rejected and replaced with a whole suite of economic theories and policies that were designed to dismantle all of the New Deal. They were not seen as “political” they were sold as science. While people associate the economic shift to the right with the elections and policies of the UK’s Thatcher post 1979, Reagan in the US after 1980, and Mulroney in Canada after 1984, it’s absolutely clear across multiple countries that incomes between labour and owners started to diverge between 1976 and 1978. Monetarist anti-inflation models and policies were already being implemented under “left” parties – Labour in the UK, Carter Democrats in the US, and the Pierre Trudeau Liberals in Canada.
These ideas have also been called neoliberal, supply-side, trickle-down, neoconservative, libertarian, and fiscal conservative.
While I have been reading and writing for years about economists, politician scientists and other experts showing, using empirical data and impartial history that those ideas continually fail to do what they promise….
Why ‘Recession’ Is a Garbage Metric
Christopher Armitage, Oct 08, 2025 [The Existentialist Republic]
Disrupting mainstream politics
[Politico, via The Big Picture, October 06, 2025]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Meta account suspension scam hides FileFix malware
[Fox News, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2025]
The incredible arrogance of OpenAI
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 10-06-2025]
(Mis)education
Inside America’s Academic Gulags (w/ Rashid Khalidi)
Chris Hedges, Oct 08, 2025
It is now impossible, says historian Rashid Khalidi, to teach about Israel, Palestine and the ongoing genocide in elite American education institutions.
Climate and environmental crises
How extreme temperatures strain minds and bodies: a Karachi case study
[PreventionWeb, via Naked Capitalism 10-11-2025]
Democrats’ political malpractice
This is the Democrats’ only way forward — A new study confirms it, once again
Jordan Zakarin, Oct 08, 2025 [Progress Report]
…the Center for Working Class Politics (CWCP) … surveyed thousands of voters in the Rust Belt states that used to be the Democratic firewall — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio — to better understand what they think of the current Democratic Party, which kinds of ideas and language most appeal to them, and how their values shape their beliefs….
CWCP’s report finds that just 11% of independents and 19% of Republicans cited Democrats’ supposed “wokeness” as the main reason why they dislike the party. Instead, it’s a sense that the party has become corrupt and out of touch with everyday people that has animated much of the animus against Democrats in the four Midwestern states….
In this study, CWCP provided a mix of “strong” populist rhetoric, which offered a sharp critique of corporate power and its negative impact on workers, and “weak” populist rhetoric, which involved less blame assigned for social inequities. The former was more analogous to Bernie Sanders’ broad moral outrage at systemic corporate abuses, while the latter used rhetoric taken directly from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, which posited that most businesses played by the rules and that the economy was skewed by the misdeeds of a few bad actors.
All told, strong populist rhetoric was 11 points more persuasive to the survey’s Rust Belt respondents, and that’s without taking into account the actual policy prescriptions that were offered in the study. Drilling down into the cross tabs, strong populist messages were especially persuasive to the kinds of voters who have drifted away from Democrats in recent elections. Respondents who have working class jobs preferred strong populist messages by 22 points, while those with annual incomes beneath $50,000 favored the blunt and confrontational economic rhetoric by 18 points.
[TW: Kamala Harris being so out of touch is the reason she clung to the fantasy that “titans of industry” would be a bulwark against Trump and his “excesses.” ]
David Sirota, October 10, 2025 [The Lever]
Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator from Georgia, recently showed up on Pod Save America with an argument that may have irked the program’s die-hard Democratic audience. President Donald J. Trump, Ossoff said, is not the one-and-only major problem facing American politics. There is something else.
“Vast sums of corporate and billionaire money in our political system—with or without Trump—are why ordinary people are so ill served by elected officials and by Congress,” he said. “If we don’t solve this problem—even once we put Trump back in the box in the midterms and once he’s gone—the country will still be in deep trouble.”
Ossoff’s comment ran counter to Democrats’ self-soothing assumption that they can win elections simply by casting Trump as the singular anomalous problem plaguing the country. It is a familiar pitch that presumes voters will believe that once Democrats regain control of Congress and Trump is out of the White House, we will all live happily ever after….
Why Not Take Over the Hollowed-Out Democratic Party?
Les Leopold, Oct 10, 2025
…I went back and checked on the Socialist Party of America, (1897-1946). In 1911, it elected more than 1,100 local officials in 353 cities and towns. It also elected two members of Congress: Victor Berger, from Milwaukee (1910, 1918, 1922, 1924, 1926), and Meyer London, from New York City (1915, 1917, 1921). Both ran exclusively on the Socialist Party ballot line, not as fusion candidates with either the Democrats or the Republicans.
Socialist Party mayors include Danial Weber Hoan, who was unbeatable in Milwaukee, reelected repeatedly from 1916 to 1940. More than 70 Socialist Party candidates were elected mayor in the U.S. from 1901 to 1948.
The Socialist Party was successful because its platform rang true to working people….
Today there are 132 Congressional districts that Republicans won with a margin of at least 25 percentage points, and 112 districts that were won by Democrats with a margin of at least 25 percentage points. That means that in 244 ultra-safe districts there is only one party now!
A new progressive populist formation that chose to run against Republicans in any of those 132 districts would be a second party, not a third party. There is no way that the new party will spoil the chances of the Democrats and enhance the Republicans. There is no Democratic Party in these districts to spoil! ….
Commentary: Who can save the Democratic Party?
Matthew Yglesias [Yakima Herald Republic, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2025]
[TW: Yglesias adds to the mountain of proof that he and his ideas are part of the problem, not the solution.]
Resistance
Republicans Will Try to Steal 2026. Here’s the Law That Puts Them in Prison.
Christopher Armitage, Oct 07, 2025 [The Existentialist Republic]
One-third of Congress denied the 2020 election. Nearly all of them still hold office. In 2026, they might need to accept results that cost them power, but history says they likely won’t.
One hundred fifty-six election deniers hold congressional seats (States United Action, 2024a). The Republican National Committee has deployed over 100,000 “election integrity” volunteers and attorneys across battleground states (Republican National Committee, 2024). Donald Trump controls the pardon power. Meanwhile, Republicans have gerrymandered the system so thoroughly that Democrats could win the popular vote by five points and still lose the House.
Factually, even if Democrats overcome that rigged system and flip the House anyway, the margins will be razor-thin. Three to five seats. Maybe less. Close enough to contest. Close enough to claim fraud. And this time, unlike 2020, Republicans have the institutional power to act on it….
But four states have enacted a different category of law since 2020. Statutes so specific in defining prohibited conduct that the good-faith defense fails. These laws don’t rely on proving subjective intent. They establish objective violations with mandatory penalties.
Four states have statutes that work. Colorado criminalizes fake electors specifically. Up to twenty years in prison for knowingly signing false electoral certificates, with each certificate a separate offense. Arizona criminalizes certification refusal. One to five years for willful refusal to perform mandatory duties, plus expedited court orders compelling compliance and daily fines until officials act. Colorado, Minnesota, and New York protect election workers with criminal penalties up to five years for threatening or doxxing officials, privacy protections for personal information, and required security resources.
These laws define exact prohibited conduct. No proving “intent,” no good-faith defense. You did this, and then you go to prison….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The Man Behind Trump’s Push for an All-Powerful Presidency
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, October 06, 2025]
Russell T. Vought spent years drawing up plans to expand presidential power and shrink federal bureaucracy. Now he is moving closer to making that vision a reality, threatening to erode checks and balances.
The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture, October 06, 2025]
GOP senators sink measure to halt Trump’s strikes on alleged drug boats
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2025]
He Wrote a Book About Antifa. Death Threats Are Driving Him Out of the US
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 10-10-2025]
The South Rises Again
These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department.
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2025]
[TW: Excerpt from Forrest A. Nabors, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, Columbia, Mo., University of Missouri Press, 2017, pages 46-47:
“KNOWLEDGE,” Thaddeus Stevens said in 1835, “is the only foundation on which republics can stand.”29 This theory and its opposite, that ignorance is the only foundation on which oligarchy can stand, runs through the Republicans’ criticism of the slave states’ abstention from establishing a healthy common school system. They argued that the slave-state rulers deliberately prevented the development of common schools because popular ignorance was their policy goal. The arrangement of educational institutions in the slave states secured this goal and supported oligarchic rule.
…in 1858, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan quoted from the annual message of South Carolina governor Whitemarsh Seabrook: “Education has been provided by the Legislature but for one class of the citizens of the State, which is the wealthy class. For the middle and poorer classes of society it has done nothing, since no organized system has been adopted for that purpose….
In 1860 Representative Charles Van Wyck of New York charged Southerners in Congress: “Your despotism is as galling upon the whites as the blacks. The despotism depended upon the denial of common school education to poor whites, which was the policy of the Southern state governments. Van Wyck quoted a principled defense of this policy by his colleague in the House Representative Laurence M. Keitt of South Carolina:
“It is also incontrovertible that all the inhabitants of a State cannot be educated; the ordinance of God condemns mankind to labor, and certain menial occupations are incompatible with mental cultivation.”
[American Political Science Review, via Naked Capitalism 10-09-2025]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
How the Supreme Court Unleashed Trump’s War on the States
Aziz Huq, Oct 6, 2025 [Project Syndicate]
…Until recently, the Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, was fully committed to protecting the states from federal overreach. That is why it invalidated the Affordable Care Act’s mandatory expansion of Medicaid in 2012. But now, the Court is largely ignoring federalism and making dramatic changes to the separation of powers. The result is a central government that looks very different from the Congress-centered model envisioned by America’s founders.
The Court’s recent interventions have not only shielded the executive branch from the force of legal constraints that might act as a check on state violence, but also permitted its misuse of fiscal powers. The Court’s 2024 decision on presidential immunity, most notably, has dramatically limited the force of criminal prohibitions on presidential power.
As I explain in a forthcoming academic study, while the immunity decision formally applies only to the president, it functionally applies to many other executive branch officials. For example, it bars the use of evidence of presidential communications from any prosecution, and it eliminates subordinates’ longstanding ability to object to orders that may violate a criminal statute.
These risks are not hypothetical. The Trump administration has cited the Court’s immunity decision endlessly in briefs touching on a wide variety of cases. In this Justice Department’s hands, the ruling is not an articulation of constitutional doctrine but a permission slip to “do as we please.”
Second, over the last eight months, the Court has issued those permission slips. It has granted some 21 of the 23 Trump administration requests for emergency relief, setting aside lower court orders in cases involving refusals to spend money (albeit in non-federalism domains) or to fire personnel (which involves not spending money). In doing so, the justices have granted the executive branch broad permission to wield fiscal resources as a club against political and ideological foes….
The Quantum Essays: Where are the checks on entropy in the US system now?
Richard Murphy, October 10 2025 [Funding the Future]
…Congress now appears to be what, in physics, is called a closed system. These eventually reach thermal equilibrium. That is what the U.S. legislature now resembles: it comprises equal parts heat and inertia, cancelling each other out. The noise of politics is concealing the silence of real purpose. Entropy is rising as a result.
The Supreme Court was meant to be a regulator of energy, converting the turbulence of politics into the stable currency of law. It no longer performs that role. Its recent behaviour has made it an amplifier of disorder, and not a moderator of it.
Partisanship has replaced reason. Secrecy has replaced transparency. In its eagerness to entrench ideology, it has abandoned its own feedback loop and the moral legitimacy that connects it to society. A Court that no longer interprets the law for living people becomes a mausoleum of justice and a promoter of injustice. It too is drifting toward equilibrium, as an institution still standing, but now lifeless.
The media was once the nervous system of the democratic organism. It detected imbalances, transmitted warnings, and corrected errors. That function depended on its openness and on journalists being free to speak, to probe, to hold power accountable.
Now, that system is being deliberately closed down. The attacks on Jimmy Kimmel and other talk show hosts are emblematic of this process. What once would have been comedy has become subversion in the eyes of an authoritarian movement….
The Quantum Essays: Democracy as negentropy: why fascism is the politics of death
Richard Murphy, October 08 2025 [Funding the Future]
The Supreme Court’s Dastardly Plan Makes Court Reform Obligatory
Brian Beutler, Oct 07, 2025 [Off Message]
If Democrats can’t avoid the trap Republican justices are setting, we’ll never recover from the Trump fiasco.
For a few weeks in early 2021, when Joe Biden was popular and commanded narrow majorities in the House and Senate, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority played its cards close to the vest.
These justices engage in cynical politics with a high degree of consciousness, and they’re shrewd operators…. They waited until events confirmed their suspicion—that Democrats would not change the Senate’s filibuster rules under any circumstances—then resumed their nakedly partisan jurisprudence….
This is dirty pool, and the justices aren’t even really trying to conceal it. But I don’t think most Democratic critics of the court have thought through how this approach can be used to give Trump a one-time only pass to break laws and steal spoils that will never apply, under their eventual precedents, to future administrations.
Perhaps the Republican justices simply think there will never be another transfer of power. But their approach is consistent with another strategic objective, too: allowing Trump to engage in a spree of autocratic vandalism that broadly corrupts the federal government, before shutting down his claims to king-like power in a way that prevents Democrats from quickly fixing things in 2029….
Civic republicanism
CEO of FPL defends company seeking highest shareholder profit in nation
[Tampa Bay Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-08-2025]
[TW: In the formaive era of the republic, early corporations were managed in fidelity to promoting the public interest. In the Sixteenth Annual Report of the Fitchburg Rail Road Company, date January 1858, we find on page 10
“The managers of railroads need not now have the fear, which was seriously entertained a few years since, of excessive profits — at least they need have no such fear during the life of the present generation, for as large as their profits may be they will need all, in our opinion, to give reasonable returns to their shareholders, and keep their roads in good order.”
[Fear of excessive profits?! Can you imagine any CEO, COO, CFO, director, or fund manager of today discussing seriously the danger of “excessive profits”? Clearly, the capitalism of today is a far different, more voracious beast than the capitalism of 1858. But if hundreds of local citizens had invested their capital with a company, the officers of that company would be violating the simple dictates of republicanism to care for one’s community, if they made excessive profits. Civic republicanism stood in the way of a supposed “fiduciary duty” to maximize profits, and had to be replaced — and was — by economic liberalism. ]
Man Wrongly Imprisoned for Decades Finally Freed—And Gets Immediately Nabbed by ICE
Brad Reed, Oct 12, 2025 [CommonDreams]
[TW: Just two reminders: 1. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice….” 2. Long before Trump came on the scene, conservatives and libertarians argued that the Preamble to the Constitution was merely a rhetorical “flourish” with no substantial impact on USA jurisprudence. ]
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