Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 28, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
‘An Egregious Abuse of Power’: Trump Orders Troops to Portland, Ore; OKs ‘Full Force’
Olivia Rosane, Sep 27, 2025 [CommonDreams]
In his latest attempt to turn the US military on an American city, President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he was sending troops to Portland, Oregon and had authorized them to use “Full Force, if necessary.”
“At the request of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social….
Tear gas used on protesters at Chicago-area ICE site as immigration crackdown escalates
[NBC News, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2025]
Stephen Miller Claims Simply Calling Trump Authoritarian ‘Incites Violence and Terrorism’
Stephen Prager, September 25, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trump Says Critical Coverage of Him Is ‘Really Illegal’
Luke Broadwater, Sept. 19, 2025 [New York Times]
President Trump said Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively have broken the law, a significant broadening of his attacks on journalists and their First Amendment right to critique the government.A day after asserting that broadcasters should potentially lose their licenses over negative news coverage of him, Mr. Trump escalated his condemnations of the press, suggesting such reporters were lawbreakers….
We Are All Domestic Terrorists Now — Here comes the iron fist.
Hamilton Nolan, Sep 26, 2025 [How Things Work]
Trump’s new EO is the formal declaration of the rabid fascist war to crush political opposition. It is a statement of the administration’s intention to designate any institutions organizing and funding political opposition as agents of domestic terrorism, and then to use the toolset of “anti-terrorism” to harass, disrupt, and destroy them. The order first lists off some disparate recent events—the killing of Charlie Kirk and United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the pot shots taken at Trump during his campaign, the (half ass, not really) “assassination attempt” on Brett Kavanaugh—along with quasi-imaginary “Riots in Los Angeles and Portland” to paint a picture of a crisis of political violence….
Emma Long [The Conversation. via SCOTUStoday 09-23-2025]
A 1964 Supreme Court ruling looms large in President Donald Trump’s effort to win a libel and defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, two Times journalists, and Penguin Random House, whom he’s accused of trying to damage his reputation and disrupt his 2024 campaign, according to The Conversation. The court’s decision in New York Times v. Sullivan made it clear that public officials have to clear a high bar to win defamation suits, proving not just that there were factual errors, but also that false information was published “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” The ruling “provided the press in the US with one of the most protected spaces in the world in which to operate.”
Joyce Vance, Sep 25, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
This afternoon, a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia returned an indictment against former FBI Director James Comey. The two-count indictment is about a page and a half long. It charges Comey with….
Only one prosecutor signed the indictment, which is unusual. Trump’s newly appointed U.S. Attorney and former criminal defense lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, signed. Typically, the signature of the U.S. Attorney is accompanied by those of the prosecutor or prosecutors who worked on the investigation and will be handling the guilty plea or trial that comes next….
…We have a system of “notice pleading” in our criminal justice system, which means a defendant is entitled to notice of the charges against them so they can prepare a defense. It’s likely Comey’s lawyers will ask for a bill of particulars, which will force the government to specify the precise statements he is charged with making and the factual basis for the charges….
A sharp picture of the personal nature of Trump’s disregard for the rule of law
Chris Geidner, Sep 21, 2025 [LawDork]
The Trump Stablecoin – Building Power and Profits from the Inside
[publicbankinginstitute.org, September 23rd, 2025]
Donald Trump’s latest foray into financial innovation, the proposed USD1 Stablecoin, raises serious concerns about conflicts of interest and the potential looting of the U.S. Treasury. As advocates point out, if Trump were to consolidate control over what could soon become the largest stablecoin exchange, he would gain a private channel to influence and profit from dollar-denominated digital transactions worldwide. While the venture is not yet the dominant player, the combination of presidential authority and business ambition makes its rapid ascendance almost inevitable. What looks like a new tool for global finance could instead become a funnel for enriching Trump and his allies.
The danger becomes clearer when considering Trump’s control over the Treasury itself. The Department is responsible for deciding which stablecoin issuers are permitted to purchase U.S. Treasuries as the “backing” for their digital coins. By blurring the line between state power and personal enterprise, Trump could ensure that his exchange enjoys privileged access to government debt instruments, securing liquidity and legitimacy while starving competitors. This mechanism effectively transforms public debt—paid for by taxpayers—into a private revenue engine. In other words, Trump would wield Treasury policy not for national stability, but for personal enrichment.
“Extremely Disturbing”: What Does Trump’s “Antifa” Executive Order Actually Do?
Schuyler Mitchell, September 26, 2025 [Mother Jones]
…I spoke with Chip Gibbons, policy director at the nonprofit civil liberties advocacy organization Defending Rights & Dissent, about the Trump administration’s playbook for crushing free speech.
Gibbons has spent a decade submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to the FBI—including asking for the FBI’s antifa files in 2017—in an attempt to shed light on its domestic surveillance activities….
Trump Declares War on Left With “Domestic Terrorist” Designation
[Ken Klippenstein, via Naked Capitalism 09-23-2025]
ICE Detains Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent
Brad Reed, Sep 26, 2025 [CommonDreams]
The Department of Homeland Security claims that Roberts was taken into custody as part of a “targeted enforcement operation.”
Alligator Alcatraz Is an ‘Extrajudicial Black Site,’ Immigrant Advocates Say as Detainees Disappear
Stephen Prager, Sep 26, 2025 [CommonDreams]
According to the Miami Herald, over 1,000 detainees in Florida’s immigrant internment camp have effectively “disappeared,” with family and attorneys unable to track their whereabouts.
It’s Happened: The United States of America Is No Longer a Democracy
Michael Tomasky, September 22, 2025 [The New Republic]
…We learned of all this the same day that Trump decided it was time to just stop pretending and ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute three specific individuals: New York Attorney General Letitia James, Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, and former FBI Director James Comey. He declared all three “guilty as hell” and wrote on social media: “We cant [sic] delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”….
…The Justice Department is being destroyed—slowly at first, and now all at once. Most of the lawyers in the Civil Rights Division have left or are leaving. Ditto the Federal Programs Branch, the office that’s supposed to defend an administration’s claims in court. Reuters confirmed in July that 69 of 110 lawyers in that branch were skedaddling. The exodus figure for civil rights back in May was a similar 70 percent….
Combine this with what happened last week to Jimmy Kimmel, and I think we can now just say it. The United States of America is no longer a democracy. It’s not a totally authoritarian state. I’m obviously writing these words of dissent, as are hundreds, thousands of others like me. We’re still having elections, so far. Most courts are still functioning normally. At many levels where the White House can’t just do turnkey autocracy, there is ferocious resistance. And there is a defiant public making their voices heard, alongside a not-insignificant faction of Trump voters who are growing disillusioned with what they’re seeing. And as the polls tell us, the mad king is failing to win people over, and public opinion, at least much of the time, still matters too. These facts can reassure us….
Strategic Political Economy
The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it)
Cory Doctorow, 25 Sep 2025 [Pluralistic]
…In McKibben’s telling, everything about solar is going better than anticipated. Solar efficiency is increasing exponentially with prices falling through the floor. The material bill for solar is also in freefall. Everything surrounding solar is going amazing, too. Battery capacity is improving even faster than solar generation, and the best new batteries use the incredibly abundant element sodium (not lithium) to store those useful electrons. Long-haul transmission lines are crisscrossing the world.
Hyper-reliable electric cars keep getting cheaper, and the batteries are lasting much longer than we used to think they would. Some of these vehicles are nigh-miraculous, from the ebikes that get 5 miles to the penny, to the world’s heaviest EV, a dump truck that shuttles to a quarry atop a hill where it is loaded with rocks, then regeneratively brakes its way back down the hill, accumulating enough charge to get back up to the top again (a perpetual motion machine!). Heat pumps and induction tops are actually more efficient than burning natural gas – in other words, it’s cheaper to convert sunshine into electrons and electrons into heat than it is to just burn gas…
Then there’s the capacity. China’s solar capacity growth is insane – the solar equivalent of a new coal plant is coming online every eight hours. But it’s even more intense in poor regions of the global south, like in Pakistan, where a legion of installers have learned their craft from Tiktok videos set to songs from popular musical films, leading to one of the most rapid electrification rollouts in human history. The closer a country is to the equator, the more sense solar makes, of course, so solar is sweeping some of the poorest countries in the world, liberating them from the need to attract foreign currency they can use to buy dollar-denominated barrels of oil….
Fossil fuels are valuable because they are a chokepoint on the entire productive economy. Anyone who’s seen the Mad Max documentaries knows how this goes: even the most mid, paunchy, straw-haired boomer with volcanic bacne and shitty dress-sense can seize power over the whole population if he controls the supply of one of life’s essentials.
The fossil fuel industry is a magnet for people who love a chokepoint. These people are born tollboth operators and they never stop hunting for turnpikes. They are landlords for ancient corpses, charging the whole world rent to keep the lights on. They are chokepoint-trophic.
Global power shift
China Dominates Industrial Robot Installation
Robert Brooks, Sept. 26, 2025 [American Machinist, via Quick Manufacturing News]
More than 54% of all robots deployed last year were in China, with nearly 300,000 units representing the highest annual total on record for industrial robot installations….
The United States recorded 34,200 robot installations during 2024….
How Many Countries Fit in Africa? Visualizing the Continent’s True Size.
[Visual Capitalist, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
UK, Australia and Canada recognize a Palestinian state, prompting angry response from Israel
[Associated Press, via Naked Capitalism 09-22-2025]
Trump’s “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation”
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 09-25-2025]
Welcome to “The GREAT Trust” — Gaza’s future as imagined by U.S. planners, Israeli strategists, and Gulf investors. A corporate utopia, built on ruins and wrapped in Abraham Accords buzzwords. But under the branding lies a brutal truth: Gaza is to be recolonized, monetized, and erased. This is not a reconstruction plan. This is a capitalist cleansing operation. A leaked document titled “The GREAT Trust”—short for Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation—lays out the blueprint. It envisions Gaza as a “thriving trade hub” at the heart of the new Abrahamic regional order. But that vision only begins after Gaza is destroyed, Hamas is dismantled, and U.S. control is imposed through a “multilateral trusteeship.” This is how they describe it….
Why the Israel-Palestine Conflict Remains Unresolved
David B. Green, Sep 26, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Two former negotiators on opposite sides write that neither side has ever acknowledged the other side’s existential needs.
Russia / Ukraine
Oligarchy
The Forbes 400 List 2025 – The Richest People in America Ranked
[Forbes, via The Big Picture 09-26-2025]
Larry Ellison Is a ‘Shadow President’ in Donald Trump’s America
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 09-26-2025]
Drone Strike in Haiti Kills 8 Children at a Birthday Party
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2025]
“In March, the authorities in Haiti hired foreign military contractors to operate armed drones to target gangs that terrorize the capital, Port-au-Prince. The contractors work for a company owned by Erik Prince…”
Sinclair, Nexstar won’t broadcast Kimmel’s show despite it returning to ABC
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2025]
The Week America Woke Up to Oligarchy
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2025]
[TW: This is not Stoller at his best, but it shows that he is grappling with the issues raised by the replacement of civic republicanism with liberalism. Definitely worth slogging through. ]
Since the election, I’ve been doing reading on the nature of liberty, and why the right feels that Trump is liberating them from oppression while Democrats are decrying sweeping authoritarianism. And I think it has to do with how most elites in America have adopted an odd and un-American definition of what liberty means, and that has spread confusion over who can legitimately hold power and what they can do with it.
[TW: I think Stoller — and anyone interested in republicanism versus liberalism — should read this chapter (thankfully online!), “Republicanism”, from Gordon Wood’s important book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., University of North Carolina Press, 1969).]
Masters and Minions and Muppets, Oh My! Who we are. Why we do what we do.
Thomas Neuburger, Sep 25, 2025 [God’s Spies]
…Can the Management Class Switch Sides?
To bring down a system that maintains all this oppression, the minions must side with the muppets. Repeating Dundee from above:“The heart of the struggle is to detach the minions from the masters and get them into service to the muppets. For that, we’ll need muppet solidarity.”
Is muppet solidarity likely? Is it even possible? Dundee thinks the chances are low. So does Amber A’Lee Frost, whom he quotes:
“The [DSA event] culminated during the Q and A, wherein a woman earnestly asked, What do I do if some alt-right guy wants to be in the union? Visibly vexed, I replied that if an alt-right guy wants to be in your union, you won. This … is the very premise of a union: it is not a social club for people of shared progressive values; it’s a shared struggle … She did not appear convinced.”
These divisions are made and promoted, they serve the masters. But they’re also genetic; the species we are, and those from which we came, spent millions of years in tribes. Each tribe has a culture, and conflicts naturally arise….
Cory Doctorow, 24 Sep 2025 [Pluralistic]
{TW: very entertaining]
Felonomics
Trump Admin Responds to Milei’s Failed Libertarian Policies With a US Taxpayer Bailout for Argentina
Stephen Prager, September 23, 2025 [CommonDreams]
“Milei was already gifted a $42 billion lifeline from the US-controlled IMF and the World Bank,” said one economics writer, “but even that was not enough to stabilize Milei’s crazy Austrian School experiment.”
Argentina’s financial crash is the first big defeat for Trump’s global Maga movement
[Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 09-27-2025]
Robert Kuttner, September 24, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…Why bail out Argentina? Because the current president, Javier Milei, is a far-right libertarian sycophant of Donald Trump. And the two are twins when it comes to perverse economic policies.
Milei, who was elected in October 2023, has used extreme austerity, ravaging social spending, to balance the budget, restore international confidence in the peso, reduce inflation, and attract foreign capital. However, the strategy has backfired in every respect.
At first, inflation fell. The International Monetary Fund (which loves austerity) rewarded Milei with a loan package of $20 billion to further reassure investors. Argentina, which already had $44 billion in previous IMF credits, more than one-third of the IMF’s total resources, had stopped paying interest on that debt.
This year, everything about Milei’s program unraveled. Little foreign investment materialized. Inflation crept back up. The overly strong peso depressed exports. Argentina has had to dip into scarce dollar reserves to defend the peso’s value against the dollar and is almost out of hard currency. The austerity crushed both consumer demand and Milei’s approval ratings. His political credibility, at home and globally, sank with the peso. A poor showing for Milei’s party in local elections in Buenos Aires Province, ahead of midterm elections next month where the party is on track to lose further ground, collapsed markets….
Trump Decides to Own the Shutdown
David Dayen, September 23, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Agreeing to and then canceling a meeting on government funding makes clear who’s immiserating the public with a costly shutdown.
Trump’s GOP Blamed as Rural Health Clinics Begin to Fall Under Crushing Weight of Big, Ugly Bill
Brad Reed, Sep 23, 2025 [Common Dreams]
Trump administration halts government hunger report
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 09-22-2025]
Here’s why CEOs think Trump’s economic policies aren’t working
[Los Angeles Times, via The Big Picture 09-26-2025]
A poll of 100 CEOs reveals widespread private criticism of Trump’s tariff policies, with 76% saying consumers pay the costs.
Behind closed doors, a majority of CEOs admit they won’t boost U.S. investment as tariffs hurt their businesses.
[Fortune), via The Big Picture, September 21, 2025]
Uncertainty is proving to be a major obstacle to President Donald Trump’s plans to revive the industrial sector as CEOs balk at making U.S. investments, according to a recent survey.
What Declining Cardboard Box Sales Tell Us About the US Economy
[(Businessweek, via The Big Picture 09-26-2025]
Box demand touches nearly every industry, from flat-screen TVs to packaged food, all of which see sales fluctuate based on how flush shoppers feel.
‘Tidal wave of problems’: With harvest here, Trump’s trade war pushes some US farmers to the brink
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2025]
‘The whole thing is screwed up’: Farmers in deep-red Pennsylvania struggle to find workers
[Politico), via The Big Picture, September 21, 2025]
They’re pushing lawmakers to move faster on a farm labor solution, even as the president cracks down on immigration.
Trump Hints at the Murdochs Joining the TikTok Deal
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 09-22-2025]
Trump Tried to Kill the Infrastructure Law. Now He’s Taking Credit for Its Projects
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, September 21, 2025]
Signs bearing President Trump’s name have gone up at major construction projects financed by the 2021 law, which he strenuously opposed ahead of its passage.
Trump Is Shutting Down the War On Cancer
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, September 21, 2025]
America’s cancer research system, which has helped save millions of lives, is under threat in one of its most productive moments.
Low-income Americans slash spending, a worrying sign for the economy
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture, September 22, 2025]
The Two-Speed Economy Is Back as Low-Income Americans Give Up Gains
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, September 22, 2025]
High-earners and older Americans are faring better than ever, while fortunes are sliding again for low-wage and young workers.
[Fast Company, via Naked Capitalism 09-26-2025]
The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers
[WIRED, via Naked Capitalism 09-27-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Fed Study: Big Banks Riskier Now Than Before 2008 Crisis
[NAI 500, via Naked Capitalism 09-27-2025]
David Dayen, September 24, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Decades of consolidation have made large financial institutions the primary partners for small businesses. Two case studies show how this can go awry.
A private equity firm’s secret strategy to crush German unions on behalf of sovereign wealth funds
[All-Source Intelligence, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2025]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 09-27-2025]
An affordability nightmare: It would take a -38% drop in home prices OR a +60% JUMP in household income JUST for affordability to go back to 2019 levels. You must now make ~$113,000/year to afford the MEDIAN home in the US.
Health care crisis
Legal Eagle’s Specialty is Writing Ironclad PBM Contracts that Preclude Egregious Pricing
[Health Care Un-Covered, via The Big Picture, September 22, 2025]
A veteran PBM litigator explains how she uses airtight contracts to help employers fight PBM shell games, inflated rebates and hidden markups.
Insurance Companies Send Chilling Letters Just Before Surgery. But Why?
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 09-23-2025]
[Yves Smith adds: “I am hardly an expert on medical billing, but it is the hospital that is worried about getting paid and gets the prior authorization. The fact that the insurer is trying to intimidate patients is stunning, but the patient can reconfirm with the hospital (make it the surgeon’s problem, he has clout to penetrate the bureaucracy). The article essentially confirms that. I went through this with my hip replacement because I asked my surgeon to upgrade me very shortly before my procedure to a bilateral replacement and he agreed. My MD said even if he did not have the authorization in hand, he was damned sure he would get it, my hips were in the bottom 1%. The Communist State of New York has external appeal, so that may explain his confidence.”]
The Social Security and Medicare Funding Problems Are Real
[Washington Monthly, via Naked Capitalism 09-23-2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
How country-by-country reporting exposed tax havens (YouTube video)
Richard Murphy, September 22 2025 [Funding the Future]
Something called country-by-country reporting, which I created, changed the tax world forever. It forced multinationals to reveal how much profit they were shifting into tax havens. In this video, I tell the story of how I created this idea, how it became law in more than 70 countries, and how it is still reshaping global tax justice today.
Congress Presses for Answers on Financial Fraud Mitigation
[ACA International, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2025]
Social Media Tax Scam Epidemic
[Newswise, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2025]
Reduced fine for NC farmworker’s death raises accountability questions
Eric Tegethoff, September 23, 2025 [Public News Service, via Cardinal & Pine]
José Arturo González Mendoza, 30, a seasonal farmworker, died on the job at the Barnes Farming and Farm Pak in 2023 during extreme heat. The North Carolina Department of Labor found conditions on the farm were harmful to workers, such as the lack of proper breaks from the heat. The Barnes Farming Corporation was initially fined more than $187,000 in 2024. However, the fine was reduced in a settlement this year to $3,750….
Barnes Farming, which claims to be the world’s largest sweet potato producer, denied wrongdoing in the case and has agreed with the state to update its emergency plans. The farm is owned by the family of [Republican] Sen. Lisa Stone Barnes, R-Spring Hope. National Farm Safety and Health Week shines light on the hazards of farm work, including excessive heat….
Restoring balance to the economy
[publicbankinginstitute.org, September 23rd, 2025]
Several principal elements of the U.S. economy continue to deteriorate such as the catastrophe unfolding in America’s farm sector. The convergence of low commodity prices, mass deportation of farm labor, and the strangulation of U.S. farm exports, especially soybeans, has combined to produce a nightmare in U.S. agriculture. Adding to that critical background reality is another: public infrastructure.
America’s infrastructure barely rates a ‘C’, with 9 categories of service rated ‘D’. World travelers note America’s 20th-century utilities compared to other ‘advanced’ countries and are surprised. What’s in the way of improvement? Money and politics. America could certainly afford to mirror the amazing Chinese infrastructure miracle but we don’t have the public banks that China has created to employ, and we have influential money market profiteers to serve. This stalemate condition is one reason legislative enthusiasm is building for a proven financing solution that mirrors FDR’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation in the form of a public bank: the National Infrastructure Bank.
This initiative, which would generate over $5 trillion dollars in financing without raising the national debt is being reintroduced into the 2025 Congressional docket. The NIB’s bill last session had almost 50 sponsors, and it will launch this next edition with about 35, and importantly it’s gaining support from local and national organizations alike.
Almost 4000 members of the National Association of County Executives (NACO) voted unanimously earlier this year to support the bill, and of even more national significance, the Democratic National Committee platform recently approved the resolution for its platform which would support creation of this groundbreaking legislation. Importantly, local support from elected officials and citizen groups across the country has been growing substantially.
Find out more about the National Infrastructure Bank on Wednesday evening (9/24) evening by attending their free 90-minute webinar or visit www.NIBCoalition.com.
Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine (permalink)
Cory Doctorow, 25 Sep 2025 [Pluralistic]
“Negotiating the Algorithm” is an incredibly exciting, visionary report on the ways that organized labor can and should respond to “algorithmic management” – all the ways in which bosses have turned your mobile phone into your implacable line-manager….
Creating new economic potential – science and technology
| U.S. energy storage installations reach new quarterly record in Q2 with 5.6 GW
[American Clean Power Association, September 26, 2025] The U.S. energy storage market set a record for quarterly growth in Q2 2025, with 5.6 gigawatts (GW) of installations, according to the latest U.S. Energy Storage Monitor report released today by the American Clean Power Association (ACP) and Wood Mackenzie.
Trump’s energy pivot accelerates US solar and wind power mergers, asset sales [Reuters, via American Clean Power Association, September 26, 2025]
|
Disrupting mainstream economics
Steve Keen on rethinking money (YouTube video)
Richard Murphy, September 24 2025 [Funding the Future]
Loanable funds? The money multiplier? Steve Keen and Richard Murphy dismantle the myths. Double-entry accounting shows what really happens when banks create money and governments run deficits. If economics taught reality instead of dogma, austerity would be unthinkable.
My presentation on money creation
Steve Keen, Sep 26, 2025 [Building a New Economics]
I gave the presentation below to Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project conference last Sunday (September 21st). It is easily the most succinct talk I’ve given on how private and public finances actually work, and why governments not only can but must run deficits, to create fiat money and to fund the creation of the long-term physical assets that the private sector will not provide.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Parents outraged as Meta uses photos of schoolgirls in ads targeting man
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2025]
Why AI Safety Officials Keep Quitting Their Jobs
[Technobezz, via Naked Capitalism 09-21-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
Inside Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign
Drop Site
“Mamdani passes on condemning the Holocaust,” read the alarming subject line of an influential email morning newsletter from Politico’s New York Playbook on Friday, May 16. Thus began a whirlwind ride for Zohran, which did not stop until his victory party forty nights later. The journey saw Mamdani’s stance on Israel become central to the race for mayor of New York City.
Politico’s buzzy Holocaust headline was not paired with a coherent story, but the New York Post and its social media devotees eagerly helped amplify it. Each year, the New York legislature approves scores of resolutions on subjects ranging from important historical events to current controversies including the use of A.I. The statements are passed via voice vote. Zohran, in fact, affirmed his support for this year’s Holocaust resolution, as he had done previously. But unlike in past years, Mamdani was not a co-sponsor of the 2025 resolution.
As Zohran explained in a video statement recorded later on May 16, he decided at the outset of this year not to co-sponsor any resolutions because he and his fellow legislators are inundated with them. Although the outlet’s coverage of Mamdani had not been favorable up to this point, it was now adopting the Murdoch organ’s smear tactics….
Climate and environmental crises
[Green European Journal, via Naked Capitalism 09-25-2025]
Democrats’ political malpractice
It’s the Economic System, Stupid
[America’s Undoing, via Naked Capitalism 09-24-2025]
…Adam Jettleson and his ilk represent exactly the kind of Democratic thinking that makes people like me—living here in East Tennessee—either angry to be Democrats or pushes them straight into Republican arms. These neoliberal goofballs—Adam Jettleson, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith—are peddling 1992 third-way, New Democrat Coalition bullshit in 2025. They think our path forward is social issues. The key, they reckon, is running pro-life candidates, anti-trans candidates, and maybe some folks who want to moonlight as ICE agents on weekends….
…there’s a complete misunderstanding among these consultants and the democratic brain trust as to why Donald Trump won. Twice. He didn’t win because of messaging or because Democrats were too woke. He won because people believed he was ready to overturn this broken-ass system. They thought he would stand up, break things, ignore the rules and norms, and restructure this economy in a way that would pay off for them. They didn’t care that he was reckless. They wanted reckless. They wanted someone who looked ready to kick the table over, because nothing else moved.
Trump gave people villains—but he picked the wrong ones. He painted the villains as immigrants and poor people. He painted them as inner-city Black people. He painted them as other nations that robbed us blind with trade deals. But the call was coming from inside the house. It was our own elite. The ultra-rich. The centi-millionaires and billionaires and centi-billionaires. The multinational multi-trillion-dollar corporations and all their cronies. That’s who did it.
People didn’t vote for Trump because they love authoritarianism. They voted for him because they’re desperate for someone—anyone—willing to break the system that’s crushing them….
Democrats Look for a New Villain: The Groups or the Billionaires
Monica Potts, September 22, 2025New Republic
The latest divide among the liberals bucking to define the party’s next big campaign: Should they take on the oligarchs, or take their money?3
New Census Bureau data: Poverty and child poverty increased under Biden
Stephen Semler [Naked Capitalism 09-24-2025]
Resistance
The Luddite Renaissance is in full swing
Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 09-22-2025]
…A loose constellation of grassroots collectives, orgs, and clubs, ranging from New York’s Luddite Club to Silicon Valley’s APPstinence, has gotten together and dubbed this fall the “Luddite Renaissance.” Students, activists, tech whistleblowers, and self-proclaimed Luddites have been undertaking a series of actions, readings, and protests that will culminate next weekend, on September 27, at what they’re calling the S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E. (Scathing Hatred of Information Technology and the Passionate Hemorrhaging of Our Neo-liberal Experience) rally at the High Line in New York City. I would love to be there, but alas it’s on the wrong coast. (If you can make it to Manhattan that day, I’m very jealous; drop a line and let me know how it went.)
But it’s not just the Luddite Club and the S.H.I.T.P.H.O.N.E.rs, either. It seems that since last year, when I wrote about the New Luddites rising up to resist and refuse AI, from anti-gen AI creatives to Waymo combatants to gig workers fighting Uber, this loosest of movements has only broadened. Anger at AI, smartphones, and social media—and more specifically, at the exploitative practices of the companies operating them—has galvanized people all over the world, from the youth above, to artists and advocates and academics….
Jim Stewartson, Sep 26, 2025 [MindWar]
The psychological and societal terror the Trump regime is inflicting is designed to create fear, despair, and weariness. They want everyone to make the decision that it’s just better to stay out of the line of fire. And they have a lot of help—from our own institutions.
The decisions of Jeff Bezos (Washington Post) and Patrick Soon-Shiong (Los Angeles Times) to pull their editorial boards’ endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election was the start of a long series of capitulations to the Trump regime that has only accelerated. When symbols of American liberal democracy like mainstream media outlets become corrupted, it is demoralizing for everyone else. It feels like a sign of an unstoppable force.
That force was and is an illusion, but it’s an illusion that becomes self-fulfilling—not because the threat is as real as imagined, but because imagining it as a real threat gives it the same power.
The illusion is created by the deliberate application of hybrid warfare—a combination of psychological, legal, governmental, and kinetic tactics—that serves to create the 360-degree sense of a high-speed, high-intensity threat environment that prevents people from making well-considered decisions.
What the Trump regime and his sycophants like Patel and Flynn have perfected is the stimulation of a physiological reaction to stress called hypervigilance. This short circuits normal decision-making, diverting control from your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain that handles deliberation—to your fear center, the amygdala, which is far simpler. It gives you three choices: fight, freeze, flee….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Max Blumenthal: Charlie Kirk’s Story FALLS APART
[Dialogue Works, via Naked Capitalism 09-22-2025]
[balleralert.com, via MSN 09-21-2025]
Texas governor signs bill cracking down on mail-order abortion pills
Steve Gorman [Reuters, via SCOTUSblog, Sep 22, 2025,
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, it sparked changes to state-level abortion restrictions nationwide, and laws continue to evolve to this day, according to Reuters. Last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill into law that empowers “private citizens to sue individuals and companies for shipping” abortion medications into Texas. “Women who take the abortion pills are expressly exempt from liability under the measure. There are also exceptions for the use of mifepristone and misoprostol in medically necessary procedures related to miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.”
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
White House bullish after a long string of Supreme Court victories
Lawrence Hurley and Katherine Doyle [NBC News. via SCOTUStoday 09-23-2025]
Although it may feel like the Trump administration is filing emergency applications with the Supreme Court on a daily basis, the administration has tried to be selective and has asked the justices to weigh in on only a small share of the more than 300 active lawsuits against it, according to NBC News. “The White House has won 18 times at the Supreme Court since Trump took office and is on a 15-case winning run.” According to an individual close to the White House, “[t]hey’re ecstatic” about the wins, though “officials do not want to overplay their hand at the court.”
Duncan Hosie, September 19, 2025 [New York Review of Books]
By effectively sanctioning ICE’s raids in Los Angeles, the Supreme Court is showing its readiness to discard centuries of equitable tradition in law….
…Five Californians ensnared in the chaotic raids sued. (Pedro Vasquez Perdomo, a day laborer, was the first listed on the complaint and so lent his name to the ensuing case.) On July 11 a district court ruled in their favor, temporarily blocking the government’s indiscriminate arrests in Southern California against people like the plaintiffs. It issued a restraining order barring immigration stops and detentions based solely on four factors: apparent race or ethnicity, whether a person spoke Spanish or accented English, the type of location where they were found, and the kind of job they appeared to work. As the court observed, detaining people on these grounds did not reflect the individualized inquiry the Fourth Amendment requires.
The court, in other words, applied settled constitutional law prohibiting racial profiling and crafted an immediate, preventive remedy. On August 1 a unanimous three-judge appellate panel upheld its order in a fifty-page opinion carefully canvassing the evidence—at which point the Trump administration petitioned the Supreme Court to grant emergency review, stay the lower court’s order, and stymie the usual course of litigation. The conservative justices did just that.
The order in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo came via the “shadow docket,” the opaque channel sidestepping the Court’s normal deliberative and explanatory processes. Without acknowledgement or justification, but with breakneck speed, the Court swept aside decades of Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment safeguards against unreasonable seizures and denials of equal protection.
The vacuity and cruelty of Vasquez Perdomo are self-evident. “We should not,” as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job.” Yet the order also revealed something deeper: the Court’s eagerness to discard centuries of the equitable tradition in Anglo-American law. Equity, a body of principles distinct from the common law, gives judges discretion to prevent ongoing injustice by fashioning remedies—most commonly injunctions—in cases where traditional common-law remedies, like damages, would be insufficient to rectify the harm. Today’s Court professes fidelity to “history and tradition” yet has in practice let these remedies crumble; it fetishizes constitutional text yet erases the clear command of Article III, Section 2, which grants federal courts power over “Cases, in Law and Equity.” In cases like Vasquez Perdomo, the Court is doing nothing less than remaking the legal system itself—reshaping the law of remedies to concentrate power at the top….
[TW: Emphasis added: some readers may recall that I have in the past pointed to Justice James Wilson’s 1789 law lectures and to Justice Joseph Story’s 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, to note that USA jurisprudence was originally founded on a rejection of key elements of British common law. It must be noted that Justice Wilson was one of only six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and wrote these lectures to explain the history and philosophy of the United States Constitution. Wilson’s lectures were delivered over the course of two years at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the first audience included President Washington and members of his cabinet, and several Senators and members of Congress.
[What does it mean that today, “conservative” reactionaries on the Supreme Court are discarding the American principles of equity? Does it mean a return to the legal principles of British common law — legal principles developed in, by, and for an oligarchy? My argument is, of course, that is exactly what it means. And, moreover, is to be entirely expected, since the USA replaced the governing philosophy of its founding — civic republicanism — with liberalism, crippling the polity’s ability to defend itself against all the malefactions and corruption that occurs naturally with the rise of concentrations of great wealth.
[Liberalism allows, even encourages “capital accumulation.” But civic republicanism warns of the dangers that arise from wealth inequality and concentrated economic power. But how can economic development be funded if capital accumulation is crippled in order to prevent concentration of economic power. The answer is given by the actual history of USA development — government support and promotion of leading edge technologies and basic scientific research. Alexander Hamilton explicitly argued that government would have to encourage the adoption of “new ways of doing things.” One little part of the story, How the Pentagon built Silicon Valley. Another part of the story — almost entirely written out of the economics textbooks by neoclassical and Austrian libertarian economists (which should be thought of as a form of cultural warfare), was the role of the federal armories in developing and diffusing the technology of metal cutting and metal forming machine tools, which created the foundation for today industrial mass production.
[Repairing the massive damage being inflicted by the “conservative” reactionaries on the Supreme Court will only occur by reviving the ideas of civic republicanism in order to discard the entire corpus of this Court’s work as anti-republican.]
Clarence Thomas Says the Supreme Court Is Coming for More Precedents
Edith Olmsted, September 26, 2025 [The New Republic]
Get Ready for Another Rightward Lurch in the New Supreme Court Term
Matt Ford, September 26, 2025 [The New Republic]
Citizens Unlimited: The Inside Plan To Deliver Citizens United 2.0
Jared Maher & Katya Schwenk, Sep 24, 2025 [The Lever]
The Trump Justice Department is reversing the federal government’s Supreme Court defense of longstanding campaign finance laws and is now urging justices to strike down some of the last remaining limits on election spending….
Taken together, the moves mean the little-noticed case is being surrounded by conservatives who could deliver the most sweeping campaign finance deregulation since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision opened the door to massive corporate spending and untraceable dark money flowing into the U.S. political system.
Also lining up behind the case are a constellation of powerful conservative groups and U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who are pressing the justices to build on Citizens United and use this narrow and technical legal matter as an opportunity to eliminate what is left of America’s campaign finance restrictions….
The Roberts Court Is Winning Its War on American Democracy
Matt Ford, September 22, 2025 [The New Republic]
Chief Justice John Roberts has now overseen 20 years of increasingly illiberal rulings by the Supreme Court.
How the Supreme Court Could End This Bull Market
[Barron’s, via The Big Picture, September 25, 2025]
The biggest risk for Wall Street today isn’t a potential recession or a tech earnings bust. It is the Supreme Court, which has been asked to issue rulings with the reach to reshape the U.S. economy, from interest rates and budgets to regulations and tariffs. That so many crucial economic decisions land in court indicates the country’s rising political dysfunction.
Federal government accuses Kansas town of ‘aggressive and unlawful’ interference with CoreCivic
[Kansas Reflector, via Naked Capitalism 09-25-2025]
Whither the Birthright Citizenship Cases?
Steve Vladek [via Naked Capitalism 09-23-2025]
Civic republicanism
Economics questions: the Milton Friedman question
Richard Murphy, September 27 2025 [Funding the Future]
Milton Friedman was the great evangelist of free markets in the twentieth century. His book Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and his advocacy of monetarism turned him into the intellectual godfather of neoliberalism.
He taught that the purpose of business is to maximise shareholder value, that markets should be left to allocate resources, and that governments should confine themselves to protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, and controlling the money supply….
And yet, half a century on, the results of Friedman’s intellectual crusade are visible all around us:
- Inequality has soared.
- Wages have stagnated.
- Financial crises have multiplied.
- Public services have been hollowed out.
- Politics has been captured by wealth.
- The promise of liberty has become a reality of insecurity.
This leads us to the Friedman Question: if everything is reduced to markets and money, how can society survive when its values, obligations and collective purposes are all stripped away?
….
3. The destruction of social obligation
For Friedman, the social responsibility of business was “to increase its profits.” This phrase, now repeated endlessly in boardrooms and business schools, has had devastating effects.
- It has justified the extraction of short-term profit at the expense of workers, communities, and the environment.
- It has redefined companies as machines for shareholder enrichment, not social institutions with widespread responsibilities.
- It has been used to legitimise tax avoidance, attacks on trade union rights, and the erosion of job security.
By reducing everything to money, Friedman’s doctrine stripped business of moral obligation. What mattered was not whether a company treated its workers well, served its community, or protected the environment; all that mattered was whether it delivered high returns to its shareholders….
Friedman told us that liberty would flourish when markets reigned. The truth is the reverse. Liberty, fairness, and democracy decline when society is reduced to a balance sheet.
The lesson is clear: a civilisation cannot be built on markets alone. It must rest on values beyond money, such as care, justice, solidarity, and the recognition that we are citizens before we are consumers.
Tucker Carlson’s Flawed Feudal Fantasies
Chelsea Follett, Sep 22, 2025 [LA Progressive]
“Feudalism is so much better than what we have now. Because at least in feudalism, the leader is vested in the prosperity of the people he rules,” declared Tucker Carlson recently on The Tucker Carlson Show. His guest, writer Auron MacIntyre, agreed enthusiastically. Carlson added, “If all your serfs die, you starve.” McIntyre replied, “Yeah. There’s a true incentive to care for those people.”
The conversation sparked ridicule online, but it also reflected a broader, bipartisan trend. As Amanda Mull observed in The Atlantic, social media has grown “strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages.” Samuel Matlack of The New Atlantis noted the puzzling frequency of the argument that the preindustrial past may have been superior to modernity….
The average European life expectancy in the 11th century hovered around 25 years, driven down by staggering child mortality. Historian Richard Hoffmann notes that of 1,000 children who survived infancy, as many as 250 died by age seven. Only between 40 and 70 percent ever reached adolescence. In contrast, life expectancy in Europe today exceeds 80 years….
Modern economic systems, for all their flaws, have delivered longer lives, safer working conditions, and unprecedented prosperity. The record of feudalism offers no reason to wish for its return.
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