Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 23, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Managing Unexpected ICE Visits: Best Practices for Employers
March 19, 2025 [IndustryWeek]
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges
[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]
Iran-Contra Paved the Way for Trump to Defy Democratic Norms
Sam Lebovic, March 7, 2025 [Bloomberg]
... In The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy (The University of North Carolina Press, March 4), Alan McPherson argues convincingly that Iran-Contra should be plotted not as a minor sideshow in the Cold War’s final act, nor as a case study in flawed national-security policymaking, but as a key moment in the collapse of democratic norms.
McPherson was inspired to return to the improvised, personalized diplomacy of the affair while watching the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019. But his argument has become even more compelling in the first weeks of Trump 2.0. In McPherson’s telling, Iran-Contra was an assault on democratic governance by an extremist executive branch. The results — corruption, deception, willful illegality, lack of accountability — are starting to look familiar….Defying Congress and the law required operating in secrecy, which also meant sidelining the federal bureaucracy. Policy was conducted instead by a small cluster of officials close to the White House, who delegated key tasks to a coterie of allies who weren’t elected, some of whom weren’t even really part of the government. McPherson is particularly good at highlighting the corruption that flourished in such a freewheeling environment. Weapons sales to Iran were managed by a small firm known, appropriately, as “The Enterprise” — operating for profit, its owners marked up the price of the missiles and decided to pay themselves millions of dollars in commission….This was all part of a radical revision of the role of the presidency. Lawyers in the Reagan administration embraced what is known as the Unitary Executive Theory — a reading of the Constitution in which the president has sole and complete authority over the executive branch. That meant sidelining Congress and ending the independence of the bureaucracy. Edwin Meese, Reagan’s second attorney general — who would resign in 1988 amid corruption allegations — believed “the entire system of independent agencies may be unconstitutional.” Iran-Contra was a perfect illustration of the theory in practice: Congress could be ignored, and policy would run through the White House…....In a 1992 article in The Nation, playwright Steve Tesich saw Iran-Contra as a prime instance of what he dubbed a newly emerging “post-truth” society: “President Reagan perceived correctly that the public really didn’t want to know the truth. So he lied to us, but he didn’t have to work hard at it.” The title of the piece was “A Government of Lies.”….But McPherson is right to suggest that Iran-Contra is prologue to our present. The scandals presented an opportunity to send a clear signal that democracy had no tolerance for this kind of politics. The opposite happened. In 1992 Ted Draper, author of one of the first comprehensive histories of the scandals, concluded that “if ever the constitutional democracy of the United States is overthrown, we now have a better idea of how this is likely to be done.” Indeed, Iran-Contra taught politicians lessons — that one could find much room for maneuvers in the inner workings of the government, that the law was flexible, that there would be no consequences if you pushed the envelope or lied about what you were doing.
During the first Trump administration, when Stephen Miller’s immigration policy proposals hit obstacles in federal court, rumors would circulate about his plans to dust off arcane presidential powers. Government lawyers were wary of overreach; officials in the West Wing and at the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes snicker….Miller’s approach is different this time. He has unleashed an everything-at-once policy storm modeled after the MAGA guru Stephen K. Bannon’s “flood the zone” formula. Drawing on policy ideas worked up in conservative think tanks during the four years between Trump’s terms, Miller’s plan has been to fire off so many different proposals that some inevitably find a friendly court ruling, three administration officials told us….Three months after leaving the White House, in April 2021, Miller co-founded a Trump-aligned think tank, the America First Legal Foundation, that he fashioned as a right-wing counter to the American Civil Liberties Union. The group’s lawyers filed scores of lawsuits against the Biden administration and U.S. companies. They also provided legal firepower to Texas Governor Greg Abbott and other Republican officials launching state-level immigration crackdowns….
With Orders, Investigations and Innuendo, Trump and G.O.P. Aim to Cripple the Left
Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher, March 19, 2025 [New York Times]
The president and his allies in Congress are targeting the financial, digital and legal machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive political world….
...A small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them, according to two people familiar with the group’s work who requested anonymity to describe it.Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors liberal money in politics, recently briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques. The White House group is said to be exploring what more can be done within the law….Some of the president’s allies have welcomed the moves as payback for Democratic congressional investigations of Mr. Trump and Republican political networks.“Democrats ran breathless investigations of Republican dark money for years, and I hope that this is a concerted effort to go after the left’s dark money,” said Mike Davis, a former Republican congressional aide who founded a group using what he calls brass-knuckle tactics to assail Mr. Trump’s critics….
Trump picks his next Big Law target
[Politico, via Wall Street on Parade, March 17, 2025]
President Donald Trump continued his retaliatory spree against major law firms on Friday, signing an executive order targeting New York firm Paul, Weiss days after a judge ruled that major parts of a similar order were unconstitutional.
Trump’s new order seeks to suspend the security clearances of attorneys with the firm and limit their access to government buildings, ability to get federal jobs and receive money from federal contracts….
Why Trump Tried to Fire Federal Trade Commission Democrats
BIG by Matt Stoller
...What is this dispute really about?
So what happened? As best as I can tell, the real reason for this move is that someone in the administration wanted to establish a basic principle of governance, that the President is in charge, and not the “Deep State.”The White House is already embroiled in a bunch of fights over who runs which parts of government. And one way to understand this action at the FTC is as part of a legal strategy to tell the courts, in a uniform way, that Trump, as the democratically elected leader, believes the Constitution empowers him to execute all Federal policy however he chooses.
And that’s a reasonable view, though the alternative - that Congress should be able to design institutions with some flexibility - is also reasonable. That said, ultimately, all roads here lead to the Federal Reserve. The logic of Trump takes us there. As Slaughter said earlier today on CNBC, if any commissioner at any agency can be fired by the President for any reason, then so can the Federal Reserve Chair or any Fed board member.
And that’s a fight Trump, and the Supreme Court, just don’t want to have, because Wall Street would absolutely freak out. Basically, the real Trump argument is that all the little people regulators must constitutionally be controlled by the President, but the one big guy, the Fed, is constitutionally run by Wall Street. I’m not kidding. In a case about the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Justice Alito actually put that in a footnote in his dissent. His legal rationale for why the Fed should be treated differently is that the Fed “should be regarded as a special arrangement sanctioned by history,” as it is a “unique institution with a unique historical background.”
Alito is a very smart guy, yet that’s the best he could come up with. This rationale is the legal equivalent of a t-shirt they sell at the beach that says “I’m the Mommy that’s why.” In a sense, the unaccountable secretive Supreme Court looks at the Fed, and game recognizes game. If Trump succeeds in taking apart the FTC’s independence, the Fed’s independence comes next.
10-year-old American citizen recovering from brain tumor deported to Mexico
psychbob, March 22, 2025 [Daily Kos]
Venezuelan Professional Goalkeeper Deported to El Salvador Prison, Stunning Family Back Home
Ryan Grim and Sarah Hay, Marcg 20, 2025 [dropsitenews]
Republican files impeachment against judge who ruled against Trump deportations
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]
Boasberg impeachment resolution reaches 16 cosponsors
[Punchbowl News, March 21, 2025
Trump v. Boasberg: If This Isn’t a Constitutional Crisis, What Is?
Michael Tomasky, March 21, 2025 [The New Republic]
Trump’s Appetite for Revenge Is Insatiable
Peter Wehner, March 20, 2025 [The Atlantic]
A Statement from Constitutional Law Scholars on Columbia [University]
Steven G. Calabresi, Erwin Chemerinsky, Eugene Volokh, Michael C. Dorf, David Cole, and 13 other scholars, March 20, 2025 [The New York Review]
The government may not threaten funding cuts as a tool to pressure recipients into suppressing First Amendment–protected speech.
[TW: But Trump’s regime did. And without any legal consequences to itself.]
The Insidious Doctrine Fueling the Case Against Mahmoud Khalil
Debbie Nathan, March 21, 2025 [Boston Review]
How a century of immigration law has evaded constitutional rights.
...Yes, the First Amendment offers speech protections. But we also have a lesser-known idea that has influenced congressional and executive branch–mandated immigration law for well over a century: the plenary power doctrine. According to the doctrine’s principles, judges should avoid ruling on whether or not immigration laws are constitutional, even when it appears they are not….
Stephen Engelberg, March 20, 2025 [ProPublica]
In late October, ProPublica published one of its most prophetic stories in our history…. “‘Put Them in Trauma’: Inside a Key MAGA Leader’s Plans for a New Trump Agenda,”….
The story drew on private recordings of a series of speeches given in 2023 and 2024 by Russell Vought obtained by our colleagues at Documented, a news site with a remarkable knack for uncovering information powerful interests would prefer remained secret.
Trump Declares War on “Frivolous” Lawsuits
Stephanie Mencimer, March 22, 2025 [Mother Jones]
Late Friday night, the White House released the latest tranche of Trump executive actions and directives aimed at further kneecapping some of the nation’s most famous lawyers and law firms the president believes are obstructing his agenda or have tangled with him in the past.
One of the late-night directives is entitled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court.” Both terrifying and hilarious given its author, the memo instructs Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to aggressively pursue court sanctions and disciplinary actions against lawyers and law firms that engage in “grossly unethical misconduct,” which it mainly seems to define as lawyers and lawsuits Trump doesn’t like. Singled out for persecution are immigration lawyers and “Big Law” firms with pro bono practices that represent immigrants or litigate against the federal government, as well as Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias.
Move Fast and Break the Mortgage Market
David Dayen, March 20, 2025 [The American Prospect]
On Monday, according to securities filings, Bill Pulte, the new director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), appointed himself chair of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, known as the government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs. Pulte came from a family business that is now the third-largest homebuilder in the country, but he left that behind to run a private equity firm, and became renowned as a meme-stock impresario, hyping companies like GameStop or Bed Bath & Beyond to retail investors.
Pulte, whose agency currently has the power of management over Fannie and Freddie, also removed 14 of the 25 sitting board members at the two companies. In addition to himself and Clinton Jones, the FHFA general counsel who was appointed to both boards, Pulte added four other board members, including a former portfolio manager with well-known hedge fund Elliott Management and (briefly) an engineer tied to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Another new board member, Brandon Hamara, previously worked for Pulte.
Men DOGEbags at Work
‘It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]
[TW: An important expose of how the DOGEbags are simply not qualified, trained, or educated to do the work they claim to be doing.]
...But two federal auditors with years of experience, who have both worked on financial and technical audits for the government, say that DOGE’s actions are the furthest thing from what an actual audit looks like. Both asked to speak on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.
“Honestly, comparing real auditing to what DOGE is doing, there’s no comparison,” says one of the auditors who spoke to WIRED. “None of them are auditors.”….The auditors who spoke to WIRED allege that not only is Musk’s claim not true, but also that DOGE appears to have completely eschewed the existing processes for actually rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse….“You can’t coherently audit something like the whole Social Security system in a week or two,” says the second auditor. It’s exactly this rush to crack systems open without full understanding, the auditors say, that has led to Elon Musk’s false claims that 150-year-olds were receiving Social Security benefits. “It could be that DOGE didn’t de-dupe the data.” ….The auditors described a lengthy vetting process that allowed them to get the permissions necessary to dive into an agency’s data and systems. In addition to going through the initial vetting process, the auditors say that they are required to engage in continuing education.“None of them have any auditing background, none have any certifications, none have any clearances,” says the first auditor.Federal workers who have spoken to WIRED expressed concern that DOGE’s operatives appear to have bypassed the normal security clearance protocols in order to access sensitive systems. WIRED found that many of DOGE’s youngest members, all of whom were 25 or younger, have very limited work experience, and none in the government. One, Edward Coristine, who goes by “Big Balls” online, appears to be a 19-year-old high school graduate. Despite this, they were given high-level access at places like the GSA, the Social Security Administration, and the Treasury. Others, like those at the Federal Aviation Administration, come directly from Musk’s own companies and were not fully vetted before their start dates…..
The Post reports today that the IRS’s internal projections estimate that the DOGE-driven disruptions to the IRS since the inauguration are on track to have reduced tax receipts by more than $500 billion by April 15th. This, to be clear, is not a final tally. It’s not April 15th yet. It’s a projection based on historical data, the number of people who’ve filed, paid owed amounts of tax etc. It’s worth taking a moment to put this number into some context in case half a trillion dollars doesn’t do it for you. Non-defense discretionary spending is the cost to fund the US government once you take out mandatory spending (mostly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and the cost of the US military. For 2023 that number was $917 billion. So that’s most of the stuff we think of as the government, apart from those payment programs and the military. In other words, in about eight weeks DOGE managed to lose the US government, more or less light fire, more than half of what goes to all non-defense discretionary spending.
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2025]
[Yves Smith: “Understand what is going on. Fed and Treasury officials historically have ALWAYS bent over backwards to reassure investors even as they labor behind the scenes to tackle looming issues. They never never never talk up the prospect of a crisis. This is Bessant acting at the front man to justify DOGE wreckage of many institutions and programs….with no meaningful impact on the deficit, among other reasons because the savings claimed are gross fabrications. Bessant’s noise-making is to justify going after Social Security and Medicare.”]
DOGE Going Dark as Evidence of Fabrications, Destructive Results and Citizen Anger Rises
Yves Smith, March 17, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
As DOGE Mauls Social Security, Profit-Hungry Private Equity Is Swooping In
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 03-20-2025]
DC Metro Police Roust Staff of Indy Agency At DOGE’s Request
Josh Marshall, March 18, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
In the background over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to find out about the purported activities of the U.S. Marshals Service working at the behest of DOGE. When DOGE operatives took over the Foundation for African Development a couple of weeks ago, they reportedly made forced entry with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals. That’s not really what the Marshals do….
When I poked around, it seemed like people just assumed they were Marshals. Or perhaps they identified themselves as such. But the more questions I asked, the less clear it was who they really were, notwithstanding the press reports that simply stated it as a fact….
It turns out, that’s not what happened at all. According to the later-published full account in the Times, the U.S. Marshals Service wasn’t even there. DOGE operatives arrived in black SUVs along with FBI agents and accompanied “by what appeared to be private security who arrived in separate vehicles and were dressed in street clothing.”….
But it wasn’t the FBI agents or the “private security” who rousted the USIP staff out of their office. It was the DC Metro police….
Billionaire commerce secretary says only 'fraudsters' need Social Security
Emily Singer, March 21, 2025 [Daily Kos]
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made an appearance on Trump stooge David Sacks’ podcast “All In” on Thursday, during which he said that anyone calling for help because their Social Security check did not get paid is likely a fraudster.
"Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who's 94, she wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn't. She thinks something got messed up and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise screaming, yelling, and complaining. And all the guys who did PayPal, like Elon knows this by heart, right? Anybody who's been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen,” he said….
Approximately half of the population aged 65 or older living in households that receive at least 50% of their family income from Social Security benefits, and about 25% rely on Social Security benefits for at least 90% of their family income, according to a 2017 report from the Social Security Office of Research, Evaluation, and Statistics.
Here’s a ‘dead’ person on Social Security in Seattle, with plenty to say
[Seattle Times, March 15, 2025]
Johnson’s strange trip through the netherworld began in February, when a letter from his bank arrived addressed to his wife, Pam.
“We recently received notification of LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s passing,” it began. “We offer our sincerest condolences …”
At first she figured it was a scam — her husband, after all, was sitting right there. But then the bank got to the point.
“We know this is a difficult time, and we’re here to help,” the bank wrote. “We received a request from Social Security Administration to return benefits paid to LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account after their passing.”
“There’s nothing you need to do — we’ve deducted the funds from LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account.”
Uh oh. It itemized how $5,201 had been stricken from their bank account, on the grounds that Ned wasn’t justified to get those benefits — because he was dead. That was for payments he’d received in December and January….
What followed was a nearly three-week battle to resurrect himself. He called Social Security two or three times a day for two weeks, with each call put on hold and then eventually disconnected. Finally someone answered and gave him an appointment for March 13. Then he got a call delaying that to March 24.
In a huff, he went to the office on the ninth floor of the Henry Jackson Federal Building downtown. It’s one of the buildings proposed to be closed under what the AP called “a frenetic and error-riddled push by Elon Musk’s budget-cutting advisers.”
It was like a Depression-era scene, he said, with a queue 50-deep jockeying for the attentions of two tellers. The employees were kind but beleaguered.
“They are so understaffed down there,” he said. “They think the office is about to be closed down, and they don’t know where they’re going to go. It feels like the agency’s being gutted.”
After waiting for four hours, Johnson admits he jumped the line: “I saw an opening and I kind of rushed up and told them I was listed as dead. That seemed to get their attention.”
Oklahoma City man says social security benefits terminated without warning or explanation
[KFOR, Oklahoma City, March 13, 2025]
A local retiree says his Social Security benefits were suddenly suspended without warning — and with no explanation given when he reached out. He worries it may have to do with the place he was born, and ongoing DOGE cutbacks.
The man, who was born to an active duty U.S. Solider at an overseas U.S. Army base, says because of recent comments from Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) leader Elon Musk, he’s worried his benefits were cut because of his foreign birthplace….
Musk Taps Private Equity Veterans to Aid DOGE at Social Security
[Bloomburg, via Truthout 03-16-2025]
Among those tapped for the task are Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners, who also served on the board of Tesla Inc. and was an early investor in SpaceX — two of Musk’s companies — as well as Scott Coulter, formerly of Lone Pine Capital, and Michael Russo, formerly of Shift4, according to people familiar with the moves who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss them….
Russo arrived Feb. 3, and “introduced himself as a DOGE representative to multiple employees on multiple occasions,” Flick said. He now serves as the agency’s chief information officer. Russo also brought on Akash Bobba, a former intern for Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies Inc., to analyze Social Security data.
Bobba’s onboarding was unusual, according to Flick, who said his background check was held up for a few days. She said she received pressure from Russo and Steve Davis, who runs Musk’s Boring Co. and is also working for DOGE, to get Bobba credentials by midnight on Feb. 10. Bobba was sworn in over the phone, “contrary to standard practice,” she said.
EXCLUSIVE: Memo details Trump plan to sabotage the Social Security Administration
Judd Legum, Mar 17, 2025 [Popular Information, via Gizmodo.com]
An internal Social Security Administration (SSA) memo, sent on March 13 and obtained by Popular Information, details proposed changes to the claims process that would debilitate the agency, cause significant processing delays, and prevent many Americans from applying for or receiving benefits.
The memo, authored by Acting Deputy SSA Commissioner Doris Diaz, purports to be motivated by a desire to mitigate "fraud risks."
Elon Musk has pushed several false claims about the nature and scope of Social Security fraud. In a recent interview on Fox Business, Musk suggested that 10% of federal expenditures were related to Social Security fraud. This is false. Social Security fraud does exist, but "improper" Social Security payments amounts to about $9 billion annually — less than 1% of total Social Security benefits paid and 0.1% of the federal budget. Most improper payments are not criminal fraud but the result of beneficiaries or the SSA failing to update records.
The biggest change contemplated by Diaz's memo is to require "internet identity proofing" for "benefit claims… made over the phone." When an SSA customer is "unable to utilize the internet ID proofing, customers will be required to visit a field office to provide in-person identity documentation." ….
About 40% of all claims are currently processed over the phone.
Because the SSA serves a large population that is either older or physically disabled, many cannot access the internet. Under the new system, this would force these populations to visit an office to have their claim processed. The Diaz memo estimates it would require 75,000 to 85,000 in-person visitors per week to SSA's offices to implement the policy.
SSA offices do not currently have the resources to handle an influx of in-person appointments of this size. In 2023, the most recent data available, there were about 119,128 daily visits, on average, to SSA offices…..
An Interview With A Fired NOAA Director
Sabrina Imbler, March 18, 2025 [Defector]
The Revenue and Distributional Effects of IRS Funding
[The Budget Lab at Yale, via Naked Capitalism 03-17-2025]
“If the IRS shrinks by 50% (a workforce decrease of about 50,000 people),3 we estimate that this significant reduction in IRS staffing and resulting IRS capacity to collect revenues would result in $395 billion ($350 billion net) forgone revenue over the 10-year budget window.4 If the lack of IRS resources leads to a substantial increase in noncompliance, net forgone revenue could rise by $2.4 trillion over 10-years.”
DOGE Is Going to Kill a Lot of Americans
Kenny Stancil, March 19, 2025 [The American Prospect]
On empathy: Elon Musk says empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western Civilization.
Thomas Mills, March 21, 2025
Will Lockett, March 06, 2025 [via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]
...Tesla’s insane valuation over the past few years has enabled the company to take on a ridiculous amount of debt.
As of writing, Tesla has at least $48.39 billion in debt.
However, Musk has also used his Tesla stock as collateral for SpaceX, Twitter, and Tesla loans. Before he bought Twitter, over half of his shares were collateralised; now, that figure is far, far higher. Again, let’s be generous and assume only 70% of his 12.8% stake in Tesla is collateralised in this way, with a third of these loans for Tesla. That would mean Musk has $71.68 billion in personal loans, with $23.89 billion for Tesla.
These loans aren’t accounted towards the company’s liabilities, as they are technically part of the debt owner’s — in this case, Musk’s — personal liabilities.
In other words, Tesla actually has $72.28 billion in debt. That is more than the company is realistically worth!
Inside Trump and Musks’s Takeover of NASA.
David W. Brown, March 21, 2025 [The New Yorker]
...Darren Bossie, the new White House liaison to NASA, arrived shortly after Trump’s Inauguration. Bossie was more or less unknown at the agency, but employees soon found his LinkedIn profile. He had spent four of the past seven years bouncing around conservative politics, with a stint as Trump’s White House liaison to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and had worked as a senior consultant for unnamed companies. For the bulk of his professional life, however—from 2006 to 2018—he had been an assistant manager at a Total Wine & More in Palm Beach County, Florida. “That didn’t seem very promising,” a senior NASA official told me….
A review of public records, however, suggested that Darren is the brother of David N. Bossie, the president of Citizens United—the conservative group whose litigation before the Supreme Court empowered mega-donors and corporations to make unlimited contributions to political candidates. During Trump’s first Presidential run, David was the deputy manager of the campaign; in 2017 and 2018, he was known for fund-raising efforts in support of conservative candidates. During that period, his brother was hired into what appears to have been his first federal job—deputy director of the Office of Secretarial Boards and Councils at the Department of Energy. (In 2019, Trump distanced himself from David Bossie after he was accused of profiting off the President’s likeness; at the time, David said he was being “unfairly targeted by left-wing smear tactics.”)
Strategic Political Economy
The Underlying Problem: This is happening because some people are too rich
Hamilton Nolan, March 21, 2025 [How Things Work]
...Trump is such a sui generis figure that it is possible to attribute his rise to any combination of a laundry list of personal attributes, social trends, and political events. Is all of this a consequence of Trump’s own celebrity? A racial backlash to the Obama years? The outcome of decades of brain poisoning by right wing media? Pandemic social isolation and inflation manifesting in a national death cult? What the hell?
Still—some causes are bigger than others. Trump’s personality and the rise of Fox News and Musk buying Twitter and the effects of the pandemic and angry old racist whites all contributed to where we are, yes, but they are not “the reason” we got here. If you pull back your focus, away from the individual personalities at play, you can perceive a brittle, dysfunctional system that was sitting there waiting for these guys to step in and run wild. How is it that the richest nation in the history of the world allowed itself to reach a point where all of this was possible? How did the United States of America become so vulnerable?
...The underlying cause of our situation is inequality. We have allowed too few people to accumulate too much wealth. The imbalance has grown so severe that a tiny number of individuals with twelve-figure net worths have the means to purchase so much political power that they can effectively make the federal government’s decisions. The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience. The inequality, the decades of regulatory failures that led up to Elon Musk’s net worth, were the precondition for all of the insanity that is now playing out. It is easy to lose sight of this amid the daily headlines and the cartoonish corruption and the outrageous statements and the think pieces about the esoteric philosophy of Mencius Moldbug. It is tempting, because of the sudden severity of our situation, to imagine that there is a secret, hidden reason driving it all.
There’s not. This is the outcome of the class war—the same class war that we have been talking about for decades. This is what happens when it is lost….
Democracy is incompatible with the extremity of wealth inequality that we now have in America. The two things cannot coexist. Why? Because an electoral democracy, even the half-functional sort that the US has, only has value if all interest groups have to participate in it. Democracy is a grand gathering of interests around a table, and then a symbolic wrestling match among them all to have their interests represented and defended. Once you have one hundred or two hundred or three hundred billion dollars, however, you do not need to show up and sit around the table. You can buy the whole table. Everyone else sits around your table now, and begs you. Just like that, democracy has been replaced. This is where we are….
The soil from which everything else grew is: Rich people have too much money. That is a political and economic choice, a predictable consequence of the failure to get ahead of capitalism’s well understood tendency to produce this very situation. Here we are. We have allowed it to go too far and now the richest guy is buying total power. The key thing, the big mistake, was letting the rich people get this rich. If they were not this rich—if inequality were not so wide—the various other interests in our democracy would themselves be powerful enough that they could not be outweighed by single oligarchs. But wealth is power, and we let the oligarchs get too much wealth, and they, personally, got stronger than other interest groups that represent millions of people….
Rep. Town Hall Breaks Out in chats “Tax the Rich!” #taxcutsandjobsact [YouTueb video short]
[TW: YouTube video of portion Nebraska Republican Congressman Mike Flood’s town hall when he asks “How can you be against a balanced budget?” and the crowd began to chant "tax the rich." Note the smug look on his face.]
‘Therefore, since you trample the poor continuously,
taxing his grain,
building houses of stone in which you won’t live
and planting fine vineyards from which you won’t drink—
12 and because I know that your transgressions are many,
and your sins are numerous
as you oppose the righteous,
taking bribes as a ransom,
and turning away the poor in courtj
13 therefore the prudent person remains silent at such a time,
for the time is evil.
14 What good does it do, my brothers, if someone claims to have faith but does not prove it with actions? This kind of faith cannot save him, can it? 15 Suppose a brother or sister does not have any clothes or daily food 16 and one of you tells them, “Go in peace! Stay warm and eat heartily.” If you do not provide for their bodily needs, what good does it do? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it does not prove itself with actions, is dead.
Trump’s Economics—and America’s Economy
James K. Galbraith [The Nation, via God's Spies, March 20, 2025]
Leaving aside the buckets called “culture wars” and “foreign policy,” we may distinguish eight distinct forces at work in Trump’s economics. They are (a) the targeted destruction of specific regulatory agencies, (b) random disruptions of the federal civil service, (c) old-fashioned Reaganism, (d) tariffs, (e) migration, (f) energy, (g) the military, and (h) the general effect of rash and unpredictable policymaking—otherwise called uncertainty and chaos….
Not all regulation is effective. But quite distinct from its social and health benefits, effective regulation serves the interests of advanced businesses, including in manufacturing, by forcing old, dirty, and unsafe technologies and low-wage competitors out. Trump’s government, like others before it, is—unfortunately for its own declared strategy—in the hands of the reactionary branch of the business elite.
[Thomas Neuburger: “Translation: The troglodytes running this ship could soon be opposed by elites who want to succeed in the actual world, not just in their dreams.”]
[And, Neuberger again:
[James Galbraith is the man who wrote this about Barack Obama when he tried to cut Social Security in 2011:
[T]he President too is a young man. … He'll need a big house in a gated suburb, with high walls and rich friends. And a good income, too, from book deals and lecture fees. He may be thinking about that now. ... [But] it won't save him. For if and when he ventures out, for the rest of his life, the eyes of all those, whose hopes he once raised will follow him. The old, the poor, the jobless, the homeless: their eyes will follow him wherever he goes.
[File under “In case you forgot, it doesn’t all start with Trump.”]
Global power shift
Exposing Britain’s Covert War On Yemen
Kit Klarenberg [Global Delinquents, via Naked Capitalism 03-20-2025]
Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 03-20-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana
Dictated over the phone from ICE Detention. Mahmoud Khalil. [via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]
Oligarchy
Social Security Is Not a Ponzi Scheme
Lawrence B. Glickman, March 11, 2015 [The Boston Review]
Today’s attacks are just the latest form of backlash to the New Deal.
When Elon Musk called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time” on Joe Rogan’s podcast on February 28, he was, wittingly or not, echoing a long line of conservative critics. Over the last fifteen years alone, a long line of Republican politicians—Mick Mulvaney, Ron Johnson, Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul—have characterized it the same way….
Inapt though such comparisons may be, they have been a persistent strand of conservative thought ever since 1935, when the Social Security Act became law. The initial conservative backlash—first to the act, then to the other gains of the New Deal era—laid the groundwork for the nine decades of attacks on public goods that have followed. Since then, the strategy has been refined, but the crusade still follows the same four-pronged process: demonize Social Security, claim that the essence of government is found in spending on absurd programs, use the state as a personal piggy bank, and assert that you and your fellow elites have been the real victims all along.
In 1937 a New London, Connecticut, newspaper, evaluating the new “social security scheme,” dismissed it as a “Ponzi-like plan” based upon a philosophy of “something from nothing.” The comparison stuck. In 1956, Clarence Manion, the former Dean of Notre Dame Law School, pioneering conservative radio broadcaster, and future member of the John Birch Society, said the federal government had “[adopted] the Ponzi “‘get rich easy’ scheme as its very own.” In 1981 conservative senator Jesse Helms called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme to buy political popularity at the risk of social security’s ultimate bankruptcy.”….
In accepting the Democratic nomination for the second time in 1936, Roosevelt gave a masterclass in how to counter the likes of DOGE. He called the kind of people whom Dewey addressed “economic royalists” sparing them no mercy in connecting their greed to the undermining of democracy and the diminution of liberty for ordinary Americans: “The privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.” Such people, Roosevelt declared, were “new mercenaries” who “sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property.” ….
Sanders, AOC Draw Biggest Crowd of Their Careers at Rally to Fight 'Oligarchy' in Denver
Eloise Goldsmith, March 22, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trumpillnomics
Thomas Mills, March 19, 2025 [PoliticsNC]
Right now, Donald Trump is mostly fighting on his turf. He’s made deporting immigrants and cutting government his priorities. He’s getting cheered by Republicans and conservatives for his aggressive actions. It’s not going to last. There are only so many immigrants he can deport before he causes pain in communities. There’s only so much government he can eliminate before the consequences start to hurt people and their families….
We’re only two months into the administration and the consequences of their actions haven’t been felt widely, but they are coming. A friend of mine has been talking to developers about building a few houses on a piece of property he owns. The deal fell through when the builders told him they aren’t taking on any new projects because of the uncertainty of material prices. They can’t estimate costs with Trump jerking the economy around with his on-again-off-again tariff regime.
They also can’t predict labor costs. A lot of those deportees were working in the construction industry. Builders may find themselves paying much higher costs for employees and contractors. Those same concerns will spread across the economy, making businesses reluctant to invest in their companies and hesitant to make long term plans.
The impact of tariffs will hit soon. New cars are about to increase in price from between $4,000 and $12,000. Buy now, because you won’t get a better deal anytime soon. I expect that applies to a lot of other goods, too….
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, March 19, 2025 [Wall Street on Parade]
‘Italian vendetta’: SEC targeted by triumphant crypto industry
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2025]
How TD Became America’s Most Convenient Bank for Money Launderers
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]
[Yves Smith: “Big investigative report. Note we wrote up a recent case seeking to claw back pay and pensions from crooked execs. This article confirms a key element of the thesis of that case, that the execs were in cahoots with the crooks.”]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Jim Byrne [MMT101.ORG, via Mike Norman Economics, March 16, 2025]
Health care crisis
With crumbling public health infrastructure, rural Texas scrambles to respond to measles
[The Texas Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 03-16-2025]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
OpenAI Says It’s “Over” If It Can’t Steal All Your Copyrighted Work
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 03-17-2025]
The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem
Alex Reisner, March 20, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Court documents released last night show that the senior manager felt it was “really important for [Meta] to get books ASAP,” as “books are actually more important than web data.” Meta employees turned their attention to Library Genesis, or LibGen, one of the largest of the pirated libraries that circulate online. It currently contains more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers. Eventually, the team at Meta got permission from “MZ”—an apparent reference to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—to download and use the data set….
Meta employees acknowledged in their internal communications that training Llama on LibGen presented a “medium-high legal risk,” and discussed a variety of “mitigations” to mask their activity. One employee recommended that developers “remove data clearly marked as pirated/stolen” and “do not externally cite the use of any training data including LibGen.” Another discussed removing any line containing ISBN, Copyright, ©, All rights reserved. A Llama-team senior manager suggested fine-tuning Llama to “refuse to answer queries like: ‘reproduce the first three pages of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”’” One employee remarked that “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”….
Many in the academic world have argued that publishers have brought this type of piracy on themselves, by making it unnecessarily difficult and expensive to access research. Sci-Hub, a sibling of LibGen, was launched independently in 2011 by a Kazakhstani neuroscience student named Alexandra Elbakyan, whose university didn’t provide access to the big academic databases. In that same year, the hacktivist Aaron Swartz was arrested after taking millions of articles from JSTOR in an attempt to build a similar kind of library….
[TW: The obvious solution — but obvious only if one knows the tenets of civic republicanism — is for all scholarly articles to be in the public domain at their creation, with the creators and publishers paid by a centralized government fund. This fund could be administered by the government, or by a board comprised of scholars and publishers. This scheme of course would destroy the business model of the scholarly publishers — but that is exactly the point of civic republicanism: Each individual in society has a duty as a citizen to promote the General Welfare. Scientists and scholars are the tip of the spear in scientific and technological development: the products of their research should be made as widely available as possible as soon as possible to help advance their fields of inquiry and advance the state of human knowledge. Without scientific and technological development, no society can survive, because of the limits of finite resources at any one point in time of a particular mode of production. Our current dilemmas of private interests overwhelming public interests is the result of liberalism’s fetishization of the rights of property. (The great irony of current conservative and libertarian thinking is that they argue that liberalism has failed, because it has not done enough to shield the rights of property from civic duties and demands of public interest.)]
Climate and environmental crises
More Than 150 ‘Unprecedented’ Climate Disasters Struck World in 2024, Says UN
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 03-22-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
The Government Funding Law Damages the Legal Pushback on Trump
David Dayen, March 20, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Here’s why Chuck Schumer’s cave-in was beneficial to Trump’s legally shaky slashing of spending and the federal workforce.….
...The bigger point here is that if the only way to constrain Trump on these budgetary issues is through the courts, then you would want to take a course that doesn’t materially harm the legal arguments. Precisely by granting government funding that leaves the particulars up to the executive, those legal arguments have been harmed. Even outside of the political argument that cowering in the face of a fight makes the Democrats a more toxic and disliked institution, Schumer’s decision had negative consequences….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 03-17-2025]
Always worth a reminder that Obama inherited ICE as a fledgling agency, increased its budget 300%, established a nationwide network of detention centres and expanded the 'secure communities' enforcement program from 14 counties under Bush Jr to all 3,181 jurisdictions in America
Trump’s transactional regime
It's the Trauma Stupid: Hurt People, Hurt People
[LA Progressive, via God’s Spies, March 20, 2025]
Anyone paying attention to politics knows that Trump’s second term has been marked by a gleeful cruelty. The blizzard of executive orders, freezing overseas assistance to the world’s poor, firing masses of federal workers and targeting domestic safety nets pick up where his first term left off.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” boasted Russell Vought, who is now Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, in speeches before 2024’s election. “We want to put them in trauma.”
[Thomas Neuburger: “This long piece is not just about what trauma is inflicted by Trump and his followers, but what trauma they’ve suffered that they’re now exporting.”]
Trump gave wounded swathes of the electorate a permission slip to hate immigrants, those transgendered, every diverse Democratic constituency, with special emphasis on educated coastal “elites” and its “lying media.” The irrational hate mobilized against Democrats resulted in many MAGA voters acting like the most crazed sports fans, known for their rigid, sometimes violent, home-team loyalty.
Daniel J. Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, further explains the powerful appeal and draw of leaders who exude hostility and authoritarian impulses.
“People may actually feel excitement that someone in the public eye is expressing aggression, or assertion, the opposite of impotence,” Siegel said. Such traits can feel empowering to those who lack agency and power in their lives, he explained. “It is like a child wanting to be with a parent who will protect them.”
Resistance
Guest Post By Newark Mayor Ras Baraka: Democrats Cannot Afford To Wait— The Storm Is Here
[downwithtyranny.com 3-20-2025]
80 Teslas damaged at once at Canadian Showroom
Bill Addis, March 21, 2025 [Daily Kos]
Tesla has gone so far as turning on the Sentry mode on all the cars at service centers and showrooms. They start recording when there is suspicious activity around the car.
Musk: Tesla has activated security cameras on vehicles at dealerships
[CBS News, vis MSN 03-21-2025]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Project 2025 Tracker began as a humble spreadsheet created by /u/rusticgorilla, combined with /u/mollynaquafina's vision for making this information accessible to everyone through a dedicated website.
Beyond My Wildest Dreams’: The Architect of Project 2025 Is Ready for His Victory Lap
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 03-17-2025]
Will-to-Power Conservatism and the Great Liberalism Schism
Stephanie Slade [Reason, October 2020 issue, via Semafor]
By virtue of representing the correct vision of the good, these conservatives say, they have every right to use the coercive power of the state to interfere with others' choices….
...an increasingly restless group of writers and thinkers at places like First Things and the Claremont Institute who say America has tried classical liberalism—and it failed us.
These "post-liberals" believe it's time for a conservative politics that stops worrying about protecting individual liberty and starts worrying about attaining the common good. Generally speaking, that means embracing "strong rule" by a government tasked, among other things, with "enforcing duties of community and solidarity in the use and distribution of resources," as the Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule put it in a March essay for The Atlantic….
...New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari, in a now-infamous 2019 essay for First Things, called upon conservatives to accept the hard truth "of politics as war and enmity." All societies have rulers, the Will-to-Power Conservatives seem to be saying; what matters above all else is ensuring that our tribe is dominant.
Don't take my word for it. In a recent symposium published by The American Conservative, editor of American Affairs Julius Krein (echoing his colleague Gladden Pappin) complains that "contemporary conservatism" lacks "a serious approach to wielding political power." Hillsdale College's David Azerrad argues that conservatives must learn to be "manly," "combative," and "comfortable" using "the levers of state power…to reward friends and punish enemies." And Claremont's Matthew J. Peterson insists that "conservatism must not merely make arguments…it must act on them, wielding 'regime-level' power in the service of good political order to do so." ….
For Will-to-Power Conservatives...: By virtue of representing the correct vision of the good, they say, they have every right to use the coercive power of the state to interfere with others' choices. In place of equal rights under the law, it's error has no rights. This is no way to achieve the common good.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State
Aziz Huq, March 23, 2025 [The Atlantic]
On September 20, 1938, a man who had witnessed the rise of fascism packed his suitcases and fled his home in Berlin. He arranged to have smuggled separately a manuscript that he had drafted in secret over the previous two years. This book was a remarkable one. It clarified what was unfolding in Berlin at the time, the catalyst for its author’s flight.
The man fleeing that day was a Jewish labor lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel. He completed his manuscript two years later at the University of Chicago (where I teach), publishing it as The Dual State, with the modest subtitle A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. The book explains how the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws—and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.
Fraenkel offered a simple, yet powerful, picture of how the constitutional and legal foundations of the Weimar Republic eroded, and were replaced by strongman-style rule in which the commands of the Nazi Party and its leader became paramount. His perspective was not grounded in abstract political theory; it grew instead from his experience as a Jewish lawyer in Nazi Berlin representing dissidents and other disfavored clients. Academic in tone, The Dual State sketches a template of emerging tyranny distilled from bloody and horrifying experience….
