Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 04, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Trump DHS Post Calling for ‘100 Million Deportations’ Suggests Intent to Kick Out Nonwhite Citizens
Stephen Prager, January 02, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The Trump administration provoked horror this week with the suggestion that the United States could be turned into a paradise if over a quarter of the people in the country were deported.
On Wednesday, the official social media account for the Department of Homeland Security posted a piece of artwork depicting a pink late-1960s Cadillac Eldorado parked on a bright, idyllic beach. Over the clear blue sky are the words “America after 100 million deportations.”
Jim Stewartson, January 01, 2026 [MindWar]
To put this number in perspective:
The total number of undocumented immigrants in America is about 14 million.
The total number of foreign-born people in America—including naturalized citizens—is about 53 million.
The total number of Black and Hispanic people in America is about 110 million.
100 million is almost a third of the total U.S. population.
Millions would necessarily die in any such process.
The economy would collapse.
The “third world” framing in the post makes the intention explicit. It’s not about crime or even immigrants; it’s about race. The only conclusion you can reach is that DHS’s goal is to forcibly transform America into a whites-only ethnostate like apartheid South Africa—by deporting every Black and brown person... somewhere….
DHS Says REAL ID, Which DHS Certifies, Is Too Unreliable To Confirm U.S. Citizenship
[Reason, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
Trump’s Immigration Nightmare: It Is Happening Here
Radley Balko, December 24, 2025 [The New Republic]
With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. And the experts agree: It’s all going to get much, much worse….
...Over the last year, I’ve spoken to and met with immigration attorneys and advocates all over the country. Many who openly spoke with me prior to the 2024 election are no longer willing to be quoted, fearing retaliation against their organizations or their funders, or even against them personally.
In more recent months, I’ve also interviewed former ICE and Customs and Border Protection officials, and former Immigration Court judges who served across multiple administrations of both parties. Career legal and law enforcement officials tend to be circumspect in their critiques of fellow law enforcement officers. They tend to avoid casual references to police states, or comparing U.S. police agencies to those in authoritarian countries. That’s no longer the case. These career police executives and prosecutors now use language I’ve rarely heard from current or former government officials in my career….
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Isaac Chotiner, January 3, 2026 [The New Yorker]
I spoke by phone on Saturday morning with Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and the director of its Center for Global Legal Challenges. She is also the president-elect of the American Society of International Law….
If drug trafficking is a reasonable justification, then a whole range of possible arguments can be made that basically mean that self-defense is no longer a real exception. It’s the new rule. Why couldn’t you make the same argument about communicable diseases? There’s bird flu coming from a country, and therefore we have a legal justification for the use of military force. Once we start going down that road, the idea that there’s any limit evaporates. I mean, yes, drugs are horrific. Do they cause loss of life in the United States? Absolutely. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a terrible scourge, but the idea that because drugs are coming from a country it justifies an invasion and a change of administration in that country basically gets rid of any kind of limits on the use of force….
So if Maduro goes to trial in an American court, is this going to be a contested legal issue about whether he can even be tried based on whether he is the head of state of Venezuela? Is that something that American courts are going to have to weigh in on?
Yes, it is something that the American courts are going to have to weigh in on. It definitely is the case that his lawyers will make the argument that he’s a sitting head of state at the time that he was seized and that he remains the sitting head of state and therefore, under international law and under U.S. law, he should be given immunity, which means that he’s not subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and can’t be criminally charged. This has come up once before with the criminal indictment of Manuel Noriega, the former leader of Panama, when the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989 and seized Noriega and then brought him back to the United States and indicted him for drug smuggling and money laundering.Back then, Noriega argued that he enjoyed head-of-state immunity, and the executive branch argued that he didn’t because the United States had not recognized him as a legitimate leader of Panama. That gives us a hint as to what is likely to happen in this case. My guess is that the United States will argue that it’s never recognized Maduro as a legitimate leader of Venezuela and therefore he doesn’t receive immunity…....What’s troubling here is that it seems that President Trump may be making good on his promise and his national-security strategy that he issued last month to revive the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine was basically a justification by the United States to exercise force in Latin America. And that was renounced by President Franklin Roosevelt as part of a shift away from the idea that states could use force whenever they wanted to. It was an endorse
Brynn Tannehill, January 4, 2026 [The New Republic]
This act has also sent a chilling message to the world that the United States is beginning the process of carving up the world into spheres of influence run by dictatorships (namely the U.S., Russia, and China). Russia was Venezuela’s benefactor and ally but has been strangely quiet. Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Fiona Hill testified to Congress in 2019 that Russia was “signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap agreement between Venezuela and Ukraine.” In other words, the U.S. could have Venezuela if we let Russia have Ukraine. This strongly suggests that the price for letting the U.S. go after Venezuela without any protest was, and will be, Ukraine. It also suggests that Tawain may already be on the table as a bargaining chip with China, in order to secure its acquiescence to further U.S. regional hegemony in the Americas.
America’s 2025 National Security Strategy document has already put NATO and Europe on notice that they are the real enemy to Trump’s ambitions for empire and riches. In this seminal document, Russia was no longer portrayed as an adversary, and China was barely mentioned. Instead, the document focused on distancing the U.S. from NATO and the EU, treating them as adversaries rather than our closest allies. This further supports the notion that the globe is being carved up behind closed doors by nuclear-armed dictators intent on amassing wealth, building buffers to their empires, and securing their own backyards….
After Venezuela Attack, Trump Says Something Must Be Done About Mexico
Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani, January 3, 2026 [The New Republic]
They Say They’re Protesters. The DOJ Says They’re Terrorists.
Sam Russek, January 4, 2026 [The New Republic]
...This case is the first of its kind since President Donald Trump, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, signed a new national security presidential memorandum, NSPM-7, that instructs federal law enforcement to investigate “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” a staggeringly broad set of “motivations” justifying police action to “disrupt” and “disband” left-wing groups before a crime occurs. After the Alvarado protest, federal officials were unusually quick to circulate mug shots and term the protest a “planned ambush,” levying the defendants’ ties to an anarchist book club and a local chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association, a nonprofit gun club, to claim that they belong to an antifa cell and pull more and more people into the investigation’s dragnet.
To Xavier T. de Janon, the director of mass defense for the National Lawyers Guild, the implications of this case are alarming. If you attend a demonstration that becomes volatile due to an action taken by someone in the crowd—or, for that matter, someone in law enforcement—you could now find yourself on trial for something you had little to do with….
‘Scorched-Earth Attack’: Trump Admin Cuts Off Childcare Funds to All States
Jake Johnson, January 01, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The Trump administration on Wednesday froze federal childcare funding to every state in the US after initially suspending funds for Minnesota earlier this week, a move that the state’s Democratic attorney general condemned as a “hasty, scorched-earth attack” on key social services.
Jim O’Neill, deputy secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a statement posted to social media that he has “activated our defend the spend system for all [Administration for Children and Families] payments” to states, alleging “fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country.” As evidence, O’Neill cited a viral video by Nick Shirley, a right-wing influencer who recently visited Somali-owned Minnesota daycare sites at the direction of state Republicans.
Jacqueline Sweet, January 3 2026 [The Intercept]
David Hoch, identified only by first name in Nick Shirley’s video, got info for his anti-Somali campaign from a GOP state House staffer….
Shirley’s main source is a lobbyist and one-time right-wing candidate for Minnesota attorney general whose full name is David Hoch. Accounts bearing his name have a long online history posting about the Somali community in Minnesota. A TikTok and a recently deleted Instagram account posted almost exclusively on the subject — including derogatory statements about Somalis and Muslims.
“EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud. ALL of them,” Hoch posted on the now-deleted Instagram account.
In November, he posted, “Even the Blacks have had enough of the demon Muslims.”
7 takeaways from Jack Smith’s congressional testimony
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 01-01-2025]
...the Department of Homeland Security’s X feed has become a white nationalist sewer pit—makes it clear that Miller is trying to pull off a hegemonic shift. Miller hoped the combination of brutal police-state tactics plus relentless state propaganda would shock the American people into embracing—or accepting—a semi-conscious ethnonationalism. Miller wants Americans to see immigrants from the “Third World” as a threat to American wellbeing at an existential, civilizational level.But that hasn’t happened, either. His tactics have triggered a sustained cultural backlash in defense of the specific migrants in Trump-Miller’s crosshairs and of immigration more broadly as a positive good for the country. Miller has helped drive Trump’s approval on immigration—once a “good” issue for him—into the toilet. The public is rejecting their vision.
‘Their first instinct was to loot’: how Trump’s acolytes are plundering the Kennedy Center
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
Judge Warns Vought of Contempt Order if He Back-Door Shuts Down CFPB
David Dayen, December 30, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Judge Amy Berman Jackson has clarified that Vought would violate her injunction against shuttering the consumer protection agency if he declines to seek funding for it.
War mongers
Trump says if Iran “kills peaceful protesters,” the U.S. will “come to their rescue”
[CBS, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
Trump Says U.S. Is ‘Locked and Loaded’ if Iran Kills Protesters
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
Strategic Political Economy
Ed Zitron [via Naked Capitalism 12-30-2025]
One time, a good friend of mine told me that the more I learned about finance, the more pissed off I’d get.
He was right.
There is an echoing melancholy to this era, as we watch the end of Silicon Valley’s hypergrowth era, the horrifying result of 15+ years of steering the tech industry away from solving actual problems in pursuit of eternal growth. Everything is more expensive, and every tech product has gotten worse, all so that every company can “do AI,” whatever the fuck that means….
We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth. The money does exist, it just exists for those who want to gamble — private equity firms, “business development companies” that exist to give money to other companies, venture capitalists, and banks that are getting desperate and need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Repurchase Facility or Discount Window, two worrying indicators of bank stress I’ll get into later….
...By letting neoliberalism and the scourge of the free markets rule, modern society created the conditions for what I call The Enshittifinancial Crisis — the place at which my friend Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification Theory meets my own Rot Economy Thesis in a fourth stage of Enshittification….
...The third stage is critical, in that it’s when the company also turns on its business customers. A Marketing Brew story from September of last year told the tale of multiple advertisers who found their campaigns switching to different audiences, wasting their money and getting questionable results. A New York Times story from 2021 described companies losing upwards of 70% of their revenue during a Facebook ads outage, another from 2018 described how Meta (then Facebook) deliberately hid issues with its measurement of engagement on videos from advertisers for over a year, and more recently, Meta’s ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones, in one case targeting men aged 30 to 45 with an AI-generated grandma, all without warning the advertiser.
Meta doesn’t give a shit, because investors and analysts don’t give a shit….
Wall Street is stealing from volunteer fire departments
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 12-30-2025]
A handful of PE companies are snapping up affordable software providers in the emergency response space, consolidating them, then aggressively raising prices.
Most fire departments in the United States are made up of volunteers, and are budget-constrained. But Wall Street investors are enjoying huge profits, by tripling annual fees on departments, and buying and shutting down more affordable providers….
What Each of Us Can Do In 2026
William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Dec 30, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
If 2025 was about coming together to say, “No,” the work of 2026 is to reach the untapped people power of a true populist movement in this moment. As a people we are vulnerable to hucksters and social media manipulation because we allow almost half of Americans to live with their backs against the wall - working full time and living in cars, in the shadows without documentation, having to chose between rent and health insurance. Absent leadership that would challenge corporate interests and demand justice, a plurality of eligible voters believed the false promises of politicians who blamed immigrants, scapegoated minorities, and promised prosperity. Donald Trump did not create this scheme, but he saw he could benefit from it. The Wall Street Journal estimates that the Trump family raked in $4 billion this year alone.
As preachers we know that Jesus organized a people’s movement in the 20th century by recruiting exploited workers to tap the power of the everyday people who’d been targeted by an extractive economy. In the Galilee, where Jesus lived, the Romans used local fishermen to feed a global market for a fish paste called “garum.” A popular commodity throughout the empire, garum production led to the first recorded example of overfishing in human history. The Roman authorities didn’t just exploit the labor and tax the income of Jesus’ neighbors. They depleted the fisheries that local communities had relied on for generations.
In that context, Jesus recruited disciples for his movement with a simple mandate. “Come, follow me,” he said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.”
...When the authoritarian rulers of an extractive economy used fishermen to deplete the local fisheries, Jesus went to those exploited fishermen and said, “Come fish for people.” No one is in a better position to recruit people for a movement to change an unjust system than the people who’ve experienced the injustice first hand. Not everyone can preach to the President, refuse to obey unlawful orders, or maintain the integrity of institutions in the midst of an authoritarian crisis. The integrity of leaders in this moral moment is crucial, and many stood tall to clarify what’s at stake. But the genius of fishing for people is that it is something each of us can do….
Re-moralising economic life is not an optional extra
Richard Murphy, November 22, 2025 [Funding the Future]
...much of what is now called wealth creation involves no creation at all. It is, instead, too often an act of extraction, whether that be from labour, from land, from artificially inflated assets, and from speculative transactions that add nothing of value. Despite this, our society has come to treat this extraction as if it were a virtue. The more a person accumulates, the more we are told to admire them, regardless of how they acquired that money. Some obvious thoughts flow from that.
First, this means we have normalised the belief that the pursuit of wealth is at least morally neutral. The financier who distorts a housing market is called innovative. The corporation that avoids tax is considered efficient. The monopolist is just profit-maximising. None of this language is accidental. A deliberate effort has been made over decades to separate money from morality, as if economic choices existed outside the sphere of ethics.
Second, the moral scrutiny that has been removed from the wealthy has been displaced onto those with the least. People on low incomes are now subjected to scrutiny, conditions, tests and suspicions. Their behaviour is moralised and most commonly frowned upon. Meanwhile, the behaviour of those who extract unearned incomes escapes any equivalent judgement. This inversion is not just unjust; it is socially corrosive.
Third, once morality is removed from economics, it then disappears from politics. If we accept that wealth can be accumulated without ethical constraint, then we also accept the political power that accompanies that wealth. Democracy is distorted when the ability to buy influence is considered normal.
From these thoughts, several consequences follow.
To begin, inequality becomes entrenched. If accumulation is celebrated and extraction is unchallenged, the gaps in income and wealth widen relentlessly. That is not the result of market forces alone; it is the consequence of a moral framework that rewards taking more than either giving or creating.
Next, public institutions decline. When the wealthy are not expected to contribute fairly, whether through taxation or through socially productive investments, the state is deprived of essential financial flows required to manage the economy. Public services are then condemned for failure, even as the tax base is deliberately eroded.
Then, trust collapses. People can see that rules apply differently depending on a person's status. They see tax avoided at the top while benefit claimants are lectured about responsibility. They see that some can bend the system with impunity. Cynicism grows, and with it the sense that the social contract has been broken, because that is the case.
Finally, political extremism thrives. When economic life is morally hollow, people seek certainty elsewhere. That is the fertile ground on which authoritarian movements grow: resentment combined with the belief that the existing order lacks legitimacy. We are seeing this unfold all around us now….
Firstly, we need to restore moral language to economics. Markets are not natural phenomena. They are, instead, shaped by rules which reflect the values that a society chooses. If we do not embed fairness, restraint and social obligation within those rules, we embed their opposites and implicitly endorse them.
Secondly, we need accountability for those who accumulate wealth. Taxes must be paid. Regulation must curb extraction. Speculation must not be rewarded as if it were productive work. Wealth gained by harming others must be recognised for what it is, which is a social cost, and not a social contribution.
And, thirdly, we need to reclaim morality as a public endeavour. Economic morality is not about policing the behaviour of the poor. It is about defining the obligations of those with power and wealth. A democratic society requires a shared understanding that some actions are unacceptable because they exploit, harm or degrade others.
The danger we face is clear. If money remains detached from morality, morality will retreat from public life altogether, and when that happens, democracy itself becomes fragile.
AI on the scale now envisaged will create a recession on a scale hard to imagine
Richard Murphy, January, 3 2026 [Funding the Future]
Project Syndicate published an article by Simon Johnson and Piero Novelli about a month ago in which they discussed AI.
This is a recurring theme of mine right now, because it is becoming increasingly apparent how destructive this technology is going to be, at least in the short term, and maybe way beyond that.
Among their various arguments, one stood out to me. It was this:
- How exactly will this technology be used? Conversations with senior executives of large-cap corporations across traditional sectors – companies commonly presumed to provide high demand for AI solutions – confirm that while all expect to achieve significant savings and efficiencies from AI, almost none can highlight with confidence additional sources of revenue (such as new lines of business).
This is a staggering suggestion. What it says, in itself, is that there is nothing positive to be gained from the use of AI. No one knows that it will add value by creating new worth. All they can say is that it might cut costs.
Why Is the United States Drawn to War?
Emanuel Pastreich, Dec 29, 2025 [via defenddemocracy.press, Dec 30, 2025]
The United States is drawn to war on every front, like a moth to a candle. It does not matter that Americans are sick of foreign wars stretching back 25 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Venezuela, wars that have bankrupted the nation.
Glossary entry: financialisation
Richard Murphy, December 31, 2025 [Funding the Future]
Financialisation is the process by which financial motives, financial markets, financial actors, and financial measurement come to dominate the operation of the economy, the behaviour of firms and households, and the priorities of government.
It is not simply about “more finance”. Financialisation describes a structural shift in how economic success is defined and pursued, from producing goods and services to maximising financial returns.
Key characteristics of financialisation include:
Shift in corporate purpose
Firms increasingly prioritise shareholder value, dividend payments, share buy-backs, and balance-sheet optimisation over long-term investment, workforce development, or productive innovation.
Household integration into finance
Households become increasingly dependent on financial markets for housing, pensions, education, and security. Rising personal debt substitutes for wage growth, while exposure to asset prices increases economic vulnerability.
Transformation of public policy
Governments adopt fiscal rules, privatisation, public-private partnerships, and market-based delivery models that embed financial logic into public services. Policy success is judged by market confidence rather than social outcomes.
Measurement dominance
Financial indicators, inclduing asset prices, yields, credit ratings, and deficit targets, displace real-world measures such as resilience, well-being, capital maintenance, or ecological sustainability.
Rising instability
As more of the economy depends on leverage, speculation, and expectations of future price appreciation, financialisation increases systemic risk and amplifies economic shocks.
Global power shift
First and second largest economies in charts and figures
[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-30-2025]
[TW: The only chart the US leads China is in GDP — an economic statistic that became misleading years ago. In everything else, China leads USA, often by factors of two or three or even more. In steel production, China leads USA by a factor of ten
- primary energy demand
- electricity demand
- share of manufacturing
- industrial robots installed
- steel production
- gross tonnage of ships built
- car sales
- motor vehicle registrations
- motorcycles registered
- length of limited access highways
- high speed rail length
- transit rail length
- skyscrapers over 150 meters tall
- merchandise exports
- high tech exports
- shipping container throughput
- share of industrial consumption
- global ecommerce sales
- packages delivered
- luxury good sales
- 5G wifi stations installed
- university and college graduates
- engineering and computer science bachelors students
- science and technical articles published
- patent applications
- healthy life expectancy at birth. ]
China’s beautiful biotech chaos vs West’s elegant paralysis
[Asia Tim, via Naked Capitalism 12-30-2025]
Taiwan’s £7.5tn secret weapon is disintegrating
[Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
...This is Taiwan’s “Silicon Valley” and these facilities produce the majority of the world’s semiconductors – small chips that power virtually every electronic device in use today, from coffee machines to fighter jets.
Every country in the world relies on these chips, including China, which despite threatening to “reunify” Taiwan by force, imports nearly half of the island’s semiconductors.Economists warn that an invasion of Taiwan would cost the world’s economy £7.5tn – far more than the cost of the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the Covid-19 pandemic. Analysts argue that this very fact would act as a key deterrence against Beijing following through on its threats, as China knows if it does invade, its economy would take a direct hit from the fallout….
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Shaun King, Dec 31, 2025
When a state blocks medics and aid workers, it’s telling you exactly what it plans to keep doing
Oligarchy
Shaun King, Jan 02, 2026
The man in this clip, Shlomo Kramer, is presented on CNBC as an Israeli cybersecurity executive. And he says, in plain language, that it’s time to limit the First Amendment “in order to protect it.” He then goes further: he says “we need to control the social platforms and take control of what they are saying.”
First: that is authoritarian logic. It’s the kind of sentence dictators say right before they outlaw dissent. “We need to limit freedom to protect freedom” is not a serious principle. It’s a slogan used to sell censorship to people who still want to feel like they’re good and democratic.
Second: the First Amendment is not some decorative American tradition. It’s the spine of a free society. The First Amendment is the line between a country where people can criticize power and a country where power can punish criticism. When someone says “limit it,” they’re saying the quiet part out loud: we want less accountability.
Third: I need you to notice the word he used: “we.” Not “the United States.” Not “Congress.” Not “the courts.” Not “American voters.” “We.”
Dougald Lamont, December 29, 2025
The pandemic was seen as an opportunity for maximum disruption, and in the spring of 2020, a group of far-right politicians and policymakers gathered to talk dismantling public education.
A New Year and a Manifesto for America
Mike Brock, December 28, 2025 [Notes from the Circus]
….
II. What We Face
We face a specific mechanism of oligarchic capture that our grandparents did not face at this scale: cross-sectoral coordination.
Cross-sectoral coordination is when the same actor can move money, law, narrative,
The oligarch doesn’t just have wealth. He has coordinating power across multiple sectors simultaneously. Deploy capital into startups. Advocate for deregulation publicly. Fund political candidates who promise to remove constraints. Use media platforms to normalize the policy. Secure government appointments that ensure favorable regulation. Portfolio companies benefit from the environment created.
Each step is legal. The coordination is structural, not conspiratorial. There’s no smoking gun because the gun is the system itself.
Example: Cross-Sectoral Coordination in the Wild
Marc Andreessen controls venture capital through a16z, influences cryptocurrency, shapes tech policy through donations, coordinates narrative through media like the All-In podcast, and now has direct political access through administration appointments, including David Sacks as AI and Crypto Czar. He published a manifesto listing a literal fascist among his intellectual heroes—Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who founded Italian Futurism and aligned with Mussolini. He declared democratic constraint on technology to be “murder of preventable progress.” He paid $2.5 million to secure protection from the administration that would remove regulatory friction. Now he funds infrastructure marketed as innovation: “Physical observability” means surveillance cameras across American cities. “Agent-primacy design” means systems optimized for machines, not humans. “Healthy MAUs” means continuous biometric monitoring as a subscription. “Year of me” means personalization that destroys collective power.
This is extraction dressed as progress.
The Ottoman Empire “Debt Trap”: How Britain Bought The Middle East
[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
Felonomics
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 12-28-2025]
Social Security Administration ‘In Turmoil’ as New Reporting Details Damage Done by Trump Cuts
Brad Reed, December 30, 2025 [CommonDreams]
An in-depth report published by the Washington Post on Tuesday offers new details about the damage being done to the Social Security Administration during President Donald Trump’s second term.
The Post, citing both internal documents and interviews with insiders, reported that the Social Security Administration (SSA) is “in turmoil” one year into Trump’s second term, resulting in a customer service system that has “deteriorated.”
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Gatekeepers of Law: Inside the Westlaw and LexisNexis Duopoly
Tom Blakely, Dec 31, 2025
Ever since a spate of mergers in the 1990s, Westlaw and LexisNexis have dominated legal research. And that might be why searching legal cases is so costly, even in the age of AI.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Shaun King, January 01, 2026
Restoring balance to the economy
As Billionaires Seethe, Organizers Say Proposed Wealth Tax in California Is ‘Not Radical’
Jake Johnson, January 02, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Billionaire outrage against a proposed one-time wealth tax on the richest Californians reached a fever pitch in recent days as organizers began the process of gathering the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed to get the initiative on the November ballot.
Without providing specifics, billionaire Bay Area investor Chamath Palihapitiya claimed in a social media post that he knows people “with a collective net worth of $500 billion” who “scrambled and left California for good yesterday” to avoid the potential 5% wealth tax, which would apply to billionaires living in California as of January 1, 2026. (The evidence for significant billionaire tax avoidance via physical relocation is virtually nonexistent.)….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Cory Doctorow, 01 Jan 2026 [Pluralistic]
...Here's an anecdote that unravels this riddle: many years ago, in the years before Viktor Orban rose to power, I used to guest-lecture at a summer PhD program in political science at Budapest's Central European University. And one summer, after I'd lectured to my students about anticircumvention law, one of them approached me.
They had been the information minister of a Central American nation during the CAFTA negotiations, and one day, they'd received a phone-call from their trade negotiator, calling from the CAFTA bargaining table. The negotiator said, "You know how you told me not to give the Americans anticircumvention under any circumstances? Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. I'm really sorry."….
Collapse of independent news media
As Millions Lose Health Insurance, the Washington Post Misleads About Medicare for All
Andrew Perez, Dec 30, 2025 [Zeteo]
The Post editorial board also didn’t mention owner Jeff Bezos has a major stake in the US healthcare debate.
Climate and environmental crises
Mapped: 16 times extreme weather drove higher food prices since 2022
[Carbon Brief, via Naked Capitalism 12-31-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
5 Hard Truths Democrats Must Face on Education
Evan Bonsall, December 29, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
Resistance
Francesca Albanese and the Lonely Road of Defiance
Chris Hedges, Dec 30, 2025
The U.N. special rapporteur is one of the most courageous crusaders against the genocide in Gaza. Because of this, she is blacklisted and treated as if she is a terrorist.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Doug Bock Clark, December 29, 2025 [propublica.org]
The GOP-led North Carolina legislature spent nearly 10 years trying to control the elections board. But it’s also taken aim at other commissions in the state by shifting who has power to appoint members that historically belonged to the governor.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Why the Supreme Court Is Giving ICE So Much Power
Nancy Gertner, December 29, 2025 [The Atlantic]
The Constitution inarguably applies to federal immigration agents—but the Supreme Court has taken away the hope of ever holding them to that standard….
Nancy Gertner is a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School. She served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011.
The Right-Wing Justices Know Their Favorite Legal Theory Is Bunk
Simon Lazarus, January 2, 2026 [The New Republic]
...The right-wing justices’ emergent disarray seemed to reflect their awareness of pitfalls lurking in and around their hitherto unquestioned unitary executive gospel—including logical, legal, and most of all, real-world consequences that menace the economy, the nation, and the court itself. With these threats suddenly hoving into view, the conservative justices were flailing to figure out credible strategies to head it off.
Obviously, the gritted-teeth dogmatism of the conservative justices is the engine that has driven this kooky theory forward, despite its evident lack of grounding in constitutional text and history. But liberals also deserve blame. They have stood by while conservative presidential absolutists have framed the debate with labels, shibboleths, and catchphrases that, while misleading or outright false, have tilted the playing field rightward….
How the Supreme Court’s Judicial Sanewashing Wrecked the Legal System
Erin M. Carr, January 1, 2026 [The New Republic]
The Latest Defenses of SCOTUS’s Corruption Only Make the Case Against It
Josh Marshall, [Talking Points Memo]
Civic republicanism
[TW: It doesn’t even require “careful study.” Just ignore much of the left-wing trash talk of the founders and the founding.]
...In his latest, Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920, the second in a proposed trilogy on the Constitution’s history, Amar traces the origins of the Reconstruction amendments—the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery in 1865; the Fourteenth Amendment, establishing birthright citizenship, due process, and equal protection in 1868; and the Fifteenth Amendment, granting Black men the vote in 1870—along with the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended suffrage to women in 1920. His central argument is that these amendments succeeded because their advocates framed them as fulfillments of the nation’s founding texts, above all the Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal.” By rooting their arguments in the Declaration and interpreting the Constitution as the Founders supposedly intended, figures like Lincoln—the book’s central hero—emerge as the first true “originalists.”
Amar’s message is hardly subtle: Liberals and progressives who try to advance equality by dismissing the Founders and the Constitution misunderstand history. The nation’s greatest strides toward equality haven’t come in spite of the Founders’ words, he suggests, but through liberals’ fidelity to them….
Born Equal is on firmer ground in narrating the ways antebellum anti-slavery politicians hewed closely to the Constitution. To his credit, Amar doesn’t argue that the original Constitution was inherently anti-slavery. Instead, he maintains that, despite its many pro-slavery features, it had just enough Easter eggs for future anti-slavery politicians to utilize. The Adams family—beginning with John Adams, an overlooked co-author of the Declaration of Independence—figures prominently in Amar’s account. He credits his son John Quincy Adams, a former president and, in the 1830s, a leading anti-slavery voice in Congress, for realizing that the Constitution could allow the federal government to emancipate slaves during wartime—the justification Lincoln used for the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Because the Constitution never formally recognized slavery under federal law, and because its purpose was to provide for the nation’s “common defense,” the federal government could emancipate slaves as a wartime necessity, or so argued Adams and eventually Lincoln. Amar sees this as sound originalist reasoning and cites founding era politicians who warned about this very thing. During Virginia’s ratifying convention in 1788, Patrick Henry, who opposed adoption of the Constitution, cautioned that, in a future war, Congress could “liberate every one of your slaves.”
We Are the Bad Guys — The swaggering threat to global stability is us.
Hamilton Nolan, Jan 03, 2026 [How Things Work]
The most generous interpretation of the U.S. as a global actor in 2026 is that we are in the hands of a bunch of amoral, dangerous gangsters, and that the stability of the world depends on the political opponents of Trumpism winning back control of the US government before too much damage can be done. The less generous interpretation is that the many systematic political and economic flaws built into our nation—investor capitalism, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, the antidemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate, the Supreme Court—are now, at long last, bringing about the final end of the age of American global dominance. That we are, in other words, on a ship whose thin hull has finally rusted through in too many places, that is going down no matter how fast the passengers desperately try to bail it out. Which of these interpretations you believe is mostly a matter of attitude. What is not debatable is that the United States government under Donald Trump is the most dangerous force on earth, and a serious potential threat to every other nation, and the leading cause of geopolitical instability. That usually causes a backlash.
The Shared Walk; A Reflection on Jim Holt’s Excursions to the Edge of Thought
[The One Percent Rule, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]
The central claim of this book is quietly radical. It is that the deepest discoveries in mathematics and physics are not cold abstractions, but acts of human courage. Holt writes about Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel not as icons, but as walkers, talkers, companions. Einstein, near the end of his life, said he went to his office “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” That sentence alone reframes intellectual history. Discovery here is not a solitary flash but a shared persistence, sustained through conversation and mutual respect. What bound them was not merely brilliance, but a shared philosophical conviction that had left both men increasingly isolated. As Holt makes clear, Einstein and Gödel were united by their Platonism: the belief that the world is rationally organized and exists independently of our minds. In an era drifting toward indeterminacy in physics and formalism in logic, this faith in an objective, intelligible reality set them apart. Gödel was, Holt notes, “the only one of our colleagues who walked and talked on equal terms with Einstein,” not because he deferred, but because he shared the same stubborn allegiance to a universe that could still, in principle, be understood….
The West has found a way to end free speech
Ricky Hale and Council Estate Media, via Naked Capitalism 01-01-2025]
[Yves Smith: “Fine long-form treatment of the disgraceful and alarming Jacques Baud case.”]
