Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 16, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War on voting
Christopher Armitage, Aug 13, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Eighteen states have handed their complete voter files to the Trump Justice Department, the drivers license and Social Security numbers of every registered voter included. Between them, those eighteen states hold 148 US House seats, 36 Senate seats, and 184 electoral votes, roughly two thirds of what it takes to run the House, the Senate, and the White House.
A March 2025 executive order ordered states to change how they run elections and threatened to withhold federal money from the ones that refused to comply. The Justice Department went straight for the data, asking all 50 states and the District of Columbia to hand over their voter files. The Department of Homeland Security rebuilt a dormant database called SAVE so states could run those files through it for citizenship checks.
A second order, in March 2026, told the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on a federally approved list. Financial pressure was also applied via grant conditions that make states rewrite their election rules and run their rolls through SAVE or lose 20 percent of their homeland security funding, a program worth more than a billion dollars. DHS made those conditions official in July, and two dozen states sued within two weeks....
Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovensky, 08.11.26 [Talking Points Memo]
War
Pentagon Drafting New Nuclear Strategy To Expand Options for Tactical Nuclear Weapons Use
[Antiwar.com, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]
Previously reported via Scott Ritter but important not to miss.
Deep Intel on Carrier LINCOLN's Morale Crisis (YouTube video)
Ward Carroll, August 14, 2026 [YouTube]
4:53
The problem started with the loss of Fifth Fleet headquarters due to Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks early in the war, which some war planners might describe as a single point failure. According to Vice Admiral Verisimo, quote, "When Bahrain was no longer a port for logistics, food and mail, all the gear that was there when the shooting started got stuck there." So that was an initial very large backlog. That also caused us to undergo very contested logistics, very difficult and long supply lines, we had to prioritize food, which was also a challenge and remains on occasion to be a challenge. End quote.
Deadly clash aboard US carrier Abraham Lincoln leaves seven dead, several injured: Report
[Press TV, via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2026]
Seven US Navy personnel have reportedly been killed and several others wounded in a violent clash aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as growing unrest among the carrier’s crew has exposed mounting pressure inside the US military amid a prolonged deployment.
The incident erupted after an adviser to US Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Brad Cooper boarded the carrier to address mounting complaints from crew members following protests by their families over the ship’s prolonged deployment, according to Tasnim News Agency, citing an informed military source.
The adviser was reportedly met with boos and had water bottles thrown at him while addressing a gathering of personnel.
The confrontation subsequently escalated into a fight among crew members involving knives and other bladed weapons, leaving seven personnel dead and several others wounded, according to the source....
[Military Times, via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2026]
U.S. has lost 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones, roughly 25% of fleet, in Iran war
[Washington Post, summarized by Drop Site Daily: August 14, 2026]
The U.S. military has lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reaper drones during its war with Iran, representing about a quarter of the pre-war fleet and a potential taxpayer cost exceeding $1.3 billion, according to three officials cited by The Washington Post on Friday.
Ukrainian drones wipe out entire US tank brigade in live war game
[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2026]
How Iran Adapted Its Attacks as U.S. War Munitions Dwindled
[New York Times
Russian Arena-M Active Protection System Finally Comes of Age on the Battlefield
[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]
...As a first quick background, the Arena-M was originally created to stop various munitions like ATGMs and Javelins, including from “top attack” mode. These are obviously no longer a problem compared to the pervasiveness of drones. But here is test footage of an Arena-M system on a T-72B3M intercepting a small missile from a top-attack and direct trajectory as example of how it works:
The system works by having a small millimeter-wave doppler radar which detects incoming projectiles and then launches a hard-kill countermeasure that is timed and fused to explode near the tank which showers the incoming projectile with shrapnel.
Now, in a recent assault in the Dobropillya direction out of Shakhove, near Pokrovsk, Russian forces reportedly used tanks with these Arena-M systems for the first time. Footage released by the Azov Corp which defends the area showed one possible shoot down of an FPV drone by the Arena system....
But the shocker was that major pro-Ukrainian figures which included American analyst Rob Lee and a Ukrainian Special Operations veteran Dmytro Putiata spoke to the Azov units involved in the attack and learned that the Arena-M system actually worked remarkably well....
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
James Baratta, August 14, 2026 [The American Prospect]
The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, a global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog, has likened shell companies to a “getaway car” for illicit actors. For transnational criminal networks and foreign kleptocrats alike, shell companies have been instrumental in hiding assets from the prying eyes of governmental authorities. This is precisely why Congress, with strong bipartisan support, passed the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) as part of the National Defense Authorization Act six years ago. Moreover, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a U.S. senator in 2020, he touted the CTA as “the most significant anti-corruption and money laundering law in decades.”
A key plank of the CTA requires American companies and individuals to report beneficial ownership information to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which defines beneficial owners as having at least a 25 percent stake in, or “substantial control” over a company. But that requirement is going away.
The Treasury Department has published its final rule permanently exempting companies and individuals in the U.S. from disclosing beneficial ownership information. The rule also deletes all beneficial ownership data that domestic companies have already submitted to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The Treasury Department stopped enforcing the beneficial ownership information reporting requirement for American companies and individuals when it first announced the rule in March 2025. Law enforcement groups, national security experts, and small business associations have since been sounding the alarm on the rule and calling on the Treasury Department to reverse course....
A Green Light for Crooks - The Treasury has made the American economy a safe space for corruption.
Casey Michel, August 14, 2026 [The Atlantic]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2026]
Wally Rashid@wallyrashid
This means if foreigners decide to create a shell company in Delaware to fund superPACs in elections, which is illegal, there is no way of knowing. Here is AIPACs lobbying disclosure form showing they lobbied the Treasury Department and State Department on pushing this through.
[Steve Vladeck, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]
Trump Wants Black People Barred From Med School
Naomi Bethune, August 14, 2026 [The American Prospect]
By targeting medical schools for prioritizing diversity, the Trump administration insists on a century-old belief that Black people are unequipped to practice medicine....
PRIOR TO THE SUPREME COURT’S 2023 decision, the number of Black medical students was slowly trending upward. In 2024, however, the enrollment of Black medical school students fell nearly 12 percent. The Trump administration’s assault on medical school admissions practices that encouraged enrolling students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds will only compound this decline....
Heather Cox Richardson, Aug 14, 2026 [Letters from an American]
On August 10, ICE published a notice that it would spend up to $20 million on shock gloves that deliver a painful charge of electricity to subdue individuals. Jeremy White of Wired reported today that the glove is supposed to subdue someone in three seconds or less and the manufacturer warns that the device should not be used for longer than 15 seconds; no more than one pair should be used at the same time on one person; that operators must touch only arms or legs, strictly avoiding head, face, throat, chest, and groin; that gloves must not be used on the elderly, children, pregnant women, or people with severe disabilities; and that the technology must not be used to stop people from talking back, as punishment, or to torture.
Garrett Graff, August 12, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario]
Strategic Political Economy
Cory Doctorow, August 11, 2026 [Pluralistic]
In the summer of 2013, two esoteric, technical, incredibly important texts were published within weeks of one another: the first is the Snowden leaks, which revealed a system of global, pervasive digital surveillance; the second was Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a book about the economic inevitability (and political instability) of oligarchy:
https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/ ....
Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").
This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system – the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity – are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating....
Piketty shows that this holds true across markets and nations and eras: all other things being equal, the market system produces a class of hereditary aristocrats who command the world's capital and direct its deployment, despite never having done anything. The market's most lavish rewards do not go to its most productive participants, but rather, to those participants who have the good fortune to emerge from the luckiest of orifices....
Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#gates-foundation
Closer to home, Gates's hatred of public institutions led him to allocate millions to dismantling public schools and replacing them with charter schools, particularly for poor and racialized kids, with disastrous results:
And of course, Gates supported and empowered Jeffrey Epstein and his rape island:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Connection_with_Jeffrey_Epstein
Capital's tendency to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats end up setting an ever-larger proportion of our societal agenda, despite their manifest unfitness to govern and their absence of any kind of democratic legitimacy....
The Trump years are proof of this. We've reached a high-water mark for rule by illegitimate billionaire dilettantes. The second Trump admin began with DOGE's Bonfire of the Stupidities, where Musk cultists dismantled vast swathes of the American administrative state. Musk didn't just attack foreign aid – though the fact that the world's richest man murdered hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest children for the lulz isn't merely cruel, but also massively destabilizing in a way that will shake the world's politics for generations – but also domestic institutions. It was a DOGE cultist who fed the part of the NIH that tracks cyclosporin outbreaks into the wood-chipper:
https://truthout.org/articles/disease-researchers-blame-doge-cuts-for-spiraling-cyclospora-outbreak/
Today, tens of thousands of Americans are experiencing the literal enshittification of the American state, and this isn't just a human tragedy (though it is), it's also an economic tragedy, with massive knock-on effects for the businesses that rely on those sickened Americans and for the agricultural sector whose outputs are now being shunned by millions. Whether it's letting Bill Gates decide how your schools will work or letting Elon Musk decide how your public health system runs, the result is political chaos and a societal nudge away from the rule of law and towards guillotines.
Which brings me back to Snowden. The Snowden revelations did spur a global conversation about digital surveillance, with the result that the majority of the world's digital traffic is encrypted today. That's not nothing.
But the American state found new ways to conduct mass-scale, global surveillance, often by collaborating directly with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel capitalized on Big Tech's conflicted feelings about openly participating in surveillance by founding Palantir, with the express mission of murdering the political opponents of oligarchy:
https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2026/01/07/palantir-kill-communists/
Over the past decade, the steady march of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of giant global firms who collude with the US government's system of political repression in exchange for tax breaks, antitrust forbearance and fat federal contracts has yielded more mass surveillance productivity gains than the previous 25 years:
The Trump administration is the most unpopular in more than a century. Trump has stolen more money in office than any president in history. Trump presides over spiraling greedflation and collapsing buying power. The Trump administration has also presided over a titanic increase in state-aligned, privatized surveillance. The Trump years are the Flock years:
https://newrepublic.com/article/206992/flock-safety-cameras-alpr-deflock-resistance-nationwide
The Trump years are the Palantir years:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html
The Trump years are the facial recognition years:
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/ice-face-recognition
Trump's authoritarianism is a function of his misrule, and his misrule is enabled by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, the more he destroys with wars of choice, and incoherent tariff policies, and official pronouncements linking autism and vaccinations, the more he needs spy cameras, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, and facial recognition. Every time Trump talks about a third term in office, or canceling elections, or suppressing the vote, he creates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison the people this drives into the streets. The more mass surveillance there is, the safer it is for him to commit unpopular, corrupt acts. It's the world's worst self-licking ice-cream cone.
It's not just Trump, of course. Trump is the vanguard of a movement of orifice lottery winners whose delight in stealing, cheating, maiming and despoiling gives rise to political instability and requires them to divert some of their yacht money to mercenaries:
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/25/police-luigi-mangione-wealthy-ceos-threat/....
Why Peace Would Spell Ruin for the Global Elites
[Forvm Geopolitica, via Naked Capitalism 08-10-2026]
Global power shift
Why the Mecca Agreement is a necessary show of force
[Middle East Eye, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]
... What finally pushed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who had spent billions investing in US President Donald Trump, to sign a mutual defence pact with Turkey and Pakistan will be a matter for historians to work out.
But at a guess, I would say the Chinese have it right. So far there has been no official statement from the Chinese foreign ministry, but the official Xinhua agency put it like this:"America is unreliable: Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan sign a defence agreement."
China could have taken the view that the pact is an 'Islamic Nato', but it does not. Rather, it views this pact as a direct result of the US and Israel’s military disaster in Iran.
Xinhua quoted Yan Xuetong, dean emeritus of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University, who said that the war has not only prompted the Arab nations under the US military umbrella to question Washington’s actual military strength, but also its ability to protect them.
Regional states had come to realise that their national security "can not depend on the United States, but must depend on themselves", Xuetong said.
The Great Solar Wall: China doubles down on its ambitious effort to tame deserts
Victoria Bela, 6 Aug 2026 [South China Morning Post]
... Solar is poised to overtake coal as China’s largest source of installed power capacity by the end of the year, with much of it under construction in its western and northern regions, including Inner Mongolia and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, with their abundant sunshine and land.
In 2022, China’s National Development and Reform Commission issued a plan to build large-scale wind and solar projects in the arid regions – including the Gobi Desert – to reach an installed capacity of 455 gigawatts by 2030, according to Xinhua.
This would be equivalent to the capacity of around 20 of China’s Three Gorges – the largest hydroelectric facility in the world – and more than seven times the planned Yarlung Tsangpo mega-dam project.
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israel’s campaign to make southern Lebanon ‘unliveable’
Raya Jalabi in Beirut and Aditi Bhandari in London, Aug 12 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 08-15-2026]
An FT visual investigation with journalism non-profit Lighthouse Reports found systematic destruction across Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon, including tens of thousands of homes, schools, farmland and forests.Analysis of satellite imagery, open-source data and verified footage shows that much of the damage occurred after Israeli forces established control over emptied villages in mid-April. It has rendered large areas uninhabitable, destroying systems needed for civilian life, from water and energy infrastructure to medical care, a tactic rights groups and legal experts say appears designed to prevent residents’ return.“It’s an extensive, long-lasting and organised attack on the people of southern Lebanon,” said Kristine Beckerle, a deputy director at rights group Amnesty International. “If you raze everything to the ground, critical infrastructure and healthcare, if you scorch the earth, you are creating effective wastelands that are unliveable and making it very difficult for people to return to southern Lebanon.”
But weeks into the latest conflict, defence minister Israel Katz invoked a different approach, one used with devastating consequences after Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack: the “Rafah and Beit Hanoun model”, a reference to Israel’s wholesale levelling of cities in Gaza. “All homes in Lebanese villages near the border will be destroyed,” Katz said.By July, Katz claimed his threat had been carried out. “Twenty-four Lebanese villages, hundreds of years old, we destroyed all the buildings,” he said, boasting that up to 20,000 homes had been demolished. “Not house by house, but entire villages.”
Oligarchy
The Golden Billion and the New Malthusian Order
[MultiPolar Press, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]
Konstantin Malofeev, the Russian businessman, Orthodox conservative, and founder of the Tsargrad media group, has issued a stark warning about what he sees as the emerging politics of global depopulation. His argument about the “Golden Billion” begins from a simple observation. The rulers of the richest countries speak more and more often about limits: limits to population, limits to consumption, limits to energy use, limits to travel, limits to economic growth. At the same time, those who preach these limits rarely live within them. Malofeev points to a recent study proposing that the world population should fall to roughly four billion by 2200, helped by a global fertility rate of about 1.75 children per woman. He places this beside older arguments associated with the Club of Rome, the population politics of wealthy philanthropists, the private discussions of men such as Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Thiel, and the growing power of artificial intelligence. His conclusion is that these are not merely separate curiosities. They belong to a way of thinking in which human beings are treated as a burden to be reduced, measured, redirected, and controlled. The phrase “Golden Billion” gives this way of thinking a name. It does not require us to believe that a committee has written down a plan to kill seven billion people. The charge is both simpler and more serious: a small class that already possesses most of the wealth and power is building a world in which it will need fewer workers, tolerate fewer independent nations, and demand ever greater restraint from everyone below it. Malofeev is right to treat this prospect as a political danger rather than as an innocent exercise in scientific planning.
Felonomics
USAID fallout: In Nepal, when the aid workers stopped coming, the women and babies started dying
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2026]
[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 08-09-2026]
Booming Oil Profits Show Why Policymakers Can’t “Wait and See” on Gas Prices | Washington Monthly
Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, August 14, 2026 [Washington Monthly]
Recent days have seen oil companies report blowout profits on earnings call after earnings call for the second quarter of 2026—the first quarter to fully reflect the impact of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Chevron posted its highest quarterly profits ever. BP’s profits more than doubled year-over-year. Exxon also doubled its year-over-year earnings, despite losing 10 percent of its upstream production. Those three firms alone raked in average daily oil profits of over $400 million.
It isn’t surprising that the closure of the strait would benefit fossil fuel companies less reliant on the output of Middle Eastern oilfields. One particularly interesting dynamic, however, is that windfall profits are coming not just from firms’ “upstream” crude extraction segments, but also their “downstream” refining operations—which should, in theory, see thinner margins when crude prices (their input costs) are high.
Quite the opposite, refining margins have boomed over recent months. To take one example, BP’s refining margin was $12 per barrel last year. In the second quarter of this year, it was $30 per barrel, and it has reached $42 per barrel in the third.
Trump Opens Door to Foreign-Built Warships in Major Navy Shipbuilding Overhaul
[gCaptain[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2026]
U.S. Budget Deficit Hits July Record at $432 Billion
[Economic Insider, August 14, 2026]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
If You Get in a Car Crash, the Risk Is Growing Your Insurance Won’t Pay
[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 08-10-2026]
Cory Doctorow, August 14, 2026 [Pluralistic]
Health care crisis
The Economic Populist, Aug 10, 2026 [Economi
c Liberties]
The practice of health insurance conglomerates requiring prior authorization for medical treatment — in many cases, medically necessary treatments — and their corporate affiliates then adjudicating those requests for coverage has become not just a massive, costly barrier between patients and the care their doctors prescribe, but one that threatens the health and lives of patients. In a new report, Economic Liberties calls for banning prior authorization as it exists today, rife with conflicts of interest. We document how the practice erodes care quality while inflating costs.
In conjunction with the report, co-author Hannah Garden-Monheit, a senior fellow at Economic Liberties, published an op-ed at MS NOW, recounting how her own father paid the price for needless denials....
Yale Study: Medicare for All Would Save Over 114,000 Lives and $1 Trillion a Year
Jessica Corbett, August 11, 2026 [CommonDreams]Previous research has shown that shifting the United States to a Medicare for All system could save roughly 68,000 lives and $650 billion per year, but a new study by experts at Yale University suggests the savings would likely be even greater on both fronts.
A New Piece of the Puzzle of Covid’s Origin
[The New Atlantis, via Naked Capitalism 08-09-2026]
Predatory finance
[Notes on the Crises
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
[BettBeat, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2026]
Zorro Ranch, Jeffrey Epstein, and Donald Trump's Justice Department
Joyce Vance, Aug 11, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
Last week, New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued DOJ for access to unredacted Epstein-related investigative files that he says the Justice Department has been withholding. He alleges in his lawsuit that in 2019, the Department “directed” the state to pause an initial criminal investigation into Epstein’s activities at Zorro Ranch outside of Santa Fe, and promised “to share relevant information when their work concluded.” That would have been during the first Trump administration.
The lawsuit accuses DOJ of “refusing to facilitate the investigation of state law crimes by hiding information about Epstein and his co-conspirators from Attorney General Torrez and state law enforcement, when New Mexico is one of few jurisdictions that still may have an opportunity to hold Epstein’s associates accountable or otherwise provide some sense of justice to survivors....
Christopher Armitage, Aug 09, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Sufficient evidence rests in the public record, and opening a criminal investigation requires far less than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. This all rests on the New Mexico Attorney General.
Controversial group wins $158M-contract to represent unaccompanied immigrant children
[NPR, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2026]
[Conor Gallagher: "Not a good look, especially considering Epstein’s links to Customs and Border Protection."]
Fiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing
Jesse Coburn, August 12, 2026 [ProPublica]
General Dynamics opened a Texas factory to churn out artillery shells for Ukraine, but the machines kept breaking. Robot arms smashed into things. Hunks of metal crashed to the floor. There was even a real-life dumpster fire.
Restoring balance to the economy
Mamdani Backs Proposal to End Amazon’s ‘Exploitative’ Delivery Model in New York City
Julia Conley, August 11, 2026 [CommonDreams]
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has thrown his support behind legislation that could become a first-in-the-nation law to regulate Amazon’s network of subcontractors that deliver the $3 trillion company’s packages—an “exploitative business model” that shields the e-commerce giant from accountability, as Mamdani said Monday.
The Democratic mayor endorsed the Delivery Protection Act, proposed by New York City Council Member Tiffany Cabán, which would establish new safety, training, and labor standards for “last-mile” warehouses and distribution facilities in New York City, and hold the companies that operate the facilities, such as Amazon and FedEx, liable for employing the workers who make hundreds of deliveries per day across the city....
According to a report by the Office of the Comptroller in New York City last year, 78% of areas surrounding last-mile facilities saw an increase in injury-causing crashes after the warehouses opened.
“Corporations like Amazon build billion-dollar business models by insulating themselves from accountability through a system of exploitative subcontracting,” said Mamdani in a statement. “As last-mile delivery centers have exploded across New York, so too have traffic accidents and worker injuries. The Delivery Protection Act is commonsense regulation that protects delivery workers, safeguards the communities where these facilities operate, and ensures that the corporations benefiting from workers’ labor are responsible for the consequences of their business practices.” ....
Disrupting mainstream economics
Understanding economics: What is the economy for?
Richard Murphy, August 10, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Infographic: What is the economy for?
Richard Murphy, August 10, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Richard Murphy, August 13, 2026 [Funding the Future]
The wealthy do not flee because of tax
Richard Murphy, August 13, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Documents show how feds spied on protesters, left-wing organizations and unions during Metro Surge
[Minnesota Reformer, via Naked Capitalism 08-14-2026]
Matt Stoller, Aug 09, 2026 [BIG]
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 08-13-2026]
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 08-09-2026]
Google co-founder has spent more than $100 million fighting California billionaire tax proposal
[ndtvprofit on Instagram, summarized by Drop Site Daily, August 11, 2026]
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has donated an additional $20 million to Build a Better California, bringing his total spending against the state’s proposed billionaire tax to more than $100 million, Tech Crunch reported, as he seeks to avoid an estimated $13.3 billion tax payment.
California’s Prop 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of roughly 200 billionaires in the state to help fund healthcare programs.
Other tech figures including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have taken steps to avoid the assessment, though Jensen Huang, the co-founder of Nvidia, has said he would be “perfectly fine” paying the tax, which voters will decide on in November.
Big Tech Wants to Harvest Your Thoughts
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 08-13-2026]
Private intelligence firms selling surveillance dossiers on AI, data center critics
[The American Prospect, summarized by Drop Site Daily, August 11, 2026]
Private intelligence firms including RANE Network, Kroll, and Liferaft are marketing dossiers and monitoring services on critics of artificial intelligence and data centers, framing grassroots opposition to server farms and AI expansion in counterterrorism-style language, according to documents obtained by The American Prospect.
RANE offered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission a tailored assessment of “anti-technology sector sentiment” in March 2025 and later held a webinar warning of threats from protesters including creatives, environmentalists, laid-off workers, and civil liberties advocates.
The commercial offerings coincide with “anti-tech extremism” memos from federal agencies.
Read the full report from The American Prospect here.
Climate and environmental crises
London Recorded Its First Month Without Rain Since Measurements Started 150 Years Ago
[ZME Science, via Naked Capitalism 08-09-2026]
Hoover Dam Is Losing Power as the Colorado River Crisis Deepens
[Popular Mechanics, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]
Rhine River Hits Record Low, Deepening Shipping Crisis
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2026]
Democrats' political malpractice
Health Insurers Are Paying Third Way as It Targets the Left
[Sludge, via Naked Capitalism 08-13-2026]
Leak: Top Democratic Org’s “Anti-Extremism” Project Targets Left
Ken Klippenstein , via Naked Capitalism 08-15-2026]
Dean Obeidallah, August 14, 2026
In the past when a politician like Bernie Sanders—or even Donald Trump in 2016 campaign—said “the economy is rigged” by the “billionaire class,” it was an applause line for a subset of Americans. Today that is the reality that transcends party lines and resonates across the nation.
I heard that first-hand Sunday, when I was on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” answering questions from viewers for about 45 minutes. What I heard from people calling on the Republican, Democratic and Independent phone lines in that time—as well as in the 30 minutes before I was on—backed up what I hear from many who call my SiriusXM show.
That is this simple truth: People are not happy. In fact, many are angry. And those feelings are born out of a deep sense of frustration. People believe the economic system is rigged against them by the rich and powerful. I even heard that in the message of Republicans who called on C-SPAN to disagree with me on specific issues but they all at some point landed on that point.
We all see the rich literally getting richer in front of us....
Third Way Doesn’t Care About the Democratic Party
Jason Linkins, August 15, 2026 [The New Republic]
... As Robert Reich wrote this week, “If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way ... you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.” Third Way’s donor base is a “Trojan horse” packed to the gills with scoundrels: Wall Street cretins and private equity goons; “members of the GOP-aligned American Legislative Exchange Council,” best known for producing cookie-cutter right-wing legislation that is diametrically at odds with just about every Democratic Party policy priority; and supporters of the Republican Attorneys General Association, “which helps elect Republicans who fight federal environmental and other regulations.” In addition, Reich points out that two of the organization’s former honorary co-chairs are Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Enough said! (Sludge’s David Moore also reported this week that Third Way has received donations from health insurance interests that undoubtedly oppose Medicare for All, which was the centerpiece of El-Sayed’s campaign.)
Bidenomics Was More Successful Than People Think
[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 08-13-2026]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The Christian Nationalist Plan for America Has a Fatal Flaw
[WA Lawrence, via Naked Capitalism 08-11-2026]
Atheism, Nationalism, and the Conductor of the American Christianity Crazy Train
J. Basil Dannebohm [via Naked Capitalism 08-10-2026]
... Recently, a well-known Catholic journalist was cheerfully ridiculed on social media by a priest who declared with religious conviction that the journalist was, “A waste of baptismal water because he refuses to debate his liberal theological views.”
I’ve received similar messages from pastors, “influencers,” armchair theologians, and converts whose chrism has not even dried yet, all of whom suggest that my interpretation of the Gospel is “naïve,” “liberal,” “consumed with social justice,” “a victim of the heresy of empathy,” and “far too centered on the message of Christ, rather than the messages handed down by the Holy Spirit through sacred tradition.” ....
I don’t know about that Catholic journalist, but I’m not going to “debate” my “liberal theological views,” I’m going to live them.
I’ve been told I “disrupt the peace.”
That’s probably true.
I may be persona non-grata in at least two of the historical branches of Christianity, but let’s be honest: Sitting in a building for an hour on Sundays doesn’t make someone a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes someone a Chevrolet. Judas Iscariot is proof that you can be part of a dynamic movement with an amazing shepherd and still become the devil’s stooge if your heart is not genuinely committed to the very Christ you claim to worship....
Conservatives meet to make birthright citizenship their long-term project
Myah Ward [Politico, via newsletter.scotusblog.com, Aug 10, 2026]
Before President Donald Trump on Thursday “unveiled two new executive orders narrowing birthright citizenship and cracking down on ‘birth tourism’ schemes,” efforts were already underway among conservatives to energize a movement against the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling. “The president’s allies said they plan to make ending birthright citizenship a recurring topic at conferences and law schools where the next generation of lawyers will be trained,” according to Politico. “They turned birthright citizenship into the next Roe v. Wade, that we’re going to have to spend the next 50 years overturning,” said Mike Davis, the founder of Article III Project, a Trump-aligned legal organization, at a late-July event on the issue.
The Republicans Are Going to Kill People—but Not Until After They Vote
Norman J. Ornstein, August 16, 2026 [The New Republic]
In the Big Beautiful Bill, the GOP put off Medicaid cuts until after midterms. America is about to find out why.
The Enemy Is the Platform - How a party without an ideology found something better than one
Mike Brock, Aug 10, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
... a man who thinks in stories is governed by whoever writes them. From 1954 to 1962 the writer was General Electric. Reagan spent eight years as host of GE Theater and as the company’s traveling ambassador, visiting all 139 GE plants under the tutelage of Lemuel Boulware, the GE vice president whose union-breaking communications strategy was so distinctive that labor law still carries the word “Boulwarism.” Thomas Evans’s The Education of Ronald Reagan documents the conversion in detail: a former union president — Reagan led the Screen Actors Guild — was systematically steeped in free-market fundamentalism, anti-communism, low taxes, and limited government, on a corporate salary, in front of corporate audiences, for nearly a decade. Reagan himself called the GE years his “postgraduate education in political science”. He was not wrong. He just never asked who designed the curriculum, or why. The Cold War made the manipulation frictionless: with actual Soviet communism supplying the contrast, everything Boulware’s people handed him — every statistic about creeping collectivism, every parable of bureaucratic strangulation — slotted cleanly into the one big story Reagan already believed, the story of free men against the machine. Business interests did not have to corrupt Reagan. They only had to cast him.
Trump Is a Wood-Chipper - Imagine you put your arm into a wood-chipper
Mike Brock, Aug 10, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
The chipper does what a chipper does. It takes the arm. You stand there, blood-slick and swaying, and you say to the machine, “that was really low of you to take my arm.” Then you feed it the other one. You say, “well, that was a new low.” ....
That is what commentary about Donald Trump has become. Every week the same sentence: Trump has reached a new low. Every week the columnist stands, blood-slick, marveling at the machine.
The problem is not that the sentence is wrong. The problem is that the sentence is a category error....
Trump is a wood-chipper. This is not a metaphor about cruelty, though he is cruel. It is a claim about what kind of object he is in the sentence. Nine years of public record — the Access Hollywood tape, the family-separation policy, the mocking of a disabled reporter, the Muslim ban, the pardons, the coup attempt, the second-term deportation operations, the meme-coin grift, the pardoning of the January 6 attackers, the deployment of masked federal agents into American cities, the trade in political prosecutions, the demolition of the East Wing — do not compose a descent. They compose a specification. What the machine does when it is running is what it has always done when it is running. The pattern is not the story. The pattern is the machine....
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Justice Samuel Alito: ‘Practical Originalism’ and Its Facile Critics
James Taranto [The Wall Street Journal, via newsletter.scotusblog.com, Aug 10, 2026]
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Justice Samuel Alito shared that he will not leave the court this summer. “Obviously I’m here for another term,” he said. Alito reflected on the speculation surrounding his retirement decision, including calls from conservatives for him to leave the court while Republicans control the White House and Senate. “It’s not pleasant, in the sense that it’s a reminder of mortality,” he said. “It’s like, what are those vultures doing up there? They are flying around. But it goes with life tenure.” Alito also discussed critiques of his work on the court, including the claim that he is “especially vulnerable to a charge of partisanship.” “I vote in every case the way I think the case should be decided,” he said. “If that means a high correlation with what Trump wants, fine. If it means zero correlation with what Trump wants, fine as well. I think it’s wrong, it’s absolutely wrong, to say, ‘Well, you know what? I’m going to decide some cases this way and some cases the other way so that people will say, “Well, he’s objective, because sometimes he favors this side and other times he favors that side.”’”
How Democrats can repair the broken Supreme Court
Sen. Adam Schiff [Los Angeles Times, via newsletter.scotusblog.com, Aug 13, 2026]
In a column for the Los Angeles Times, Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat representing California, argued that “[f]uture Democratic majorities in Congress — perhaps starting as soon as January — should make repairing the [Supreme Court] and reforming the judicial branch a priority to make sure it does not continue to operate as a partisan and retrograde institution.” Specifically, he called on Democrats to “enact term limits for Supreme Court justices,” “expand the number of justices sitting on the court to reflect the expanded size of our nation,” and “create an enforceable code of ethics, bringing this court under the same set of rules of accountability as other leaders privileged to be in public service.” “These proposals would help restore balance and credibility to the court,” Schiff wrote.
[TW: Term limits won't really do much so long as the pipeline by which young conservatives are indoctrinated into "law and economy" and "unitary executive theory" remains open. Though I think there is a strong case to be made that such indoctrinated ideologues are far more likely to run aground on an enforceable code of ethics.]
Justice Samuel Alito made up to $2.9 million from fossil fuel holdings since 2005
[The Guardian, summarized by Drop Site Daily, August 12, 2026]
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito gained between $390,000 and $2.9 million from oil and gas interests between 2005 and 2024, according to an analysis by judicial watchdog Court Accountability shared exclusively with the Guardian.
Most of the gains stemmed from a Grady County, Oklahoma property in which Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, holds a mineral interest, along with an inherited ExxonMobil stock bequest.
The findings come as the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments on October 5 in a case where Suncor Energy and Exxon are seeking to block subnational governments from suing fossil fuel producers over climate effects.
Civic republicanism
Corporate Power Approaches Escape Velocity
Hamilton Nolan, Aug 14, 2026 [How Things Work]
If corporations become more powerful than national governments, we are all in trouble. The reason for this is straightforward: Corporations are not real objects. They do not exist in nature. They are legal fictions created according to a set of laws that dictate what they can and cannot do. Those laws, which quite literally create corporations, are made by governments. The rights of corporations and the limits of their operations are entirely dictated by governments, which write the laws and administer the courts that both enable corporations to exist and make money, and put boundaries on them. If governments lose their ability to draw hard lines on the behavior of corporations—if corporations become so powerful that governments are no longer able to tell them what to do—then corporations become the supreme power on earth.
This is bad, obviously, but it is worth stating why it is bad. It is bad because governments, while imperfect and sometimes even malignant in many ways, ultimately derive their legitimacy from the will of the governed. Legitimate governments, good governments, democratic governments are obligated by some scrutable process to work for the public good, as they define it. We all know the many ways that this can go awry, but when governments are bad, we can tell that they are bad because they fail on their most basic task of empowering themselves with the will of the public to increase the public good.
That’s not what corporations do at all. Corporations care not for the public good, nor for the public’s very existence. Corporations are robots, algorithms—AI programs, if you like—that work for the lone goal of increasing profits. Their definition is the same as that of cancer. They grow without regard to the good of the larger body....
The Mentor - How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything
Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark, August 3, 2026 [The New Yorker]
