Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 08, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
Rubio Says the US Launched a War With Iran Because Israel Was Planning To Attack
Dave DeCamp, March 2, 2026 [DefendDemocracy.Press]
“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States, Israel, or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States,” Rubio told reporters.
“If we stood and waited for that attack to come first, before we hit them, we would have suffered much higher casualties. And so the president made the very wise decision — we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces,” he said.
Rubio’s comments align with reporting from The New York Times that said when Tucker Carlson recently met with President Trump and tried to convince him not to launch a war with Iran, the president said he had no choice but to join a strike that Israel would launch….
How The War With Iran Was Bought By Adelson Money.
[The Dissident, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
The current unfolding American/Israeli war on Iran was in large part bought by two of Trump’s largest pro-Israel donors, the late Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam.
In 2016, when Trump first ran for president, the Washington Post reported that , “The couple gave a total of more than $21.2 million to Trump’s cause, contributing to several organizations, including Trump’s campaign, Republican committees and a pro-Trump super PAC, according to federal finance disclosures.”
This money, in large part, was given in exchange for Trump to carry out Israel’s desired policy on Iran….
Trump, looking back at his first term as president, has not hidden the influence Adelson’s money had on his Middle East policy.
During a speech to the Israeli Knesset Trump boasted, “Miriam and Sheldon would come into the office. They’d call me, he’d call me. I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else I can think of … she loves Israel. But she loves it, and they would come in, and her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him. He was a very aggressive, very supportive of me. And, he’d call up, ‘Can I come over and see you?’ I’d say, ‘Sheldon, I’m the President of the United States, it doesn’t work that way.’ He’d come in”.
Trump similarly boasted on the campaign trail in 2024 that, “Miriam and Sheldon would come into the White House probably almost more than anybody outside of people that work there. And they were always after — and as soon as I’d give them something — always for Israel. As soon as I’d give them something, they’d want something else”, and last year boasted , “Sheldon was an amazing guy, and he’d come up to the office, and there was nobody more aggressive than Sheldon. he’d always say 10 minutes, it turned out to be about an hour-and-a-half, and what he did is he fought for Israel. He just wanted to take care of Israel”….
Dean Obeidallah, Mar 07, 2026
... the CIA together with British intelligence … devised what came to be known as “Operation Ajax” to remove Mosaddeq from power and reinstate the pro-Westen, pro-big oil Shah. [Mosaddeq was the Iranian premier who tried to terminate British ownership and control of Iran’s oil fields.]
The CIA and Britain’s MI-6 orchestrated the arrest of Mosaddegh, who was charged and convicted of treason. He lost power and remained under house arrest for the rest of his life. (In 2013, the CIA finally admitted their role in removing Mosaddeq.)
That ended democracy in Iran. In return, the Shah gave the Western oil companies exactly what they wanted and that was massive profits from Iranian oil by way of a new agreement.
But the United States under various administrations was far from done with the Shah and oppressing the people of Iran. From there, the Shah began to dismantle the judicial system, suspended civil liberties, extinguish dissent, etc.
And worse, he did it with the help of the United States. As one Iranian dissident detailed in 1979, The Shah created his brutal secret police known as SAVAK that suppressed dissent using torture and killings, all “under the friendly guidance of the CIA.”
How MI6 Laid Iran War's Foundations
Kit Klarenberg, Mar 03, 2026
In October 2008, The Daily Telegraph reported on a leaked assessment of then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama, prepared by London’s ambassador to Washington. While identifying many areas of consensus, it foresaw a “potential clash” between Downing Street and an impending Obama administration, over Iran “his desire for ‘unconditional’ dialogue with Iran.” This was at odds with Britain’s commitment to the UNSC’s “requirement of prior suspension of enrichment before the nuclear negotiations proper can begin.” It was thus necessary to change the future White House incumbent’s thinking.
Unbeknownst publicly, during this time MI6 was embroiled in a covert operation to “develop understanding” among foreign governments of the Islamic Republic’s apparent quest for nukes, and therefore “pressurise Iran to negotiate.” A leaked CV of Nicholas Langman, longtime British intelligence dark arts specialist and head of MI6’s Iran Department 2006 - 2008, boasts how he “generated confidence” in its assessment Tehran secretly had a dedicated program to develop nuclear weapons among “European, US and Middle Eastern agencies.”
Asawin Suebsaeng and Prem Thakker, Mar 07, 2026 [Zeteo]
… In recent days, US officials and other close allies have privately briefed Trump that if he wants to achieve what he says he wants to achieve in his illegal war – including “unconditional surrender” by the Iranian government – then he is going to have to deploy ground troops to Iran, four knowledgeable sources in or close to the Trump-Vance administration tell Zeteo.
Trump, the sources say, has been receptive to these ideas, and he and others around him have been leaning toward sending in the troops. While no final decision has been made yet, internal momentum at top levels of the government is rapidly headed in that direction….
[TW: It should be clear by now that Trump is not getting the truth from his circle of lickspittles and sycophants. This has been a recurring problem in the history of government and business, and inevitably lead to some disaster or another (pdf). So set aside your initial reaction that these bastards are insane and stupid, and understand that Trump is making decisions on highly misleading advice and limited, carefully screened information. The Zeteo article continues:]
In multiple conversations over the past few days, several of these officials and outside advisers have told the president that a more limited, smaller deployment of special forces will almost certainly not be enough, and that he’d need to send further ground troops to get what he wants….
Some Republicans close to Trump have assured him – however flimsily – that this kind of troop deployment could be achieved without creating the type of Iraq War 2.0-style quagmire in the Middle East that the president and his top officials have long publicly railed against….
“He likes the idea of special forces,” a Trump administration official tells Zeteo. “But they’re telling him he has to go bigger to end this once and for all.”
Saudi Oil Storage Filling Fast, Kayrros Says
Rong Wei Neo, March 04, 2026 [Bloomberg, via feedspot.com]
Major oil storage sites in Saudi Arabia are filling rapidly as the key export route through the Strait of Hormuz effectively remains closed to shipping, according to geospatial analytics company Kayrros.
The Ju'aymah terminal on the country’s east coast "was quickly running out of spare capacity" as of March 1, Kayrros co-founder and chief analyst Antoine Halff wrote in a post on LinkedIn. Four of the six tanks at the Ras Tanura refinery - halted after attacks by Iran this week - were full, he said.
Iraq has started shutting oil production at its biggest fields due to the closure of the strait, and Halff said spare storage capacity at the Basrah terminal was less than two days of exports. OPEC's second-biggest producer has very few tanks compared with output levels and exports, he added….
The U.S. will cover shipping losses in the Gulf, Trump says
Drop Site Daily: March 4, 2026
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday the United States will help cover financial losses for tankers or cargo ships attacked or blocked while transiting the Gulf, and directed the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to provide government-backed political risk insurance for shipping companies operating in the region. Trump also said the U.S. Navy could begin escorting oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz “as soon as possible.” Under normal conditions, about 80 oil and gas tankers cross the Strait of Hormuz daily, but shipping data from Kpler, analyzed by the New York Times, show only three tankers crossed since Monday. Brent crude prices hit $84 a barrel, up more than 15% since before the war and at its highest price since July 2024.
Spencer Ackerman, 4 Mar 2026 [foreverwars]
...the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), has received "200 calls from more than 50 military installations across all the services" describing commanders who frame the Iran War for their soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen in terms like: "President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth." [As a Christian I just want to point out that the signal fire imagery is not from the Book of Revelation but from the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies.—Sam]
Jonathan Larsen broke the story, and quotes MRRF's founder-president, Air Force retiree Mikey Weinstein: "Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end of the world eschatology." ….
The Sinister Epstein/Rothschild War against Iran - the 'Biblical War' leading to 'Armageddon'
[via Naked Capitalism 03-07-2025]
Iran’s Winning Strategy Shakes the World’s Biggest Military
[Global Geopolitics, via Naked Capitalism 03-07-2025]
Why the US is facing strategic defeat
[Policy Tensor, via Naked Capitalism 03-07-2025]
...What is the solution to this problem? If Iranian capabilities cannot be degraded for at least four months, the costs to the world economy and the United States would be intolerable. We will see a global inflation shock, global monetary tightening, a food crisis as the fertilizer shock cuts the next crop in half, and almost certainly a global recession. It will destroy the Trump presidency; it will destroy the GOP for a generation; and it would finally end the entrapment of the United States by its junior geopolitical ally.
Is there a military solution? What can the US do? John Warden’s decapitation idea was supposed to work. It did not. There is absolutely no sign of any political instability in Iran. “Zero” as a senior European official told the Washington Post….
But it gets worse still. I wrote about the implications of our mature precision strike regime that Krepinevich predicted in the early 1990s. This is “an international military order where standoff precision-strike capabilities have diffused far beyond the technologically-advanced great powers,” I wrote. But even I underestimated the Iranians.
The Iranians are not just deploying hypersonic missiles that the US has been unable to develop. They don’t just have the largest missile arsenal in the Middle East. Recent military developments have revealed surprising Iranian reconnaissance-strike capabilities.
The Iranians have managed to hit every single American military base in the region. But that is not the half of it. THAAD is one of the most powerful ballistic missile defense system in the world. If anything should be invulnerable to attack, it is this system. The Iranians have managed to hit and likely disabled every single THAAD battery in the region; all five of them….
...The all-important interdiction campaign to degrade Iranian capabilities has suffered a massive setback. That is why the US is rushing a third aircraft carrier to the region: because the US can barely use nearby air bases, it has to rely on naval aviation to fill in the gap….
The Failure of US and Israeli Air Defense
Larry C. Johnson, 6 March 2026 [Sonar21]
[TW: Johnson lists the known damage to US installations hit by Iranian drones and missiles.]
Iranian Attacks On Prized Missile Defense Radars Are A Wake-Up Call
Joseph Trevithick, Tyler Rogoway, Mar 7, 2026 [The War Zone]
Iran War: fmr IDF Soldier & Historian Omer Bartov
Daniel Davis [YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 03-07-2025]
‘Insane This Is Legal’: Democrats Allege Trumpworld Insiders May Be Betting on War in Iran
[NOTUS, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
Monopoly Round-Up: The Epstein Class Launches a War
Matt Stoller, Mar 01, 2026 [BIG]
I’ve long noticed the endless parade of investors heading over to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, getting investments for everything from banking to artificial intelligence. Elon Musk secured money from the Saudis for his AI venture and his takeover of Twitter, Sam Altman sought billions from Abu Dhabi, Anthropic went after money from UAE and Qatar. And JP Morgan, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Blackrock and Citigroup are competing heavily in the region.
And this trend is not new. In the 1970s, newly wealthy oil princes suddenly found themselves with over four hundred billion dollars, and had to put it somewhere. The deposited it in American banks, who then lent it all over the world, in what was known as “petrodollar recycling.” The corporate, banking, and oil prince worlds have only drawn closer and closer since. In the early 1980s, the merger boom unleashed by the Bork revolution started in the oil patch, and endless waves of mergers have been financed by Arab money. In the 2000s, on a political level, the Bush family linked Texas, the CIA, and the Saudis. In 2013, Al Gore sold his CurrentTV channel to the government of Qatar for $500 million. And in the shale revolution of the 2010s, Texas producers joined Saudi-led OPEC to keep oil prices high.
Today, the Middle East is full of investors in every major venture in the U.S., and most of our think tanks and diplomatic corps are part of that world. Arab elites are also part of the Western establishment. For instance, the giant video game company Electronic Arts was bought with Saudi money, in part because the Saudi prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is a gamer. He also brought the top U.S. comedians to his country for the Riyadh Comedy Festival last year.
The cultures are now so close that Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan had a private jet painted with the Dallas Cowboys logo, as he was good friend with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and loved American football. Indeed, while there’s a longstanding pretense of Arab antisemitism and dislike of Israel, it’s notable that both Arab and Israeli elites, including MBS and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, were extensively involved in the network of Jeff Epstein.
Dark money–funded think tanks pushed Iran regime change
[Drop Site Daily, March 2, 2026]
Conservative dark money networks funneled millions into think tanks advocating regime change, including the Center for Security Policy and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Donors Trust, tied to conservative legal strategist Leonard Leo and funded in part by billionaire Barre Seid, gave more than $2.7 million to the Center for Security Policy between 2020 and 2023, while the Sarah Scaife Foundation, financed by the Mellon oil fortune, provided over $1.6 million to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies during the same period. The groups have publicly urged the Iranian public to overthrow its government and warned of threats to the United States. Report from The Lever available here.
Les Leopold, Mar 02, 2026
It’s obvious that Trump loves the feel of power. It no doubt gives him a rush more intoxicating than any drug. He is the ruler of the strongest nation in the history of the world, but he doesn’t have the freedom to unilaterally act on domestic affairs, although he constantly tries. The courts are in the way, as is popular dissent. Judges and citizens are preventing him from exerting his will, even making him change course by removing troops and immigration forces. And it will, he surely knows, get even worse if the Democrats gain control of either house of Congress.
But he has a free hand in foreign affairs. The Supreme Court won’t stop him and there is no international court that the U.S. recognizes, nor does he believe he is morally bound by international law. He couldn’t care less about the U.N., and he hopes that military engagement against the weak makes him look strong to the American public. Also, in Iran’s case, a war with a quick victory has the added benefit of possibly improving his paltry approval ratings by diverting public attention away from “affordability” and the Epstein files. Already the joke is that they should have called the Iran adventure, “Operation Epic Epstein.
Twitter List: Middle East Sources
Thomas Neuburger, March 01, 2026 [God's Spies]
The list is actively curated — feeds are added or deleted based on their value as sources of information, whether they are possibly wrong or not. Many pass on videos of announcements — Israeli, Iranian, etc. — and many post war footage often from cell phone sources.
Some of these posters are strongly opinionated, so be warned, while many are less biased analysts. Not every post is of value — true of all lists — but I try to keep the percentages relatively high.
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Last Night In Texas We Saw The Future: More Voter Suppression
Joyce Vance, Mar 04, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
On Tuesday in Texas, Democratic voters in Dallas and Williamson Counties, Texas, had their work cut out for them if they wanted to vote. They had to figure out, on the day of, where their polling places were. That’s because the local Republican parties backed out of the years-long tradition of holding joint primaries, and that information wasn’t communicated widely. One voter reported showing up at his polling place and being sent somewhere else, a 15-minute drive away, only to be told to return to the original location. This is just flat-out voter suppression— designed to deny people their right to vote….
According to posters on Twitter who had receipts in the form of videos like this one, Black and Brown voters showed up to vote, only to be told that the polling place was “only for Republicans.” ….
I hate the advice I’m about to give, because it should be easy for every qualified American to vote, but the reality is, we are going to have to work hard and fight to be able to exercise that right this year. That means:
Advance planning so you can register to vote, stay registered, vote, and make sure your vote is counted (I write about this in detail in my book, Giving Up is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy)
Using your financial resources to obtain, and if you can, help others get the ID they need through groups like VoteRiders.
Getting involved with your local League of Women Voters to help spread advance education about polling places and voting requirements in your community.
...The time to figure out where you’re going to plug in is now. There are lots of groups who will warmly welcome you. Sharing information with friends and family is critically important, and something each of us can to do make sure everyone is up to date or important details like changes in polling places.
But there’s more.
Last month, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion in U.S. Postal Service v. Konan. He held that the government could not be sued for intentional nondelivery of mail. That, of course, includes mail-in ballots. The decision was 5-4. In a dissent authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor argued that the majority delivered far more protection from lawsuits to the Postal Service than Congress had intended to give it and that it’s not “the role of the Judiciary to supplant the choice Congress made because it would have chosen differently.”
But choose differently, the majority did. Although Konan is about the delivery of residential mail, its impact on voting will be far-reaching, removing any consequences of even intentional misdelivery or withholding of mail-in ballots….
[The Guardian, via The Big Picture, March 01, 2026]
When Karen Newton left home in late July 2025, she knew that international travellers were being locked up in immigration detention centres in the US. “I was aware,” she nods. “But I never thought it would have any impact on my holiday.” Karen, 65, had a British passport and a tourist visa.
At first, Karen was bewildered. “There was no reason to hold me,” she says. “Bill’s an adult. Why am I held responsible for him?” When she asked why she was being detained, an officer told her his supervisor had instructed him to hold her. The hours ticked by. “It was scary. You have no way of knowing what’s going to happen. It got darker and darker. And then other agents turned up with all these chains and handcuffs.”
...So why did ICE detain her, and keep her locked up for so long? A possible answer began to emerge over the weeks she was incarcerated. As Karen got to know the guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center where she was held, she kept hearing the same thing from them: that ICE officers are paid a bonus every time they detain someone. “Individual ICE agents get money per head that they detain – the guards told me that,” Karen says….
Karen and Bill were shackled at the wrists , waist and ankles and bundled into a vehicle. Karen doesn’t know how long they were on the road for. “It just seemed to be a never-ending day.” They arrived at Sweetgrass border patrol station in Montana in the middle of the night, and were held there for three days, sharing a cell without beds; they slept on mats on the floor, under foil blankets. “I was very nervous and frightened the whole time. And I was chilled to the bone – I couldn’t warm up.”
They were interviewed separately. Karen was not offered a lawyer; she wasn’t entitled to one, she says, because she had been detained, rather than arrested….
Bill had been working in the US with a valid work permit, but did not have a green card – fed up with the appeals process, he had decided to leave and retire back in the UK. Karen was told that she was “guilty by association”, and that she had broken the terms of her valid B2 tourist visa by helping her husband pack for the trip. “It just went from crazy to ridiculous. It felt like they just wanted an excuse to detain me.”
At Largest ICE Detention Camp, Staff Bet on Detainee Suicides, AP Reports
Katie Herchenroeder, March 07, 2025 [Mother Jones]
DoJ cases against protesters keep collapsing as officers’ lies are exposed in court
[The Guardian, via The Big Picture, March 01, 2026]
A string of embarrassing defeats for prosecutors as federal agents’ testimony falls apart under scrutiny as experts condemn DoJ effort to cast people as ‘violent perpetrators’. The pattern is hard to ignore.
How Trump Keeps Withholding Money After Being Sued 198 Times
Emily Badger and Alicia Parlapiano [The New York Times, via scotusblog.com, Mar 5, 2026]
The New York Times has published an in-depth look at lawsuits over the Trump administration’s changes to a variety of government funding programs, including its efforts to keep funds from communities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement and from organizations that promote DEI programs. The analysis includes 198 lawsuits and notes that the “[w]hen plaintiffs have sought immediate relief, district court judges have temporarily blocked the administration’s actions 79 percent of the time, signaling plaintiffs’ likely success on the merits. In the 26 instances where district judges have issued partial or final rulings, the administration lost 23.” By comparison, “appellate courts have reversed or paused orders against the administration in about 40 percent of their rulings.” The article noted that the Supreme Court’s June ruling “ending nationwide injunctions” has lessened the impact of lower court losses, which helps explain why the Trump administration has persisted with its plan to withhold funding from groups it disagrees with even in the face of so many lawsuits.
Corey G. Johnson, Brandon Roberts and Al Shaw, March 5, 2026 [ProPublica]
ProPublica is releasing a trove of disclosure records that detail the finances of more than 1,500 Trump appointees, including former lobbyists, industry executives and at least a dozen officials who declined to identify former clients.
Strategic Political Economy
Stop the Corporate Looting That Makes Billionaires
Lynn Parramore [Institute for New Economic Thinking, via Naked Capitalism 03-06-2025]
[Yves Smith: This article argues that wealth taxes are far too late an intervention to tackle the problem of ever-widening income inequality. It’s that the system is set up to allow too much extraction by corporate executives and shareholders, particularly via share buybacks, which allow companies to manipulate equity prices by not investing in the business of their business. Some indicators: in the early 2000s, Warren Buffett declared the corporate profit share of GPD, then at about 6%, to be unsustainably high. It has been at close to twice that level in recent years. Similarly, someone who goes into asset management is twice as likely to become a billionaire as a counterpart who works in tech.]
...Economist William Lazonick, a long-time critic of the way many U.S. corporations are run, argues that targeting individual fortunes treats the symptom, not the disease. The real engine of inequality is structural: corporate and financial practices that concentrate wealth among shareholders while short-changing other stakeholders who should be benefiting from corporate profits — and too often creating little of real value to society.
Most billionaires don’t “earn” their fortunes through work. They build wealth by owning stock in corporations. Executives and boards pump up dividends and stock prices, often using stock buybacks, which rocket their own pay into the stratosphere. Managers and professionals with stock options or stock awards can cash in too – but only if they keep their jobs. Everyone else — most workers and the wider public that depends on taxing corporate profits to fund schools, roads, and healthcare — gets left behind.
This shareholder-first model (famously called “the dumbest idea in the world” by former GE CEO Jack Welch), encourages executives and investors to treat companies like giant ATMs, pulling money out rather than reinvesting profits to create lasting value….
Policies aimed at corporate engines of inequality, rather than individual fortunes, could reshape the system itself. Lazonick and others have recommended a variety of approaches:
· Ban stock buybacks and suppress predatory value extraction. This curbs wealth concentration at the top.
· Encourage employee ownership or provide employee representation on corporate boards. Gains should benefit a broader group of stakeholders – not just shareholders.
· Reimagine corporate governance. Move towards stakeholder models balancing shareholder yields with social and environmental responsibility.
And last, but not least:
· Strengthen progressive corporate taxation. Close loopholes that allow extreme wealth accumulation.
As Lazonick sees it, whether it happens at the federal, state, or local level, government, policy should focus on curbing predatory value extraction and promoting what he calls “progressive value creation”—which means passing laws to stop corporations from being looted, a key source of the exploding wealth of the mega-rich. “From this position of regulatory power,” he advises, “we should then decide how the top 0.1% should be taxed.”
Usury is why Western creditor class hates Middle East
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 03-03-2025]
Our understanding of what could be a catastrophic conflict between the West's ruling neoliberals and Iran is missing the elephant in the room.Since deindustrialisation, Western economies were financialised and became dominated by networks of investors - the 'creditor class'. The big players exert influence to the extent that they operate as a shadow-government behind elected politicians.Their income depends on wholesale privatisation of assets - existing and under development - as investment targets. Their ability to indebt individuals, households, companies and nations ensures a constant flow of free money, in the form of compound interest, into their bank accounts.Many Iranian exiles are finance and tech entrepreneurs who fled the country to get rich. Exclusion from global payment systems made business difficult, but the fundamental problem was 'riba', the strict Islamic laws controlling usury….This restricts the profiteering enjoyed by the Western creditor class, who operate by monopolised and manipulated market prices of borrowing, dollar domination and their militarised ability to subjugate developing nations as resource colonies and investment targets. In C17 European morality, customs and law shifted from sympathy for the debtor to discipline on behalf of the private creditor. By C17, even the monarchs and the state were placed under that disciplinary regime as bond markets grew.This culture was, of course, exported to the US. This the core of the East-West clash - it rests on a fundamental cultural-economic disparity that determines the reproduction of class-structured wealth and power. Powerful Eastern nations such as China, Russia and Iran have their own ways of restricting and disciplining the investment banking system, which the Western creditor class cannot accept.The creditor class have been subjugating nations and funding wars for centuries. Schumpeter's 'creative destruction' has a dark, violent kernel which he understated. They don't care how many ways of life are disrupted, or how much infrastructure is destroyed - they make fortunes rebuilding it in the most tasteless styles and for the most crass purposes imaginable. They don't care how many peasants and workers die, men, women, or children, because they regard us as inferior and dispensable.The Epstein network is little more than the creditor class's entourage. The creditor class is our principal enemy and must be consigned to history's dustbin. The production of money as investment must be brought under full public control.
Felonomics
ADP Jobs Report Shows White-Collar Losses in February
[Quartz, via The Big Picture, March 06, 2026]
The professional and managerial class is getting hit hardest in the latest hiring data. The college-educated job market continues to deteriorate even as GDP holds up.
Unprecedented ‘Jobless Boom’ Tests Limits of US Economic Expansion
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture, March 06, 2026]
GDP grew 2.7% in 2025 while employment barely budged — a combination that hasn’t happened in the postwar era outside a recession. College-educated workers are bearing the brunt as AI reshapes white-collar work. We’re sitting on a one-legged stool.
A big change is coming to Social Security that beneficiaries may not notice
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
The Trump Administration is making it harder for eligible Social Security beneficiaries to access their benefits by eliminating phone services, forcing millions more people to seek in-person help even as it cuts thousands of Social Security Administration (SSA) staff. At the same time, increasingly frequent website outages are making it harder to seek service online. These abrupt and unjustified changes will worsen customer service delays and strain capacity at local field offices throughout the country….
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Dirty water, death and decline: the inside story of a privatisation scandal
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 03-03-2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Ted Cruz asks Treasury to approve $200 billion tax cut without Congress
Jeff Stein, March 3, 2026 [Washington Post]
Two leading Republican senators are asking the Trump administration to approve a $200 billion tax cut without congressional approval, as the GOP aims to improve its economic approval rating with voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) will send a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday urging him to use executive authority to reduce some of the taxes paid on capital gains — a change that would lower the tax burden on Americans selling stocks, businesses, homes and other assets, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its release. The senators argue the administration does not need congressional approval to make the shift….
Restoring balance to the economy
Lever Daily, Mar 2, 2026,
New legislation introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) would levy a new 5 percent annual wealth tax on the roughly 1,000 billionaires currently living in the U.S., raising an estimated $4.4 trillion in revenue. The bill would direct those funds toward several initiatives, including a $60,000 national minimum salary for public schoolteachers; a $3,000 stimulus check for every individual in households earning less than $150,000 a year; and an expansion of Medicare to include vision, dental, and hearing coverage.
- Sanders argued that the tax would redistribute trillions of dollars held by some of the richest men in the world. For example, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s net worth would fall from an estimated $833 billion to $792 billion.
Sen. Bernie Sanders unveils billionaire tax
[Drop Site Daily, March 2, 2026]
Jeff Stein in the Washington Post reports that Sanders is proposing a mega-tax on America’s roughly 1,000 billionaires, a levy that would raise a staggering $4.4 trillion and looks to reshape the conversation around wealth and inequality. The tax would pay for $3,000 stimulus checks to everyone earning less than $150,000 a year and also go toward proving universal child care, reducing health insurance premiums, expanding Medicaid, and requiring Medicare to cover vision, hearing, and dental, among other investments in housing and education. Potential Democratic presidential candidate Ro Khanna called it a “bold economic proposal” and said he would be working with Sanders on it.
Fed Regime Change: From Big Bank Bailouts to Local Productivity
Ellen Brown, Mar 1, 2026 [Web of Debt, via LA Progressive]
Public banks — local and national — are not alternatives to the private sector. They are the missing infrastructure that makes the private sector work….
FDIC insurance coverage for business payroll is no doubt a good idea, but to really level the playing field, community banks need more. They lack the access to liquidity and the “implicit guarantee” of the biggest banks, which remain “too big to fail.” A more comprehensive approach would be for states to establish their own “mini-Feds” as backstops for local bank liquidity and capitalization. For a model of how this can be done and how well it works, we have a 106-year-old example in North Dakota….
Trump Says He Wants Wall Street Out of Housing. Elizabeth Warren’s Got a Plan.
Economic Liberties, Mar 03, 2026 [The Economic Populist]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
What replaced Epstein? Palantir
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 03-05-2025]
Investigative journalist Whitney Webb: "They don't really need blackmail anymore... [Palantir is] the new Jeffrey Epstein.""If they want to blackmail you... they just access what Palantir sucked up about you—your search history, your communications, your finances, tweets you've liked in the past, all sorts of things." "You don't really need Epstein in the surveillance era.""The disturbing thing about Palantir is that it's really about pre-crime. They were the pioneers of predictive policing.""Palantir is the resurrection of [a] DARPA program called Total Information Awareness—that was so scandalous when it was announced it was defunded by Congress.""But then they realised that if they turned it into a private company, no one would complain. And that's how we got Palantir."
Is AI already killing people by accident?
Gary Marcus [via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
[WION, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
The Pentagon’s Claude Use in Iran Is a Reminder that Anthropic Never Objected to Military Use
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
OpenAI reveals more details about its agreement with the Pentagon
[Tech Crunch, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
Robert G. Kaiser [The New York Review, March 26, 2026 issue]
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 and promised to find inventive ways to make journalism profitable in the digital age, he seemed like a godsend. He wasn’t….
Robert G. Kaiser worked at The Washington Post as an editor and reporter for fifty years.
Climate and environmental crises
How Do We Deal with the Catastrophe of Uninsurability?
[Aeon, via The Big Picture, March 07, 2026]
Whole regions of the world are becoming uninsurable, bringing radical uncertainty to the economy. As climate risk makes more and more properties uninsurable, the financial system faces a reckoning it hasn’t priced in.
Democrats' political malpractice
The Democratic Party’s Moment Of Reckoning
David Sirota, March 03, 2026 [The Lever]
...A conversation this week hosted by the leading aggregator of liberal conventional wisdom shows that the fight over those lessons is intensifying.
The exchange unfolded on Pod Save America between former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau and Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner — perhaps the most high-profile of all the insurgent candidates aiming to rip power away from the Democratic establishment.
The discussion was superficially polite and almost easy to miss if you weren’t listening carefully. But it was a profoundly important illustration of the divide still roiling the Democratic Party, and of the increasingly cartoonish lies still being peddled by the party elite. The back-and-forth encapsulated how even now, the elite still doesn’t really understand — or doesn’t want to understand — what has happened in this country.
The key part of the conversation began with Favreau asking Platner a simple question: “Where specifically has the party gone wrong in the last decade in terms of policies, decisions, positions?”
Platner had an obvious answer: “Absolutely, the financial crisis, bailing out the banks, bailing out the big industries, letting people walk away with golden parachutes, while those banks still turned around and foreclosed on people’s homes, while the average working person saw their retirement savings just disappear. And then we watched the political apparatus back up the people that broke the thing in the first place. I think that was huge. That broke a lot of trust.”
That’s where things got interesting and revealing.
Favreau responded by pretending that his old boss and the Democratic Party leadership of the time had nothing to do with the obscene bailout of bankers who were foreclosing on millions of Americans. Of course, Obama most certainly did have a lot to do with that no-strings-attached bailout that saved his bank donors. He wasn’t reluctant about that savior role, either. He flaunted it, reminding those bankers that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks” — a line that was reprised to big donors by Hillary Clinton in her “deplorables” speech just before she lost the presidency to Trump.
Favreau also claimed Obama made “sure that the banks pay all the money back with interest,” which is a flagrant lie. Favreau recalled “talking to Larry Summers about” bankers’ bonuses and being told, “It’s contract law, we can’t claw back the bonuses, that’s illegal,” and somehow not mentioning that Obama had his aides throw cold water on Democrats’ House-passed legislation to claw back said bonuses.
And Favreau insisted that at the time of the bailout, Obama decided, “We can’t let the banks fail because the whole system goes under” — which even if you believe that hypothetical, hardly justifies giving bank executives get-out-of-jail-free cards, letting them keep their same high-paid jobs, and using taxpayer cash to make bank shareholders whole while everyone else in America is immiserated.
Favreau then recounted being in the White House and hearing his Obama administration colleagues lament that, “Well, we’d love to bail out people who lost their homes in this, but what about how we don’t want to bail out the people who bought second and third homes that they knew they couldn’t afford because then we’re rewarding people who acted irresponsibly.”
Except, it was Obama who helped his Wall Street donors block the promised bankruptcy reforms that would have allowed working-class Americans to get the same debtor protections for their primary residences as the wealthy owners of second and third homes already get. Obama was the one who promised that reform — and then made sure it didn’t happen, despite Democrats having massive majorities in both houses of Congress. You don’t have to believe me on that; we have the tape right here….
One major Dem group’s plan for 2028
[Semafor Americana. March 4, 2026]
On Sunday and Monday, the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way gathered allies, reporters, and potential 2028 campaign staff for “Winning the Middle,” an effort to organize their faction of the party and avoid the leftward march they blame for Donald Trump’s comeback. Joe Biden had left the city 24 hours earlier, after a celebration of the 2020 primary win that sent him to the White House. That win, said Third Way’s leaders, was undone by Biden’s decision to bring Bernie Sanders’ allies into the party’s platform and transition committees.
“Democrats’ post-Obama drift left must be reversed,” said Third Way president Jonathan Cowan at the start of the conference. Biden and the liberals of his era had not effectively resisted ideas like “defund the police, a Green New Deal that would ban fossil fuels by 2030, open borders, modern monetary theory that says deficits or inflation are good, a $44 trillion government takeover of health care, land acknowledgements, identity politics, cancel culture and more.”
Conference attendees got new polling on their voters’ media preferences (YouTube, not Bluesky), advice from pragmatic liberals who’d battled the left (San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Rollins), and face time with the South Carolina Democrats who helped Biden win in 2020. Third Way’s Jim Kessler described the candidate key voters wanted: A “crusading reformer” who would fight Trump, while disagreeing enough with leftists that moderates knew they could trust him.
Resistance
[Can We Still Govern?, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
Across America, officials in small government offices are reviewing the floor plans of potential detention facilities, drafting bills designed to keep federal agents out of parts of state-owned property, and crafting executive orders to rescind previously agreed-upon arrangements between their state and ICE. These actions reveal that what is often described as a strictly federal operation is in fact a sprawling, contingent system shaped as much by federalism as by federal law….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Iran, Benghazi, And The Age Of Partisan Everything
Brian Beutler, Mar 03, 2026 [Off Message]
X Really Is Pulling Users to the Right
[New York Magazine, via The Big Picture, March 01, 2026]
The platform’s algorithmic and editorial choices are measurably shifting its user base’s political orientation.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
How The Supreme Court Could Legalize Trump’s Iran War
David Sirota & Freddy Brewster, March 01, 2025 [The Lever]
...In a 1984 memo entitled “War Powers Problem,” Roberts — then an associate in Ronald Reagan’s White House Counsel’s office — advised the Reagan administration to oppose legislation extending tax benefits to veterans who served in Reagan’s unauthorized military deployment to Lebanon. Roberts argued that the administration should oppose the bill simply because it mentioned Congress’ constitutional power to declare war.
“I do not think we would want to concede any definitive role for Congress in terminating the Lebanon operation, even by joint resolution presented to the President,” Roberts wrote in the memo, which he authored only months after Congress passed a Lebanon War Powers resolution aiming to limit the president’s power to keep troops deployed.
Though Reagan signed the resolution, he declared that “the imposition of such arbitrary and inflexible deadlines creates unwise limitations on Presidential authority to deploy United States Forces in the interests of United States national security.”
“I do not and cannot cede any of the authority vested in me under the Constitution as President and as Commander in Chief of United States Armed Forces,” Reagan wrote. “Nor should my signing be viewed as any acknowledgment that the President’s constitutional authority can be impermissibly infringed by statute.”
Roberts later wrote that the legislation “will be revised so it contains no references to a Congressional role in terminating the Lebanese operation.”
During his September 2005 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, lawmakers explicitly questioned Roberts on whether Congress has the authority to stop a war. Roberts never answered the question directly, instead only answering that Congress “has the power of the purse” and that he couldn’t provide an answer for a hypothetical question.
“That’s a question that I don’t think can be answered in the abstract,” Roberts said. “You need to know the particular circumstances and exactly what the facts are and what the legislation would be like… The argument on the executive side will rely on authority as commander in chief and whatever authorities derive from that. So it’s not something that can be answered in the abstract.” ….
Additionally, Justice Clarence Thomas has also questioned whether Congress has the power to rein in presidential power related to national security. In a dissenting opinion for a 2004 Supreme Court case, Thomas wrote that the Constitution gives the president “primary responsibility” over national security and foreign policy.
“This Court… has accordingly held that the President has constitutional authority to protect the national security and that this authority carries with it broad discretion,” Thomas wrote. “Congress, to be sure, has a substantial and essential role in both foreign affairs and national security. But it is crucial to recognize that judicial interference in these domains destroys the purpose of vesting primary responsibility in a unitary executive.”
The unitary executive theory — pushed in the mid-2000s by Steven Calabresi, a former Reagan administration staffer, clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, and cofounder of the powerful conservative group the Federalist Society — argues that the president has limitless power over the executive branch and total control over the military.
Justice Thomas Bemoans Incivility as Security Prompts Cancellation of In-Person Speech
Ann E. Marimow [The New York Times, via scotusblog.com, Mar 3, 2026]
During a virtual appearance at a legal conference last week, Justice Clarence Thomas “expressed concerns that the Supreme Court faced increasing polarization, incivility and security threats, including one that apparently led the justice to appear at the event remotely instead of in-person as planned,” according to The New York Times. The details that went into the decision to switch Thomas’ appearance from in-person to virtual have not been made public. The article noted that there was a small protest outside the conference venue that appeared to be about Thomas’ participation in the event “and the Trump administration.” During his remarks, Thomas emphasized the importance of making connections across ideological lines and addressed staying on the bench until at least 2028 so as to “surpass the 36-year record for longest-serving associate justice.” “Well, I just get up every day and go to work,” Thomas said. “I don’t do a lot of that counting stuff.”
Police State
50 Years of Secrets: Why You Should Care About the FBI’s ‘Prohibited Access’ Files
Matt Taibbi, Mar 06, 2026 [Racket News]
Civic republicanism
The Greatest Story of the West Ever Told—A New Political History of the West
Mike Brock, Mar 02, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
...Because what actually happened in Athens in 399 BC was not a philosophical footnote. It was the founding act of everything we call Western civilization. And the man who performed it was not merely a great thinker. He was, by any serious application of Aristotelian virtue ethics — courage measured against cost, principle measured against consequence, commitment measured against the available alternatives — the greatest hero in the history of the human species.
Before Socrates, political change was a matter of power. Who had the army. Who had the gold. Who could build the coalition of aristocrats necessary to take or hold the city. The mechanisms of political transformation were entirely material. You changed the regime by changing who controlled the instruments of force. This was true in Egypt. In Persia. In every civilization that preceded Athens. Power justified itself by existing. The king was the king because he was the king. The arrangement of authority was not answerable to anything outside itself.
Socrates introduced a different mechanism entirely. He proposed that the legitimacy of power was answerable to reason. That the man with the sword was obligated — not just by custom or by the gods, but by the structure of argument itself — to justify his authority. That the question “by what right do you rule?” was not sedition. It was the most important question a citizen could ask.
He did not write this down. He walked into the marketplace and asked it. He asked it of generals and politicians and poets and craftsmen. He asked it with the relentless, cheerful, maddening precision of a man who genuinely wanted to know the answer — and who understood, better than anyone around him, that the powerful never had one.
High society found him irritating. This is always how it goes with the genuinely revolutionary. They are not recognized as revolutionary in the moment. They are recognized as annoying. As destabilizing. As the kind of person who makes important people uncomfortable at dinner parties by asking why they believe what they believe.
The jury of five hundred Athenians voted to execute him for impiety and corrupting the youth. What they meant was: he would not stop asking the question.
And here is where the heroism becomes precise.
His friends arranged his escape. The dialogue Crito records the offer — the boat was ready, the plan was in place, exile was available. Socrates could have lived. He was seventy years old. He could have gone to another city, continued his conversations, died in his bed.
He declined. He drank the hemlock. On purpose. In public. With the calm of a man who had settled a question.
The question he settled was this: you can kill the man, but you cannot kill the argument. That the argument is more durable than the power that tries to silence it. That dying for the principle is the most powerful demonstration of the principle that has ever been devised.
By choosing the hemlock over exile, Socrates did something no one had done before in the history of human civilization. He made the argument immortal by refusing to outlive it….
His students — Plato, Phaedo, Crito, and the others who loved him and were young and did not want him to die — wrote it down. They wrote down the arguments. They wrote down the dialogues. They copied them and taught them and founded schools to preserve them. Not because they were commanded to. Because a man they loved had shown them, by the manner of his death, that the argument was worth preserving at any cost.
Those ideas traveled. They reached Rome, where the Stoics built on them — Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero — adding the insight that the Socratic commitment to reason and virtue was not just a philosophical position but a way of living, a daily practice available to every human being regardless of their station. The slave Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius were both Stoics. The tradition had already begun its work of distributing dignity more widely than power had ever distributed it….
Every political revolution in the liberal tradition — the English Civil War, the American founding, the French Revolution, the abolitionist movement, the suffrage movement, the civil rights movement — begins with the same move. Someone stands up and says: the existing arrangement of power cannot justify itself by the standards that power itself has implicitly acknowledged. You claimed legitimacy. We are here to ask you to demonstrate it….
Conservative Legal Theories and Their Authoritarian Roots
Mike Brock, Mar 02, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
The Final Estate: It's on you, the Citizen, to act. History is screaming. Will you answer?
Mike Brock, Mar 02, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
...As you read this, the American political class is triangulating.
They are convening their pollsters. They are reviewing their focus group data. They are asking, with the grave seriousness of people who have mistaken the map for the territory, whether the correct narrative to bring to the American public is the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up, or ICE’s ongoing crimes against humanity, or the price of groceries and consumer staples. They are running the numbers on which of these frames moves the most voters in the most competitive districts. They are optimizing. They are being, in their own estimation, strategic.
And while they optimize, an unconstitutional war burns….
While they consult with their consultants about which grievance lands best with suburban moderates, the president of the United States is conducting what the Founders would have recognized immediately, without ambiguity, as an impeachable offense — the most serious kind, the kind that goes to the structural heart of the republic they built.
The Founders were not subtle on this point. They had lived under a king. They had watched what executives do when the war-making power is concentrated in a single pair of hands. They designed the architecture of the Constitution — the separation of powers, the vesting of the war power in Congress, the impeachment mechanism — precisely to prevent what is happening right now. This was not decorative. It was the central load-bearing element of everything they built.
If the Oath of Office meant what it says — if the men and women who raised their right hands and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, understood that oath as a binding commitment rather than a ceremonial formality — there would be no triangulation. There would be no focus groups. There would be no debate about whether Epstein or ICE or grocery prices is the better frame.
There would be one frame. The frame the Constitution provides. And every Member of the Democratic caucus in the House and Senate would be at the microphone, today, demanding impeachment. Not as a political strategy. Not as a messaging exercise. As the fulfillment of the oath they took, in public, before their constituents and their country….
...a president is waging an unconstitutional war. His party controls the Congress and will not stop him. The opposition party is searching for the most electorally advantageous response rather than the constitutionally required one. The mechanism the Founders designed for exactly this emergency — impeachment — is being treated as a political option to be weighed against other political options, rather than as the non-negotiable constitutional obligation it is.
The Founders put the final check in your hands because they understood that every other check would eventually be captured, corrupted, or intimidated. They were right. You are what is left.
Aurelien [Trying to Understand the World, via Naked Capitalism 03-05-2025]
...The Young Guard is one of a number of small paramilitary groups of the “Left,” found in many European countries, whose ideology is quite unrelated to that of traditional leftwing parties. It is, in fact, an entirely negative “anti-fascist” ideology, and it expresses itself not as the Left used to do, by supporting causes, but rather by attacking anyone who has the wrong opinions. The Ideology (I don’t want to sully the term “Left”) effectively involves identification, denunciation and verbal and sometimes physical attacks on people believed to hold the wrong opinions, or to have said the wrong things. All of these people are charcterised interchangeably as of the “extreme Right,” “the extreme radical Right,” or even just “Fascists,” and so by definition deserve whatever they get.
Traditionally, the Left in Europe was universalist and humanist. It wanted rights and protections for everybody, equally. Through a process I’ll describe briefly in a moment, it has splintered into mutually-competitive grouplets, each representing a lobby-group, each demanding preference. And of course preference, or special “rights” for one group, means fewer rights for others. But if you don’t put the interests of my group first, you’re a Fascist. Now, from its beginnings up until the 1980s, it was fair to say that the Left wanted to achieve things, because it believed in a better world, and hoped to create it. This wasn’t, in spite of some right-wing propaganda at the time, an attempt to create heaven on earth, but rather to ensure that children did not go to bed hungry, that jobs were available for all and that families had decent homes to live in. How quaint that seems now. The Ideology which has replaced that of the Left is by contrast entirely negative. It no longer seeks to make things better, but to destroy those whom it nominates as enemies. Thus, whilst in the 1960s and 1970s, governments of the Left introduced laws forbidding discrimination on the grounds of gender or race and legalised homosexuality, these days, the parties of the Ideology simply attack, sometimes physically, those who they think hold the wrong views on such issues.
There is, you may be surprised to hear, an actual theory behind all this, and it has its origins in intellectual movements of the 1950s and 1960s….
As I’ve mentioned, one feature of what I’m calling the Ideology is that it is relentlessly negative in its language and its assumptions, and has been largely so since the beginning. Its recent and current incarnations in unreadable books and blog posts are quite close to incitements to the nihilistic despair and violence which, as I’ve argued, is anyway the dominant political ideology of our time. Everything, one gathers, is polluted and corrupted. Only the most cynical motives are accepted as explanations of past and present events: courage, heroism, compassion, generosity, duty, altruism and such are only cynical masks behind which lies the exercise of Power itself. Great figures of history have feet of clay, allegedly important events never actually happened, famous reforms were really cynical ploys to retain power, and no-one in history has ever operated from anything except the basest of motives, or does today. We have no heroes to emulate, but only villains to execrate, no good examples to follow, but only bad ones to condemn. After all, there wasn’t really any moral difference between the Nazis and the Western Allies, was there? It didn’t really matter who won. Moral differences are so bourgeois. And so, every national myth and collective cultural artefact must be torn to pieces and trampled underfoot. And in the end, of course, as has often been remarked, this nihilism winds up devouring itself.
