Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 19, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
House rejects resolution to end U.S. war with Iran by one vote
[Drop Site News, April 17, 2026]
The Republican-controlled House voted 213–214 on Thursday to defeat a resolution directing President Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. armed forces from hostilities against Iran, one day after the Senate rejected a similar measure 52–47. Only one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.), broke with his party to support the measure. One Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden (Maine) voted against it; Rep. Warren Davidson (Ohio), who had previously voted to end the war, voted present. The resolution, introduced by Rep. Gregory Meeks (N.Y.), would have required congressional authorization to continue military operations under the War Powers Resolution.
[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 04-17-2025]
Top oil companies pocketed $30 million per hour in war profits during first month of Iran conflict
[Drop Site News, April 16, 2026]
The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies earned more than $30 million every hour in windfall profits during the first month of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, generating an estimated $23 billion in excess earnings in March alone as oil averaged $100 a barrel, according to analysis by Global Witness using Rystad Energy data reported exclusively by the Guardian. Saudi Aramco stands to make an estimated $25.5 billion in war profits in 2026 if the $100 price holds, while ExxonMobil is on track for $11 billion, Chevron $9.2 billion, and Shell $6.8 billion—with three Russian state-linked companies, Gazprom, Rosneft, and Lukoil, projected to collect a combined $23.9 billion, boosting Vladimir Putin’s war chest for the conflict in Ukraine.
Iran used Chinese satellite to monitor and target U.S. bases, leaked documents show
[Drop Site News, April 16, 2026]
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force acquired a Chinese spy satellite in late 2024 that it used to monitor and help target U.S. military bases across the Middle East during the war, the Financial Times reported Wednesday, citing leaked Iranian military documents confirmed by Fox News. The IRGC purchased the TEE-01B satellite from Chinese company Earth Eye Co for roughly $36.6 million, paid in renminbi, according to the report. Time-stamped coordinate lists, satellite imagery, and orbital analysis show Iranian commanders used the satellite to surveil Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia on March 13, 14, and 15—the same days President Donald Trump confirmed U.S. aircraft at the base had been struck—as well as Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, the U.S. Fifth Fleet naval base in Bahrain, and Erbil airport in Iraq around the time of IRGC-claimed strikes on those facilities. China’s Foreign Ministry denied the report, calling it “not true.”
How Much Has the War in Iran Depleted the U.S. Missile Supply?
Garrett M. Graff, April 14, 2026
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Caught in the Crackdown: As Arrests at Anti-ICE Protests Piled Up, Prosecutions Crumbled
A.C. Thompson [ProPublica] and FRONTLINE, and Gabrielle Schonder [FRONTLINE], April 14, 2026
- Protesters Detained: ProPublica and FRONTLINE found more than 300 people who were arrested during immigration sweeps and accused of crimes like assaulting or interfering with law enforcement.
- Cases Collapse Under Scrutiny: Over and over, cases against protesters fell apart, often because statements made by the arresting officers were debunked by video footage.
- Chilling Effect: Experts said arrests, even without convictions, can quash dissent. “I don’t want to be assaulted again. I don’t want to wind up back in federal prison,” a protester said.
DOJ fires US immigration judges who ruled for pro-Palestine activists
[Jurist News, via Naked Capitalism 04-16-2025]
Luigi-Inspired Arsonist Threatened “Our Way of Life,” Feds Say
Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 04-15-2025]
Oligarchy
The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine
[Wired, via The Big Picture, April 18, 2026]
Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. He has turned MSG into one of the most aggressive private facial-recognition operations in the country, using it to ban critics and lawyers at the door. Private-sector dystopia that most fans never see coming.
[TW: As the classic thinkers of civic republicanism warned, the morbidly rich suffer extreme psychological damage because they lose the capacity for self-discipline, destroying any basis for one of the key components of civic virtue. This happens because the morbidly rich can afford to surround themselves with sycophants who are unwilling to call out the excesses the morbidly rich indulge in. This is why Locke's concept of venerating private property must be forcefully opposed by the civic republican principles of General Welfare and the civic virtue of subordinating private interest to the public good. The preservation of a republic requires that the absence of civic virtue among the most powerful, the morbidly rich, must be countered by the extension of the Constitutional guarantees of individual liberty to the states (which conservatives and the (anti)Republican Party have been and are now contesting), AND private actors such as corporations and the morbidly rich.]
Billionaire Adelson Pours $40 Million To Back GOP—Soros Gives $50 Million To His Democrat PAC
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 04-17-2025]
Felonomics
Casey Quinlan, April 13, 2026 [The American Prospect]
GOP Food Stamp Work Requirements Hit Just as Jobs Dry Up
Whitney Curry Wimbish, April 16, 2026 [The American Prospect]
...ALREADY, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE HAVE LOST their SNAP benefits, according to a new tracker that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) released last Wednesday. The data shows that between July 2025, when Trump signed the mega-bill into law, and December 2025, participation in SNAP dropped in every single state. Nationwide, the program lost 2.5 million people, or 6 percent. The CBPP expects that once Trump’s first round of cuts are fully implemented, four million people will lose some or all of their food stamp benefits....
...A study from Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy found that every $1 cut from SNAP costs society between $14 and $20....
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
What, Exactly, Is a Fair Wage?
[Reviewed]: The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It
By Arindrajit Dube (Dutton)
Arindrajit Dube has written a lucid, empirically rigorous, and—in the current political climate—audacious book. The Wage Standard marshals decades of labor economics research to make a case that should be obvious but somehow still needs making: Most American workers have been systematically underpaid for the past half-century, not because markets dictated it, but because power did. This argument deserves to be read widely, taken seriously, and debated vigorously. Among other things, it raises questions that progressive advocates for higher minimum wages need to address....
Dube’s detective work in tracing the causes of this divergence is among the book’s startling contributions. He dispatches the usual suspects with care. Technological change and globalization matter, he concedes, but they cannot explain the peculiar magnitude of American inequality relative to that of peer nations that experienced similar shocks without similar outcomes. What ultimately matters, Dube argues, are the institutional arrangements—unions, minimum wages, tight labor markets, and shared workplace norms—that once constrained employer discretion and have since been systematically dismantled....
Among the book’s most important contributions is what Dube calls the “wage standard”—the idea that there is, or ought to be, a societally determined acceptable range of pay for most jobs. This is not simply a technocratic benchmark. It is a claim about democratic agency over economic life. Markets do not simply discover wages the way they discover prices for soybeans. Wages are always already shaped by power—by the relative bargaining strength of employers and workers, by the institutional context in which that bargaining takes place, and by shared social norms about what constitutes fair treatment. If wages are a political and social phenomenon, then setting them is a legitimate exercise of democratic deliberation rather than an interference with neutral market outcomes....
Tony Wikrent, February 1, 2015 [real-economics.blogspot.com]
[TW: I consider this to be one of the foundational statements of political economy in the philosophy of civic republicanism. But look in the index of any economics textbook today and for the past century, and try to find any reference to Franklin at all.]
Benjamin Franklin’s 1783 essay “Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages, Which Will Be Occasioned in Europe by the American Revolution,” which was published in Paris in the Journal d Economie Puplique:
"…If the term wages be taken in its widest signification, it will be found that almost all the citizens of a large state receive and pay wages. I shall confine my remarks, however, to one description of wages, the only one with which government should intermeddle, or which requires its care. I mean the wages of the lowest class, those men without property, without capital, who live solely by the labor of their hands. This is always the most numerous class in a state; and consequently, that community cannot be pronounced happy, in which from the lowness and insufficiency of wages, the laboring class procure so scanty a subsistence, that, barely able to provide for their own necessities, they have not the means of marrying and rearing a family, and are reduced to beggary, whenever employment fails them, or age and sickness oblige them to give up work.
"Further, the wages under consideration ought not to be estimated by their amount in money, but by the quantity of provisions, clothing, and other commodities, which the laborer can procure for the money which he receives.
"….The horrible maxim, that the people must be poor, in order that they may remain in subjection, is still held by many persons of hard hearts and perverted understanding, with whom it were useless to contend. Others, again, think that the people should be poor, from a regard for the supposed interests of commerce. They believe that to increase the rate of wages would raise the price of the productions of the soil, and especially of industry, which are sold to foreign nations, and thus that exportation and the profits arising from it would be diminished. But this motive is at once cruel and ill founded.
"….To desire to keep down the rate of wages, with the view of favoring the exportation of merchandise, is to seek to render the citizens of a state miserable, in order that foreigners may purchase its productions at a cheaper rate; it is, at most, attempting to enrich a few merchants by impoverishing the body of the nation; it is taking the part of the stronger in that contest, already so unequal, between the man who can pay wages, and him who is under the necessity of receiving them; it is, in one word, to forget, that the object of every political society ought to be the happiness of the largest number...."
Note that Franklin explicitly states that the wages of the great mass of people is an issue in which the government "should intermeddle." What else can this mean than direct government interference in the "free workings" of the labor market? ....
HAWB 1800s – The Doctrine of High Wages – How America Was Built
Tony Wikrent, April 1, 2016 [DailyKos]
Democracy Is Not a Ballot Box: It Is Control Over What We Produce and Who Owns It
William Murphy [via Naked Capitalism 04-13-2025]
The mystery variable that explains stubbornly low consumer sentiment
G. Elliott Morris [via Naked Capitalism 04-14-2025]
A Pillar of the Economics Establishment Admits That It Was Wrong
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture, April 18, 2026]
The World Bank is quietly reversing decades of free-trade orthodoxy and endorsing industrial policy. A big intellectual concession with real consequences for global investing.
Cory Doctorow, April 12, 2026 [Pluralistic]
..."Austerity begets fascism" is one of those things that makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it turns out that there's a good empirical basis for believing it. In "Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right" four economists from the LSE and Bocconi provide an excellent look at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists:
Here's how they break it down. Political scientists have assembled a large, reproducible body of evidence to show that "public service provision is crucial to people’s perceptions of their quality of life and living standards." Good public services are the basis for "the social contract between rulers and the ruled" – pay your taxes and obey the laws, and in return, you will be well served.
When public services go wrong, people don't always know who to blame, but they definitely notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray. They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they "withdraw their support" for the system.
Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can't get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about "undeserving migrants" who've taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to "deserving natives."....
Health care crisis
How Merck fends off competitors to keep the cost of its blockbuster cancer drug sky-high
[International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Apr 13, 2026]
...The Cancer Calculus, a yearlong investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, sheds new light on how Merck has fended off competitors to keep the price of Keytruda sky-high, locking out patients and squeezing health care systems worldwide....
Predatory finance
Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum and the Five-Month Delay.
[William, via Naked Capitalism 04-17-2025]
...Who Was in the Room
The 7th Bloomberg New Economy Forum convened in Singapore, November 19–21, 2025. Theme: "Thriving in an Age of Extremes."
The co-chairs: Gina Raimondo, former U.S. Commerce Secretary. Mario Draghi, former Italian Prime Minister and former President of the European Central Bank. Gan Kim Yong, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore.
Read those names again. The person who ran American commercial policy. The person who ran European monetary policy. And the person who runs the trade ministry of Southeast Asia's financial capital.
Around them: the CEO of HSBC — the bank that is the plumbing for East-West capital flows. The Chair and CEO of Nasdaq. The COO of Google DeepMind. The CEO of GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. The Global Chairman of PwC. Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Finer. Former Indonesian President Joko Widodo. The Prime Ministers of Singapore and Greece.
Five hundred delegates. Fifty countries. Invitation only.
That's not a conference. That's a coordination meeting....
Wall Street banks start trading derivatives to bet on pain in private credit
[FT, via Naked Capitalism 04-17-2025]
The Financial Product That Blew Up the Global Economy Is Back
Logan McMillen, April 17, 2026 [The New Republic]
As if the economy isn’t already in enough chaos, the banks are reviving credit default swaps.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
The Man Whom Exxon Tried To Drill
Chris Walker, Apr 16, 2026 [The Lever]
After years of using shareholder votes to pressure oil giants on climate, one activist triggered a corporate backlash that is reshaping the limits of investor power....
...in December 2023, Van Baal’s Dutch nonprofit, Follow This, along with a U.S.-based activist investor group, Arjuna Capital, used their limited ownership of Exxon stock to submit a shareholder resolution asking the oil giant to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Now the corporation had responded by suing its own shareholders — simply for proposing a nonbinding resolution. Van Baal had never heard of such a move.
The next morning, the nonprofit decided to fight back. In a press release, Follow This declared, “Exxon Mobil is afraid of its shareholders.”
What Van Baal could not yet see was just how aggressively Exxon would dig in — or just how far the shock waves would spread.
Over the next two years, the lawsuit would send a chill throughout the investment world. Asset managers that once supported climate-related resolutions would all but retreat from the tactic. Climate reformers would be called to the mat on Capitol Hill. One by one, small shareholders fell silent — first in the United States, and then in Europe....
Bitcoin Gets A Dark Money-Backed Assist In Congress
Veronica Riccobene, Apr 13, 2026 [The Lever]
Bitcoin’s secret backers celebrate a bonanza. A dark money pro-cryptocurrency influence group with deep ties to Trumpworld is lauding a new Senate bill codifying President Trump’s plans for a crypto-boosting strategic Bitcoin reserve and onshoring Bitcoin mining. The Lever’s Freddy Brewster reports that the Satoshi Action Fund — a 501(c)(4) group that does not disclose its donors — has shared top personnel with the Koch network of right-wing think tanks and dark money nonprofits. That includes the Heritage Foundation, which published the Project 2025 plan to overhaul the government under Trump. An executive with the pro-Bitcoin group even wrote the Project 2025 chapter on dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency.
A federal Bitcoin stockpile could boost the crypto token’s value to nearly $1 million a token, more than 10 times its current value — a massive giveaway to the largest Bitcoin owners, two percent of whom own more than 90 percent of all of the currency in circulation.
The new bill was co-introduced by Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who is not seeking reelection after serving a sole term as a senator, during which she bestowed the title of “the Senate’s first and finest bitcoiner.”
Organic Intellectuals and Toilet-Paper Fire
[Un-Diplomatic, via Naked Capitalism 04-14-2025]
[Yves Smoth: "A must read. I am surprised this sort of thing has been so long in coming."]
...The toilet paper warehouse was owned by a firm called Kimberly-Clark, which produces toilet paper, Huggies, Kleenex, Q-Tips, Depends, and on and on. Last November, Kimberley-Clark committed $40 billion to acquire Kenvue, a similar health-products company, promising in the same press statement to reduce its 22k-person workforce by 3.5%.
Last month, workers filed a case with the National Labor Relations Board accusing Kimberly-Clark of refusing to bargain with unions. In 2018, a global trade union meeting publicly condemned Kimberley-Clark for “heavy-handed tactics,” cutting worker jobs, and closing plants without prior consultation. Since 2000, the company has had to pay $81 million in penalties for labor-law violations.
My point is that the company generates huge profits from low-margin products, it has a history of immiserating the labor that produces its surpluses, and its current strategy sees it simultaneously 1) refusing to bargain with workers, 2) cutting jobs, and 3) nevertheless mobilizing $40 billion to acquire another profit center for its business.
This is all normal capitalism shit! But it’s not happening in a vacuum. Ever heard of the K-shaped economy? Since the dawning of the neoliberal era in the 1970s, capital’s share of national income has grown at the expense of labor’s share of national income. Many scholars have pronounced neoliberalism a dead doctrine since 2020, but the share of income going to workers is at its lowest in 50+ years....
Ryan Cooper, April 7, 2026 [The American Prospect]
...Third and perhaps most importantly, the American people absolutely despise inflation. Much as it might pain me and other leftists to admit it, this is a nation that principally identifies as consumers, not workers. Any future president must keep that fact at front of mind for the foreseeable future....
Restoring balance to the economy
On Tax Day, Mamdani Taxed the Rich
Whitney Curry Wimbish, April 16, 2026 [The American Prospect]
The mayor, his supporters, and public opinion convinced their previously reluctant governor to agree to a tax on the second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc.) homes of their city’s nonresident rich.
[Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 04-12-2025]
Jury finds Live Nation and Ticketmaster held illegal monopoly over concert venues
[Drop Site News, April 16, 2026]
A New York jury found Wednesday that Live Nation Entertainment and its Ticketmaster subsidiary maintained an illegal anticompetitive monopoly over large concert venues, ruling in favor of a lawsuit brought by dozens of states after four days of deliberation. The jury found that Ticketmaster’s anticompetitive practices caused concertgoers in 22 states to overpay by $1.72 per ticket—a figure that could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages once trebled, though Live Nation estimated the aggregate single damages figure would fall below $150 million. The penalty phase, including potential divestiture of venues such as amphitheaters, will be decided by the judge in a separate proceeding.
Live Nation Verdict Serves as a Warning
David Dayen, April 16, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Companies thought they could get away with anything while Donald Trump was in office. But today they have a new problem: state attorneys general, and juries full of ordinary Americans....
But the impact of this will not just end with Live Nation. The pay-to-play system set up by the Trump administration made a merger or monopolization just a matter of giving a few million dollars to the right lobbyists. There has been a burst of concentration throughout economic sectors in the last year, as the C-suites realize the corrupt nature of the regulatory environment. Some truly absurd notions, like a merger between United and American Airlines, have been floated.
That gambit is probably over, or at least significantly hobbled. State AGs have already signaled that they’re likely to take more actions. They are working to block the Nexstar-Tegna merger and will probably try to block the merger between Paramount and Warner Bros., on the back of growing public support in Hollywood. Every company thinking about using their market power or joining up with a competitor will have to think about the fact that, even if they have the means to buy off the Trump administration, they might run afoul of the states. That’s a new piece of information that their consultants and advisers will have to tell them. And it will create a chilling effect on the continued narrowing of who benefits in the economy.
Resounding Verdict! Jury Finds the Live Nation-Ticketmaster Monopoly Illegal on All Claims
[Big Tech on Trial, via Naked Capitalism 04-17-2025]
Ganesh Sitaraman, Joel Dodge, and Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, April 16, 2026
The United States has entered an era of short supply: in recent years, Americans have faced episodic shortages in semiconductors and other critical goods during COVID-19 shutdowns, energy price shocks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and now again energy supply disruptions caused by the war with Iran. We have also faced chronic shortages stemming from our failure to build enough housing, our struggle to build out clean energy infrastructure, and our loss of production capacity for shipbuilding, rare earth magnets, and other strategic goods to China and other countries....
In a new paper, we propose an addition to that toolkit: public factories. Public factories are just that: government-owned production facilities that exist to provide (or expand) the supply of important goods. We argue that public factories can provide policymakers with an additional powerful and flexible tool to address some of our most urgent challenges. In a separate white paper, one of us (Dodge) illustrates one type of challenge public factories could address: the need to secure supply chains for critical energy components like batteries and transformers....
In the defense sector, public factories pre-date the Republic, with the Continental Congress encouraging states to create their own munitions factories during the Revolutionary War. After the war, President George Washington and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton successfully advocated for the creation of armories—government-owned weapons factories—in the 1790s to reduce the military’s dependence on lackluster private production and risky foreign supply chains. During World War II, the government built and owned the vast majority of new industrial plants needed for military mobilization, the arsenal – and industry – needed for democracy to defeat fascism.
[TW: Sitaraman and Dodge fail to emphasize how government programs were responsible for almost all the major technological advances which created the modern industrial mass-production economy:
How America Was Built - LQD - New England Machine Tools
Tony Wikrent, May 14, 2012 [real-economics.blogspot.com]
The following excerpt is from an article by industrial historian Merritt Roe Smith, “New England Industry and the Federal Government,” in Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England, edited by Peter Temin, Harvard University Press, 2000. Smith is also author of a number of classic studies of the machine tool industry.
Smith argues that "there were moments during the nineteenth century when government action made an enormous difference to the development of the market economy," and traces the development of the metal working machine tool industry to prove his point....
"Historians of technology long have known that a number of fundamentally new machine-tool designs—for milling machines, forging machines, edging machines, and turret lathes, to name but four of the most important—first appeared in the firearms industry and that their inventors held contracts with the War Department. We also know that a number of the most important designs (like Simeon North’s plain milling machine of 1816-1817) were never patented and those that were (like John H. Hall's drop forging equipment) quickly made their way into armories, machine shops, and technically related manufacturing operations around the country without any royalties being paid to the inventors. This was so because the War Department, at the behest of the U.S. Army Ordinance Bureau, which oversaw the contract system, insisted that if private arms makers wished to continue as government contractors, they had to share their inventions and improvements on a royalty-free basis with the government-owned national armories at Springfield and at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The national armories, in turn, made the new technology readily available to all comers. Virtually anyone who was interested and had a proper letter of introduction (which was easily obtained from one’s congressman) could visit the national armories at Springfield and Harpers Ferry, make drawings of interesting designs, and, in some cases, even borrow patterns from the armory machine shops for a particular machine or a complete set of machinery. As a result, the new technology quickly filtered out into the larger economy."
How America was Built - LQD - New England Machine Tools, continued
Tony Wikrent, May 17, 2012 [real-economics.blogspot.com]
...from Peter Temin’s paper, “The Industrialization of New England, 1830-1880,” in Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England, edited by Temin, Harvard University Press, 2000:
"The American System of Manufactures, based on the use of interchangeable parts, made it possible for Americans to produce light manufactures in volumes and at prices unattainable in England….
"The American System did not, however, emerge from the private economy. It began in arms production, at U.S. government armories....
"Solutions to technical problems were shared by the managers the host plant in the expectation that they would be treated similarly in a visit they would make. This reciprocity was the key to the fellowship of machinery managers and a potent force for the dissemination of knowledge. The open-door policy was common practice among machinery firms in the later nineteenth century, and violations of the custom were criticized in the trade press the same way a lack of hospitality was scorned in many traditional cultures...."
Why would these nineteenth century machinists, striving to build their own companies in a brand new industry, be so willing to share trade secrets with their competitors? Such behavior obviously violates the selfish impulses of the "invisible hand" that is so much in favor among professional economists, and has been raised to the level of religious faith by such unthinking ideologues as Lawrence Kudlow. The answer is to be found in the idea of public virtue, which I have been trying to promote the past year or so, after reading Bernard Bailyn's crucial The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.John Kasson ably summarizes the point in his 1976 book, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (New York, NY: Grossman Publishers):
"The questions of the introduction of domestic manufactures and the role that labor-saving machines might play in American life were considered not as isolated economic issues but as matters affecting the entire character of society. No doubt profit motives existed, but would-be manufacturers had to make cogent arguments which addressed broader ideological concerns. “In addition to asking “How much will it pay?” they had to consider as well, ”How will it advance the cause of republicanism?” The question was not rhetorical – not at this time at least."
Any school of economics that believes markets are the sum total of untold millions of individuals pursuing their own self-interest, simply cannot understand or explain political economy that includes some of the more noble characteristics of humanity, such as a desire to improve and strengthen one's community and nation.
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
A New Eye Opens at the Top of the World
[Universe Today, via Naked Capitalism 04-16-2025]
...at an altitude of 18,400 feet above sea level! The summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile's Atacama Desert is higher than the Everest base camp, in air so thin that every visitor must carry supplemental oxygen and pass a medical examination before being allowed up. The road to the top is unpaved, the weather brutal, and the temperature unforgiving. And yet, on April 9th, more than a hundred scientists, engineers and dignitaries made the ascent to celebrate the inauguration of the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (otherwise known as FYST, pronounced “feast”) and it’s a 6 metre instrument that has been three decades in the making.
The altitude is not an accident however. Submillimeter light, wavelengths shorter than a millimetre, sit between infrared and radio waves on the electromagnetic spectrum and are almost completely absorbed by water vapour in the atmosphere before it can reach instruments on the ground. The Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth, and at nearly 5,600 metres the air above Cerro Chajnantor is exceptionally thin and dry. It is, quite simply, one of the best places on the planet to observe at these wavelengths and FYST has been designed to exploit that advantage to the fullest.
The telescope is built for speed. Its innovative Crossed-Dragone optical design (two mirrors are tilted at angles to each other rather than aligned along a single axis, eliminating obstructions and delivering exceptionally clean images across a wide field) allows it to sweep large areas of sky rapidly in each exposure. Its primary instrument, Prime Cam, can hold up to seven interchangeable detector modules and will field over 100,000 superconducting detectors giving it a mapping speed more than ten times faster than any previous submillimeter observatory. That makes FYST less like a traditional telescope pointed at individual targets and more like a celestial movie camera, building up deep, wide surveys of the sky in a part of the spectrum that has never been systematically filmed before....
Scientists Grow Electronics Inside the Brains of Living Mice
[Singularity Hub, via Naked Capitalism 04-16-2025]
A single shot transforms the mice’s brains into biomanufacturing machines. Blood proteins churn the injected chemicals into a soft, flexible electrode mesh that seamlessly wraps around delicate neurons. Pulses of light aimed at the mesh quiet hyperactive cells. All the while, the mice go about their merry ways, with no inkling they’ve been turned into cyborgs.
This science fiction-like invention is the brainchild of Purdue University scientists seeking to reimagine brain implants....
Physical economy
Why Diesel Prices Surge Faster Than Gasoline in Every Energy Crisis
Robert Rapier - Apr 17, 2026 [Oilprice.com]
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, April 14, 2026]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Georgia's voting technology blunder
Cory Doctorow, April 18, 2026 [Pluralistic]
[TW: A highly misleading headline. What Doctorow provides here is an eye-popping eye-witness account of how voting machine manufacturers abused the legal process to silence critics.]
...Diebold – one of the leaders in the cartel – knew that its voting machines were defective. They'd crash, lose their vote-counts and malfunction in other ways that were equally damaging to election integrity.
This was an alarming piece of news, but perhaps just as alarming is the way it came to light. A Diebold employee described this situation in a memo that was subsequently hacked and dumped by parties unknown. That memo, along with the accompanying tranche of extremely alarming revelations about Diebold's voting machine division, was the subject of one of the first mass-censorship copyright campaigns in internet history.
Diebold didn't dispute the veracity of these damning revelations: rather, it claimed that since the memos detailing its gross democracy-endangering misconduct had been prepared by an employee, that they were therefore works-made-for-hire whose copyright was held by Diebold, and thus anyone who reproduced the memo was infringing on the company's copyright.
Under Section 512 of the then-new Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Diebold was empowered to send "takedown notices" to the web hosting providers whose users had posted the memos, and if the web hosts didn't remove the content "expeditiously," they would be jointly liable for any eventual copyright damages, which are statutorily set at $150,000 per infringement.
Every web host folded. No one wanted to take the risk of tens of millions of dollars in statutory damages....
OpenAI Staffers Horrified When Senior Leadership Hatched “Insane” Plan to Pit World Governments Against Each Other - "It worked for nuclear weapons, why not AI?"
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 04-14-2025]
[Vinyl Culture and Chinmaya Srivastava, Apr 12, 2026, via Naked Capitalism 04-15-2025]
Vydia (the same distributor used to upload the AI fakes) then filed copyright claims against Campbell’s original YouTube videos. The very videos the AI had been trained on. YouTube’s automated Content ID system does not use humans to review initial claims. It treats the first entity to register a song as the rightful owner, an assumption that held when creating music required human effort, but shatters completely when AI can produce a synthetic clone of any artist’s catalogue in seconds.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Pete Hegseth Nailed It. No Really.
Josh Marshall, April 18, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
You’ve probably seen the story about how, at a DOD presentation, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth quoted what he apparently thought was a bible verse but was in fact the faux biblicalism delivered by Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Jules Winnfield, in Pulp Fiction. There’s a lot here. Yes, the faux godly Hegseth should really be a bit more versed in the bible. But it’s really perfectly apt that he’s not. If you remember, Winnfield is a hitman, a killer, a man of meaningless violence. He wraps his murders in stylized bible verse imitations to give them some mix of giving them retributional ooomph and just for kicks. Is there any better description of Pete Hegseth? I can’t think of one. Hegseth’s brand of Christian nationalism is a permission structure for domination and violence....
The Far-Right Plot to Hijack the Constitution — and How to Stop It
Dr. Paul Zeitz, Apr 16, 2026
A small, well-funded network is using the real $39 trillion debt as cover to rewrite our founding document. Here’s how the cross-partisan pro-democracy coalition must respond.
On March 18, 2026, the U.S. House voted 211 to 207 to advance a Balanced Budget Amendment — short of the two-thirds needed to pass. The same day, the national debt crossed $39 trillion, roughly 125 percent of GDP. A day later, the Trump administration announced it would seek up to $200 billion more for its war against Iran.
The fiscal alarm is warranted. And that is what makes this moment so dangerous — because a small, well-funded network is using that alarm as cover for a plan to rewrite the Constitution itself and lock Project 2025 into it permanently. If they succeed, the changes could not be reversed by any future election, Congress, or Supreme Court....
A parallel grassroots track has been running for over a decade under Convention of States Action, led by Tea Party co-founder Mark Meckler. Their resolution is not limited to the debt. It calls for a convention to “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government” — language so broad it can mean almost anything.
As of 2026, the Convention of States resolution has passed in twenty state legislatures, with Kansas the newest. Fourteen more states are considering it this year, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Washington. Trump regime cabinet endorsers include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Heritage Foundation — author of Project 2025 — has formally endorsed the Article V convention push....
The South Rises Again
History rhymes....
Heather Cox Richardson, Apr 14, 2026, Letters from an American, April 13, 2026
...Before Trump won the presidency in 2016, the modern-day Republican Party was well on its way to endorsing oligarchy. It had followed the usual U.S. historical pattern to that point. In the 1850s, 1890s, 1920s, and then again in the modern era, wealthy people had come around to the idea that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran everything.
Although those people had been represented by the Democrats in the 1850s and the Republicans in the 1890s, 1920s, and 2000s, they had gotten there in the same way: first a popular movement had demanded that the government protect equality of opportunity and equal justice before the law for those who had previously not had either, and that popular pressure had significantly expanded rights.
Then, in reaction, wealthier Americans began to argue that the expansion of rights threatened to take away their liberty to run their enterprises as they wished. To tamp down the expansion of rights, they appealed to the racism of the poorer white male voters whose votes they needed to maintain control of the government, telling them that legislation to protect equal rights was a plan to turn the government over to Black or Brown Americans, or immigrants from southern Europe or Asia, who would use their voting power to redistribute wealth.
The idea that poor men of color voting meant socialism resonated with white voters, who turned against the government’s protecting equal rights and instead supported a government that favored men of property. As wealth moved upward, popular culture championed economic leaders as true heroes, and lawmakers suppressed voting in order to “redeem” American society from “socialists” who wanted to redistribute wealth. Capital moved upward until a very few people controlled most of it, and then, usually after an economic crash made ordinary Americans turn against the system that favored the wealthy, the cycle began again.
When Trump was elected, the U.S. was at the place where wealth had concentrated among the top 1%, Republican politicians denigrated their opponents as un-American “takers” and celebrated economic leaders as “makers,” and the process of skewing the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression was well underway. Republican leaders wanted a small government that kept taxes low and left business to do what it wished, but they still valued the rule of law and the rules-based international order....
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas blasts progressivism as threat to America
Devin Dwyer, ABC News [via newsletter.scotusblog.com, Apr 17, 2026]
Justice Clarence Thomas spoke on Wednesday at a University of Texas Austin Law School event tied to America’s founding 250 years ago. During his remarks, Thomas criticized the political philosophy of progressivism, presenting it as an existential threat, according to ABC News. “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government,” he said. “Thomas said Washington has been overrun by elected and appointed officials who lack commitment to ‘righteous cause, to traditional morality, to national defense, to free enterprise, to religious piety or to the original meaning of the Constitution.’”
Clarence Thomas Can’t Get American History Right
Matt Ford, April 17, 2026 [The New Republic]
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence. Justice Clarence Thomas, the senior-most member of the Supreme Court, sought to honor that historic milestone this week by denouncing millions of his fellow Americans and claiming that their views were incompatible with the Declaration of Independence’s ideals. In doing so, he only demonstrated his profound ignorance of this nation’s history, as well as his own personal flaws.
Thomas’s roughly hour-long speech on Wednesday at the University of Texas at Austin Law School ....
Clarence Thomas alone is devoted to the Declaration’s principles in Washington, says Clarence Thomas, and the problem is only getting worse. “As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure,” the justice warned. “At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.
“Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life,” Thomas continued. “It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”
Thomas is correct that progressivism was introduced around the turn of the twentieth century, that Woodrow Wilson was the twenty-eighth president, and that Wilson was a progressive. The historical accuracy ends there. Presenting Wilson as the inventor of progressivism is historically illiterate, akin to saying that Joseph Stalin invented communism or that Ronald Reagan invented conservatism.
In reality, the Progressive era emerged in the 1890s from the corruption and excesses of the Gilded Age. A broad range of activists, journalists, legislators, and judges challenged the societal ills that had emerged from the nation’s rapid industrialization. Arrayed against them were corrupt party machines in the big cities and corporate tycoons that had concentrated wealth in the form of trusts and monopolies. Progressivism consisted of multiple movements, some overlapping and some not. To say that progressives in general sought to lay out a “new set of first principles” that would replace the Declaration’s principles is baseless....
Is Corruption No Longer A Crime? A little-noticed Supreme Court ruling may be sending a message.
David Sirota, April 13, 2026 [The Lever]
In an easy-to-miss two-line order in its shadow docket, the U.S. Supreme Court just vacated the corruption conviction of a local official, raising a question: Will the kind of influence peddling that’s now ubiquitous in politics eventually end up being explicitly deemed unprosecutable simply because it’s so ubiquitous? ....
For those of us who believe money in politics is a big problem, what’s notable is that the high court has sided with the particular legal argument made by Sittenfeld’s lawyer, a former Trump official now at one of America’s most Trumpy law firms.
In Sittenfeld’s petition, his legal team cast politicians soliciting money from big donors doing government business as the same as politicians asking for support from grassroots donors who support their broader agenda. From there flowed their argument that juries fed up with corruption cannot be allowed to convict politicians who accept large sums of money in exchange for government favors....
But then, Sittenfeld’s lawyers — and perhaps the Supreme Court — don’t seem to see money’s influence on politics as a problem. They seem to see transactions between donors and politicians as an integral part of democracy. Indeed, Sittenfeld’s petition insisted that “campaign solicitations are the lifeblood of our representative democracy.”
Read that over and over again, and you realize how problematic that argument is. The process of politicians begging for cash from donors undermines representative democracy by encouraging them to disproportionately represent the interests of a handful of donors rather than their whole constituencies. And yet we’re told that the process is the “lifeblood of our representative democracy.” It’s Orwellian....
Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak, April 18, 2026 [New York Times]
Just after 6 p.m. on a February evening in 2016, the Supreme Court issued a cryptic, one paragraph ruling that sent both climate policy and the court itself spinning in new directions.... By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning.
At the time, the ruling seemed like a curious one-off. But that single paragraph turned out to be a sharp and lasting break. That night marks the birth, many legal experts believe, of the court’s modern “shadow docket,” the secretive track that the Supreme Court has since used to make many major decisions, including granting President Trump more than 20 key victories on issues from immigration to agency power....
The New York Times has obtained those papers and is now publishing them, bringing the origins of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket into the light.
The 16 pages of memos, exchanged in a five-day dash, provide an extraordinarily rare window into the court, showing how the justices talk to one another outside of public view....
In public, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has cultivated a reputation for care and caution. The papers reveal a different side of him. At a critical moment for the country and the court, the papers show, he acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis.
When colleagues warned the chief justice that he was proposing an unprecedented move, he was dismissive. “I recognize that the posture of this stay request is not typical,” he wrote. But he argued that the Obama plan, which aimed to regulate coal-fired plants, was “the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the power sector,” and too big, costly and consequential for the court not to act immediately.
In the Trump era, he and the other conservative justices have repeatedly empowered the president through their shadow docket rulings. By contrast, the papers reveal a court wielding those same powers to block Mr. Obama. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. warned that if the court failed to stop the president, its own “institutional legitimacy” would be threatened....
Civic republicanism
Mike Brock, Apr 16, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
...There is a concept in public life that has almost entirely disappeared, and its disappearance explains more about the current crisis than most of the things we spend our time arguing about. The concept is this: the seat does not belong to you.
If you hold public office, the authority you exercise belongs to the people who granted it. If you sit in the C-suite, the fiduciary duty you carry belongs to the shareholders, the employees, the customers whose lives are entangled with the institution you lead. If you command a military unit, the loyalty you receive is owed to the mission and the people who serve under you. In every case, the position exists to serve interests that are not your own. You are a steward. You were entrusted with something. The moment your presence in the seat becomes a distraction from the purpose of the seat, you have an obligation to leave it.
This is not punishment. It is the basic condition of the job....
Taibbi’s error, and it is an error shared by an entire cottage industry of writers who built their brands as counter-warriors to the #MeToo movement, is a category mistake. They treat resignation as though it exists on the same continuum as criminal conviction — as though leaving office is a penalty that requires the same evidentiary standard as a prison sentence. It does not. These are different institutions answering different questions. The court asks: did this person commit a crime, and can it be proven beyond a reasonable doubt? The office asks: can this person continue to serve the interests they were entrusted to protect?
A politician embroiled in public scandal is not effectively representing the people who elected them. A CEO at the center of a months-long media firestorm is not effectively leading the company. A university president who has become the story is not effectively running the university. This is true whether the allegations are proven, unproven, or even false. The distraction is the point. The inability to fulfill the purpose of the seat is the point. The seat was never about you.
If you are falsely accused, and the accusation becomes an unmanageable public spectacle, this is of course unfair to you. Genuinely, humanly unfair. And you have remedies for that unfairness. You have defamation suits. You have civil courts. You have a legal system designed to adjudicate exactly this kind of injury. What you do not have is the right to hold the seat hostage while you fight your personal battle, consuming the attention and resources and institutional credibility that belong to the people the seat was built to serve.
That is what lawsuits are for. That is what courts are for. And a leader who cannot distinguish between their personal interest in vindication and their institutional obligation to the people they serve is no leader at all....
[Uncensored Objection, via The Big Picture, April 12, 2026]
Three decades of interviews with actual Nazis distilled into a 12-point checklist. Spoiler: the checklist is fully checked. Read it and decide for yourself.
