Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 08, 2026
by Tony Wikrent3
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Fintan O’Toole, February 26, 2026 issue [The New York Review]
Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence….
Watchfulness is the most dangerous form of resistance because it obstructs the Trump regime’s project of habituation. Fascism works by making the extreme normal. Habit, as Samuel Beckett has it, is a great deadener. It has been obvious since the start of Trump’s second term that he is trying to make the sight of armed and masked men with virtually unlimited powers one to which Americans are accustomed.
First by dispatching National Guard troops to Los Angeles and other cities, then by sending ICE contingents to Washington, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, Brownsville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis, the regime is redefining not just legal and political norms but normalcy itself. It is making the threat of arbitrary state violence routine, stitching it into the fabric of daily urban life. The hope is that most Americans can be schooled to go about their mundane preoccupations even while they are being visibly occupied….
This procedure of habituation is also a process of escalation. Authoritarian takeover in a long-established democracy must be gradual. And the gradations are primarily moral. The populace must be desensitized. People must get used to images of little children being kidnapped by unidentified masked agents. They must become acclimated to young women being grabbed and hustled into unmarked vans by faceless men; they must learn not to acknowledge abduction.
They must become familiar with official disappearances—an idea once confined to the outer darkness beyond the southern border but now fully domesticated. They must get used to killing—first to the out-of-the-way obscure deaths of migrants: thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, often because of the authorities’ refusal to treat acute medical conditions. And then they must get used to the public, open, and flagrant killings of American citizens. In this logic of escalation, a cold-blooded summary execution is not an accident. It is a climax….
How Germany Went from Street Protest to Silence
Sharon Kyle, Jan 30, 2026 [LA Progressive]
The Step‑by‑Step Collapse of Moral Resistance. In 1930, Germans still filled the streets. By 1938, open opposition had vanished.
Classified Whistleblower Complaint About Tulsi Gabbard Stalls Within Her Agency
Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber, Feb. 2, 2026 [Wall Street Journal, via Letters from an American]
...A U.S. intelligence official has alleged wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a whistleblower complaint that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter.
The filing of the complaint has prompted a continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle about how to assess and handle it, with the whistleblower’s lawyer accusing Gabbard of stonewalling the complaint…..A cloak-and-dagger mystery reminiscent of a John le Carré novel is swirling around the complaint, which is said to be locked in a safe. Disclosure of its contents could cause “grave damage to national security,” one official said. It also implicates another federal agency beyond Gabbard’s, and raises potential claims of executive privilege that may involve the White House, officials said.The complaint was filed last May with the intelligence community’s inspector general, according to a November letter that the whistleblower’s lawyer addressed to Gabbard. The letter, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, accused Gabbard’s office of hindering the dissemination of the complaint to lawmakers by failing to provide necessary security guidance on how to do so….
...Wyden is a longstanding member of the Senate intelligence committee. He takes seriously its responsibilities to stop the intelligence agencies from using their operational secrecy to break the law, violate peoples' privacy – or worse – and enmesh the country in dangerous misadventures both foreign and domestic….Interviewing Wyden is a maddening mixture of candor and obstinacy. He has a security clearance to lawfully access classified information. The reporter interviewing him does not. He wants to tell you what he found, but that would break the law and get him, at a minimum, thrown off the committee. You as the reporter are trying to absorb what little Wyden is telling you. You are primarily attentive to the vastness of what he leaves unsaid. You try to improvise clever ways to ask, and reask, questions that might clarify what he means, and/or yield leads for other ways to investigate it. Usually Wyden says he can't answer those, either….All I can tell you is that Wyden's record of warning that there is deep and constitutionally-serious dirt being done by the intelligence agencies in secret is unblemished. Never once in the many years I have been reporting on Wyden have I ever encountered a warning of his to be hyperbolic, let alone baseless….
A team working for President Donald Trump's spy chief, Tulsi Gabbard, last spring led an investigation into Puerto Rico's voting machines, said Gabbard's office and three sources familiar with the previously unreported events.The sources said the goal was to work with the FBI to investigate claims that Venezuela had hacked voting machines in Puerto Rico, but added the probe did not produce any clear evidence of Venezuelan interference in the U.S. territory's elections.
On Jan. 6, 2026, a group of election conspiracy theorists released a report detailing allegations that the 2020 presidential results in Georgia’s Fulton County were “falsely padded” with questionable ballots. A little over three weeks later, FBI agents raided the county’s offices and seized 700 boxes of voting records….The “Fulton County Report of Investigation of the 2020 General Election” was billed as coming from the “Election Oversight Group” and dated Jan. 6, 2026. EOG is a supposed watchdog group that has repeatedly filed complaints against election officials in Georgia and produced research documents based on thoroughly debunked allegations. Some of the group’s past work was cited by Trump and his attorneys in 2024 as he defended himself against Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation and pressed his ultimately successful case for presidential immunity. There are indications this more recent EOG report also made its way to Trump’s team and even that it may have influenced the mysterious investigation that led to the Fulton County raid.
Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon
[WaPo, via Naked Capitalism 02-05-2025]
BREAKING: DOJ Empowers Board of Immigration Appeals to Strip Due Process From Migrants
[Migrant Insider, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
The Paramilitary ICE and CBP Units at the Center of Minnesota’s Killings
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Ken Klippenstein, Feb 04, 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Gregory Bovino reported to Corey Lewandowski, not CBP chief
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Wait! The public face of nationwide immigration enforcement, Gregory Bovino, said in a newly discovered email that his boss wasn’t the head of CBP. He reported to Corey Lewandowski instead.
Emails reveal possible command structure for immigration Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago
Mark Rivera and Barb Markoff, Christine Tressel and Tom Jones, February 4, 2026 [abc7chicago.com WLS]
Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said his boss was not the head of CBP, emails newly obtained by ABC News show.
Accountability for ICE and CBP
Garrett Graff, February 01, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario]
On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s “Illinois Accountability Commission,” the state government body he set up after the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we’re experiencing now. The body’s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward.
I was called as the commission’s expert witness on the history of problems, corruption, and training within CBP and ICE — a story I’ve covered for more than a dozen years, as regular readers of this newsletter know. To prepare, I spent the last week re-reading and re-familiarizing myself with DHS scandals and waves of corruption and mismanagement — and found myself horrified anew.
It was the first time I’ve ever sat down and tried to organize and explain all of the last twenty-five years of DHS and immigration enforcement since 9/11 and painted a complete picture of what’s gone wrong with ICE and CBP. Overall, the totality of the criminality inside CBP in particular is so much worse than I even realized….
ICE’s Private Prison Contractors Spent Millions Lobbying to Force Banks to Give Them Loans
Biplob Kumar Das, February 5 2026 [The Intercept]
Some of the largest banks in the nation for years have eschewed the business of private prison giants like GEO Group and CoreCivic, the two firms that operate more than half the private carceral facilities in the country, including many U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers.
The moves to “debank” the companies, which have been dogged by reports of rights abuses, came after the banks’ reviews of their environmental, social, and governance policies, which included site visits and meeting with civil rights leaders. According to a nonprofit report, the moves by banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, cost the prison companies billions in potential financing.
This 3-page court opinion releasing Liam Ramos is one of the best ever written!
Dean Obeidallah, Feb 02, 2026
Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon
John Woodrow Cox, February 3, 2026 [Washington Post]
In October, a retiree emailed a DHS attorney to urge mercy for an asylum seeker. Then DHS subpoenaed his Google account and sent investigators to his home….
“Unconscionable,” Jon thought as he found an email address online for the lead prosecutor, Joseph Dernbach, who was named in the story. Peering through metal-rimmed glasses, Jon opened Gmail on his computer monitor.“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” he wrote. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”That was it. In five minutes, Jon said, he finished the note, signed his first and last name, pressed send and hoped his plea would make a difference.Five hours and one minute later, Jon was watching TV with his wife when an email popped up in his inbox. He noticed it on his phone.“Google,” the message read, “has received legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.”Listed below was the type of legal process: “subpoena.” And below that, the authority: “Department of Homeland Security.”That’s how it began. Soon would come a knock at the door by men with badges and, for Jon, the relentless feeling of being surveilled in a country where he never imagined he would be….
Yet Another Sign that the Trump Administration is Laying the Groundwork for Election Intervention?
Bob Bauer, Feb 05, 2026 [Executive Functions]
For many years, in both Democratic and Republican administrations, the Department of Justice has published a manual for its prosecutors entitled the Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses. It is now in an eighth edition, published in December 2017. It is a remarkable document—and it articulates principles of federal prosecution that the president is currently rejecting….
The department has pulled the 2017 manual from the website of its Election Crimes Branch. With the midterm elections only months away, journalists and responsible members of Congress should press the White House and the Department of Justice to explain why….
Stephen Prager, February 06, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Bannon floats big lie to prepare stealing of 2026 elections
Heather Cox Richardson, Feb 05, 2026 [Letters from an American, February 4, 2026]
Last week’s release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.
On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans’ rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to “illegal,” usually immigrant, voters.
Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through “voter fraud.” In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.
Judge Incredulous as Trump Lawyer Asks Him to Create New Law for Mark Kelly Retribution Crusade
Kate Riga, 02.03.26 [Talking Points Memo]
“You’re asking me to do something that the Supreme Court has never done — that’s a bit of a stretch, is it not?” the George W. Bush-appointed judge asked DOJ’s John Bailey.
The Trump administration tried during the hearing to argue that the diminished speech rights that apply to the active duty military — meant to preserve obedience and discipline — should apply to Kelly, who is retired, as well.
Strategic Political Economy
Pay No Attention To The Pillaging Behind The Curtain
David Sirota, February 03, 2026 [The Lever]
Have you noticed that the “news” is now almost 100 percent anything other than the unprecedented financial pillaging of the entire country, at every single minute of every single day? Have you noticed how life is becoming unaffordable for almost everyone around you, and yet this is barely a topic of national conversation, buried under the spectacle of violence and political theater being manufactured by the party-media complex?
- This is no accident — it’s part of an ongoing effort by both parties and their media machines to help their donors depoliticize the systematic looting of America. They are trying to make politics, voting, and elections about literally everything but the Great Fleecing. Why?
Blinders on. Because they do not want the public to believe that elections can change the economic superstructure that enriches the oligarchs and corporations. They do not want the political conversation to be about how nobody can financially survive, because if the political conversation is about that, then the general population might develop expectations. Expectations that democracy is an actual system rather than a slogan. Expectations that voting can create actual mandates. Expectations that elections result in politicians getting into power and materially improving people’s lives — or facing the prospect of being quickly thrown out of office….
How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism — Macroeconomics is the driver, not median voters.
Thomas Ferguson, February 3, 2026 [Boston Review]
...The Democratic Party’s historic links to working-class Americans had been fraying for a while, but Jimmy Carter’s decision to replace G. William Miller with Paul Volcker—well before the nineties—transformed a slow downward spiral into a catastrophe. Stanley Kelley’s dissection of how Volcker wrecked Carter’s reelection effort in his important 1983 book Interpreting Elections was a fine start. It should have been aggressively followed up by studies of how the Great Volcker Deflation destroyed the Democratic brand as the heartland collapsed over the next few years. The fact that a Democrat appointed him is rarely pondered by political scientists.
Together with colleagues like William Greider and Joel Rogers, I have worked through the dismal details (including opinion polling), so I will simply dismiss the idea that any appeal to the median voter was responsible for any of this. Carter’s decision reflected massive pressure from financiers and financial markets in a panic over what in hindsight was a trivial uptick in the government deficit. Ever since Democratic financiers and business groups lined up behind fiscal austerity, their demands have defined the party’s center of gravity.
This was certainly the case in 1984. Almost everyone agrees that Walter Mondale’s promise to raise taxes doomed his bid for the presidency. But as Rogers and I document in Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, Mondale made that decision after two key Democratic financiers, Robert Rubin and Roger Altman, flew out to Minnesota and pressed him to drink from the poisoned chalice.
The story four years later was similar, if less melodramatic. Under pressure from the party’s financial bloc, Michael Dukakis resisted calls for stronger fiscal spending that might have helped workers whose jobs were disappearing amid the first great surge of imports and overseas investments by U.S. firms. He lost in a landslide. Two of the most prominent Democratic financiers supporting his campaign were, once again, Rubin and Altman, while Larry Summers, closely connected to Rubin, advised the campaign. Thereafter the Democratic elite’s emphasis on austerity, lower taxes, financial deregulation, and the benefits flowing from free trade, unrestricted overseas investment, and a high dollar has barely shifted. Their indifference to investing much in average Americans, reconstructing heartland communities, or coping with falling rates of unionization reflects a policy fixation rivaling that of an Egyptian dynasty. Its devastating long-run effects on the party’s position in the Midwest and South are only now being widely recognized.
So much, then, for median voters. This is how money-driven politics works….
Right now, Democratic congressional leaders clearly think that Trump is so vulnerable that a repetition of 2025’s across-the-board shift to Democrats is likely in the upcoming midterm elections. They talk far more boldly than they act while reveling in crypto cash and other streams of political money. But they and many others have a long history of underestimating Trump’s economics and its appeals, as well as how swiftly and convincingly he is able to dramatize those doctrines as populist and outflank Democrats on the left. With Trump’s ostentatious overtures first to Zohran Mamdani and now to Elizabeth Warren, so reminiscent of how he used to talk up Sanders, the shape of things to come is obvious. As the administration revs up cascading streams of tax rebates, prescription drug price cuts, and other (short-term) goodies for an electorate that considers the Democrats more corrupt than the Republicans, these calculations on the part of Democratic elites can easily prove as misguided as they were in 2016 and 2024….
Global power shift
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2025]
You've doubtless read the numerous headlines these past few days on how Xi Jinping called for the Yuan to "become a global reserve currency."That's true, he actually said that. But, as is often the case, Western media are missing the forest for the trees.This is extracted from a speech in which Xi laid out a much grander vision of what a “modern financial system with Chinese characteristics” (中国特色现代金融体系) would look like, essentially China's answer to Wall Street.Fascinatingly, and in stark contrast to the actual Wall Street, Xi's main argument is that what matter most aren't the institutions or status that China is seeking to build up - such as having the Yuan as a global reserve currency. Those are secondary.Xi argues that what truly will make or break the system is its moral culture. As he describes it, the Western financial system is nihilistic, counterproductive and ultimately politically destabilizing.
Xi Jinping on the Chinese Financial System
Karl Sanchez [via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2025]
Oligarchy
Epstein Emails Expose How America’s Elites Really See the Rest of Us
[Egberto Off The Record, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Shaun King, Feb 03, 2026
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2025]
The attached email is the most shocking email I've seen yet in the Epstein release and I haven't seen anyone talking about it. "We've had another serious incident since an American shot the trial judge in our child sex trafficking case here."I'm sorry, WTF? An American was in Mexico and shot a trial judge overseeing a child sex trafficking case? Yes.It goes on "He and I both think this latest incident is tied to the fact we have reached out to your team. Who on your team knows we are talking to you, anyone assigned from NSA, CIA or US State Department? Please understand peoples lives here are in jeopardy."The guy writing the email is accusing the DOJ of having someone from the NSA, CIA or State on his team AND suggesting their knowledge of prosecuting a sex trafficker would generate a hit on the judge assigned to the case.It gets better (worse)...That wasn't the first violent attempt to stop the prosecution of a sex trafficker. "We have had 4 armed attacks against us, my partner has shot and killed 2 and wounded 5 American agents to date, numerous white American agents following us in vans assigned to US Embassy. Jorge was attacked and lost his arm."Holy crap!!! In 2019, US Embassy (likely CIA) vans were stalking our own guys assisting in MX to prosecute sex trafficking.
The Plutocrats Who Rule Our World Aren’t Even Enjoying Themselves
Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
...Can you imagine a more miserable way to spend your days on this planet than becoming an oligarch and manipulating state power to ensure that your unfathomable wealth will never be redistributed to the needful and the struggling, and that ordinary people will forever remain trapped as powerless gear-turners whose labor exists solely to turn billionaires into trillionaires?
I know I can’t.
The plutocrats who control our society are not sincerely dedicated to the pursuit of happiness; if they were, they wouldn’t be plutocrats, and they wouldn’t be controlling our society. Happiness comes from contentment with one’s present experience, and those who keep compulsively amassing wealth for its own sake can never experience that contentment….
Why the Epstein Files Won't Go Away — The GOP loses in a Trump-heavy Texas district, as voters get angrier and angrier at elite misbehavior.
Matt Stoller, Feb 01, 2026 [BIG]
...the Department of Justice released a series of new emails related to Jeff Epstein, the notorious social fixer and sex trafficker who sits in the middle of the political and economic world of baby boom elites, spanning institutions from MIT to Harvard to the Obama White House to Google to Donald Trump himself. There are new revelations about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Larry Summers, Kathy Ruemmler, Steve Tisch, Mike Lee, Chuck Schumer, Howard Lutnick, Bari Weiss and many other notable figures.
Often the stories coming out are horrible and gross, confirming or at least mostly confirming the worst conspiracies you might imagine. There are bits of evidence pointing to something behind the scenes we can’t quite see, like intense involvement by Epstein in early bitcoin development, through his links with MIT and Reid Hoffman. Or meetings with big law firm Paul Weiss chair Brad Karp and Goldman Sachs legal counsel Kathryn Ruemmler around the time Facebook was finalizing sensitive settlements with the FTC and SEC.
Some of what has come out is funny, like Larry Summers upset his own kids like Bernie Sanders.…
The sordid elites on both sides are being hit, and hit hard, by these documents. Though Donald Trump campaigned on releasing the files, a few months ago, he reversed course. He said there were no government files worth releasing around Epstein, and the idea of such files was a Democratic party plot. Of course, it turns out his name is all over the files, in many different contexts, none of them flattering. As another example, Elon Musk said publicly he adamantly refused to visit Epstein as a matter of principle. It turns out that Musk emailed Epstein and asked about coming to visit, with the question, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”
Even important commenters are finding it embarrassing. New York Times podcaster and Democratic party operative Ezra Klein, in 2025, mocked the idea of a conspiracy, and said “I think this guy had a lot of powerful friends, and that he was a predator and a pedophile, and those sides of his life were mostly separate.” To acknowledge a tight-knit network of insiders wielding power, cuts at the core of a lot of powerful people, who want to keep up a pretense of meritocracy.
But it’s the shamelessness of those caught up I find most interesting. Take billionaire and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, a donor to Kamala Harris who in 2024 demanded she fire Lina Khan. He was in the Epstein files and exposed as a visitor to the island….
The Big Reveal: It Was Epstein’s Psyop All Along
Jim Stewartson, Feb 03, 2026 [MindWar]
[CBS News, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Alex Krainer, Feb 01, 2026
Western society has been hostage to the same pathology for over 2,000 years. Today, we are in a better position than ever to end this curse and emancipate humanity.
Felonomics
MAGA's "People's Capitalism" — An Alliance of Bourgeoisie and Mob
John Ganz, Feb 03, 2026 [Unpopular Front]
So who stands to gain from ICE’s terror campaign? As Adam Tooze points out in his newsletter Chartbook this morning, “The MAGA immigration crackdown in the US is a bonanza for politically connected, small and mid-caps.” His source for this is a Financial Times piece: “Companies reap $22bn from Trump’s immigration crackdown.” I decided to take a closer look at the list of beneficiaries. While there are several publicly traded and venture capital-funded firms, the biggest recipients show a striking pattern: they are all regional, dynastic family businesses and major GOP donors. In addition, they have engaged in legally questionable practices.…
If you’re familiar with the work of Melinda Cooper, this wouldn’t surprise you. In 2022, she wrote “the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned” and that “[t]he family-based capitalism that stormed the White House along with Trump stretches from the smallest of family businesses to the most rambling of dynasties, and crucially depends on the alliance between the two.” Trump, of course, comes from this social class, whose business practices are “informal,” or, more blunty put, often downright criminal….
Bernie Sanders Finds How Much Trump Has Cut in Medical Research Funds
Edith Olmsted, February 6, 2026 [The New Republic]
A report published Friday by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, found that the NIH had gutted $561 million in funding for research on cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Despite research on these illnesses being fully funded by Congress, the Trump administration has chosen to terminate at least 320 grants mid-study and abandon thousands of patients across 304 clinical trials, including 69 trials for children. In addition to destroying years of work, the Trump administration’s actions have prompted an entire generation of medical researchers to question the viability of building a career in the United States….
How Federal Cuts to SNAP Are Already Roiling State Governments
Grace Segers, February 5, 2026 [The New Republic]
...In July, Congress approved a law making a series of dramatic cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps roughly 42 million Americans buy groceries. Along with adding new work requirements, the measure will also increase the amount that states spend on both administrative costs and SNAP benefits themselves.…
Beginning in October, states will be responsible for 75 percent of administrative costs of SNAP, a dramatic increase from the current 50 percent; the federal government will be responsible for the remaining 25 percent. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this provision would mean a reduction in federal funding for administrative costs by nearly $25 billion over the next decade.
As early as the fall of 2027, states will also be responsible for a portion of the cost of SNAP benefits, depending on their error rates—that is, the share of overpayments and underpayments of SNAP benefits. If an eligible household either receives too much or not enough in benefits for a given month, those payments are in error.
According to recent research by the Georgetown Law School Center on Poverty and Inequality, these new changes will result in states spending an average of two to three times more on SNAP in their budgets, with a median increase of 202 percent. In 15 states, the share of the state budget will increase by more than 300 percent.
If their error rate is above 6 percent in fiscal year 2025 or 2026, states may begin paying a portion of SNAP costs beginning in fiscal year 2028. If that state’s error rate is above 10 percent, they will be on the hook for 15 percent of benefit costs….
Kevin Warsh – Wall Street’s man
Michael Roberts [via Naked Capitalism 02-02-2025]
The Human Cost of the Warsh-Palantir Economic Framework
[Frame the Globe News, via Naked Capitalism 02-02-2025]
As financial elites celebrate AI-driven efficiency, millions face cuts to healthcare, food assistance, and social services while the manufacturing base continues to collapse.
Trump is FURIOUS Over MORE MASS RESIGNATIONS
[Talking Feds with Henry Litman, YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2025]
White House pitches renaming Penn Station as Trump Station to unlock Gateway tunnel funding
[Gothamist, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 02-03-2025]
Retirement in America: An Analysis of Retirement Preparedness Among Working-Age Americans
[National Institute on Retirement Security, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
Health care crisis
The 2008 Housing Crash Was a Warning. Health Insurance May Be Next.
[HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 02-05-2025]
Predatory finance
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-02-2025]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
This is the worst one yet... and confirmed everything we suspected about Epstein's Zorro Ranch. "2 foreign girls buried on orders of Jeffrey & Madam G. Both died by strangulation during fetish sex."
Dougald Lamont, Feb 06, 2026
You’re Paying Taxes to Billionaire Pedophiles Who Bomb and Maybe Eat Children
Charles McBryd [via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
Epstein’s “wild” party with Zuckerberg, Musk, and Thiel
[Oligarch Watch, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
The Epstein Files Are Hazing You Into The Pedo Gang
[indi.ca, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
Carole Cadwalladr, Charlie Young and Max Colbert, Jan 27, 2026 [thenerve.news, via Naked Capitalism 02-05-2025]
Nerve investigation finds Trump ally Peter Thiel's surveillance firm has won at least 34 contracts, including management services for Britain's nuclear deterrent, with MPs warning of 'gaping vulnerability' as US president threatens Nato allies.
Epstein Geopolitics And the Age of Primitive Accumulation
[Un-Diplomatic, via Naked Capitalism 02-05-2025]
Epstein was an agent of neoliberal globalization—moving within elite circles to exploit power for profit trasnationally—but he was also presiding as a power-elite at a time when the world was transitioning from neoliberalism to something much worse. Epstein was, in many ways, pioneering this transition. The era of the past decade of “post-neoliberalism” is sometimes reduced to “great-power competition” or “nationalism” or even “neo-royalism,” but these are all not-good-enough ways of talking about the end of neoliberal globalization, which, we should recall, was a fix to the crisis of industrial capitalism in the ‘60s. We are well and truly into an age of primitive accumulation, and it fucking sucks.
A Secret Oil Cartel Might Have Killed Our Clean-Energy Future
Emily Sanders, Feb 4, 2026 [The Lever]
In a landmark antitrust case, Michigan alleges oil companies colluded to “capture and kill” clean-energy and electric-vehicle efforts.
Restoring balance to the economy
Inside Cleveland’s pay-as-you-can plumbing co-op that sees clean water as a human right
[Signal Cleveland, via Naked Capitalism 02-05-2025]
Four Ways States Are Taking on the Data Center Machine
[Boondoggle, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
America's grid transformation: How renewable energy seized 99% of new capacity additions in 2026
WebProNews [via Clean Power Roundup, Feb 2, 2026]
Federal data reveals renewable sources will comprise 99% of new U.S. electricity capacity in 2026, with solar and wind leading a historic grid transformation driven by economics rather than regulation, fundamentally restructuring American power infrastructure.
Disrupting mainstream economics
Politics for People and the political economy of care: the core principles
Richard Murphy, February 4, 2026 [Funding the Future]
If GDP is a broken measure, why do politicians still worship it?
Richard Murphy, February 3, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Revisiting a 2017 Prediction — Making structural-demographic theory more quantitative
Peter Turchin, Feb 04, 2026 [Cliodynamica]
As readers of this Substack now, back in 2010 I published prediction that the United States will experience a period of heightened social and political instability during the 2020s (Political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade). Some years later, several people challenged me to make this prediction more quantitative, because quantitative predictions are a much harder test for a theory.
In response, nine years ago, in January 2017, I published a more precise prediction on my blog:
A Quantitative Prediction for Political Violence in the 2020s….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Google to pay $203M in data privacy suits: Could you get a payout?
[The Street, via Naked Capitalism 02-01-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
Cuba records first freezing temperature amid deepening energy crisis
[Intellinews, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
‘Do You Speak Billionaire?’ and Other Stories From the Fall of the Washington Post
Josh Marshall, February 05, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
...Jeff Bezos could float almost limitless news organization losses forever and barely notice. What we’re seeing is something that should be familiar to any close of observer of the news over the last generation. Let’s call it the formulaic billionaire white knight press baron doom cycle.
Our guy comes in as a White Knight. He solves every problem because money is no issue. The readers and the staff are happy and, because of that, the billionaire is happy. The press watchers at the universities are happy. Everybody’s happy. It’s a for-profit operation and the buyer doesn’t want to lose money but it’s not a money-making purchase. The operation is purchased as a kind of public trust. He’s signed up as the protector and custodian of a public asset.
But billionaires turn out not to like losing money. That shouldn’t surprise us. You don’t get to be a billionaire by having much tolerance for losing money. Having limitless amounts of money doesn’t really matter. It’s more integral to their personhood. It eats at them. I’ve seen this a number of times up close. Eventually it’s too much.
What’s the solution? Innovation, efficiency, scale … often it’s refocusing on the great underserved middle of the electorate. (Where’d that last part come from? Who do you think billionaires spend their days talking to?) The consultants and tech-adjacent efficiency and innovation bros are responsible for the rest. The guys who make this case are from a never-ending — life as spontaneous generation from the inanimate soil — list of consultants who speak billionaire.
If you’ve been in the news-publishing business over the last few decades you know the type. (Last year I did a post explaining this stage of the cycle.) ….
Now we come to the pivot moment of the cycle. It turns out the innovation and scale mumbo-jumbo isn’t really working. It’s not making any new people want to read your paper and you’re seriously bumming out your readership which, somewhat like your employers, you’re beginning to feel a certain level of resentment toward. That readership was already in at least longterm decline. Now you’re actually driving people away. And the new people, to the extent they exist and aren’t bought as commodity eyeballs, aren’t remotely filling the gap. Your staff meanwhile are increasingly angry and resentful. The ones who can are already leaving. And screw them anyway, right? If they want to self-cut, let them. That just helps with the bottom line.
At some point the billionaire realizes that as awesome as efficiencies and scale and serving the underserved middle is … well, this isn’t working. Who are we fooling? The billionaire can see that if he’s self-made. Give him his due. It turns out this is hard. And this is the kicker: He’s bored. This isn’t fun.
So the answer is: fuck this whole thing. The staff sucks. The readership sucks. This is when the self-immolation cuts start. If there’s one thing a local paper needs, one thing a metro paper needs, it’s sports. If you can’t do sports, which has a mass audience, you can’t do anything. Maybe you decided in a hard-headed moment that you can’t fund an international section. The Times and the Journal will do that. Not us. It’s not crazy. When you cut your sports section, it’s because you actually don’t want the paper to exist anymore….
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
Ruth Marcus, February 4, 2026 [The New Yorker]
[Marcus was deputy editor of the WaPo editorial page when billionaire Bezos bought it]
The Bloodbath at Washington Post Is All Jeff Bezos’s Fault
Eoin Higgins, February 7 2026 [The Intercept]
Jeff Bezos Just Taught Liberal Elites How Oligarchy Really Works
Matt Stoller, Feb 05, 2026 [BIG]
...Sanders, running for President against what he called the billionaire class, did something unusual in polite liberal society. He said Bezos had an incentive to shade coverage of politicians he didn’t like. Sanders had been discussing how Amazon doesn’t pay enough in taxes.
“See, I talk about that all of the time. And then I wonder why The Washington Post — which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon — doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why. But I guess maybe there’s a connection.”
And that comment created a bitter reaction within D.C. towards the populist politician. The executive editor of the Washington Post, a deeply respected man named Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber in the 2015 film “Spotlight”), responded the way all of D.C. felt. He called Sanders a conspiracy theorist….
But Bezos himself ruined this opportunity for the paper. In 2024, Bezos intervened in the editorial page to prevent an endorsement of Kamala Harris, which was a violation of the promise he made in 2013 when he bought the paper. That decision led to 200,000 subscription cancelations. We don’t know how many the paper has left, but the guess was that it had 2.5 million before Bezos’s intervention.…
[TW: A republic is supposed to be governed by the representatives selected by the citizens. To exercise judgment about the character and ability of the representatives they select, the citizens must have unrestricted access to the news, information, and opinions.
[But who controls that access?
[It should be clear that it is dangerous to allow that access to be controlled by too few people or institutions. One point of control is obviously unacceptable. But are two points of control acceptable? Three? Four? What about six? That is supposedly how many large corporations now control 90 percent of the news content in USA.
[It is also reported that nine of the ten richest individuals in the US are owners and executives of media corporations.
[Media ownership by the morbidly rich should not be allowed in a republic. Why? Because of the unique and peculiar psycho-pathology that afflicts the morbidly rich. This is not a discovery of modern psychology or social science. The psycho-pathology peculiar to the morbidly rich has been noted and explained by a number of ancient philosophers and thinkers.
[Cicero wrote that “When one person or a few stand out from the crowd as richer and more prosperous, then, as a result of their haughty and arrogant behavior, there arises [a government of one or a few], the cowardly and weak giving way and bowing down to the pride of wealth."
[In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli described how the Romans tried to counterbalance the control of the Senate by the rich and restore political balance by creating tribunes to represent the plebians, but the unceasing resistance and plotting against the tribunes by the rich of Rome eventually brought about the end of the Roman republic. The lesson Machiavelli advised posterity, was “Let, then, a republic be constituted where there exists, or can be brought into being, notable equality.”
[In the Christian Bible we find Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” And the famous warning that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” is repeated three times in the New Testament, in Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25.
[A return to the principles of civic republicanism would require that the free speech rights of the morbidly rich be limited – much the same as free speech rights of active military officers are limited. There are statutes and regulations that are part of the restrictions on the free speech rights of military officers, but perhaps more important are the cultural norms and expectations of the military institutions, and the society at large.
[At the present time, we have no similar cultural norms and expectations restricting the free speech rights of the rich. We will have to develop them. A large part of that will be creating a much wider public understanding of psycho-pathology of the morbidly rich.
[A foundational statute would therefore be a strict limitation on the ownership of media companies.
Perhaps: all media organizations must be at least 51% owned by employees, which include the actual journalists. No company or entity is allowed to own more than one media organization in any single metro market or region.
[Financial institutions and banks, including hedge funds, trust funds, and investment funds of all kinds, such as State Street, BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity, would be strictly prohibited from any ownership of any kind. They may not even hold stock in publicly traded companies.
[The plain history of corporate malfeasance and malignant management of the past half decade of neoliberal “shareholder value” makes clear that financial institutions of all kinds, with their ability to accumulate financial assets, and use those assets to purchase political influence, are one of the primary dangers to a republic. James Madison was explicit about this in the notes he prepared for the Constitutional Convention, and the this thinking drove much of Madison’s and Jefferson’s increasingly hostile opposition to Hamilton’s plans to create a financial system for the US free from the control of the states and princes of Europe.]
Democrats' political malpractice
Dean Obeidallah, Feb 03, 2026
Resistance
The Blueprint That Broke a Federal Occupation
Chris Armitage [via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
…Indigenous communities led from the front with smudging, dancing, and songs, organized through the American Indian Movement, the Indigenous Protector Movement, and the Little Earth Protectors. Not just elders. Whole generations showed up. Representatives from at least ten tribes traveled to Minneapolis, the birthplace of AIM, on what Rachel Dionne-Thunder of the Indigenous Protector Movement called "unceded Dakota land."⁵ They came because ICE was stopping, questioning, and detaining Native people based on skin color alone.⁶ Federal agents occupying Indigenous land were profiling Indigenous people for looking Indigenous. That fact alone should have been a national scandal. In Minneapolis, it was one more reason to march.
Print shops across the city churned out posters by the thousands at steep discounts or for free. Volunteers distributed them at events, tucked them under windshield wipers, taped them to doors. The posters listed upcoming actions, named the politicians to contact, and spelled out the specific demands that would have the most effect. Multiple groups produced and distributed them independently, without coordinating with each other, because the need was obvious enough that nobody had to be told. Volunteers 3D-printed whistles and handed them out block by block so an entire neighborhood could sound the alarm the moment agents turned a corner.
At the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, the ICE field office that served as the operation's command center, activists ran daily surveillance and captured footage that ended up on every network in the country. They turned a federal building into a stage where the administration's own cruelty played on camera for a national audience. Clergy from half a dozen denominations went to the airport and got arrested for it, about a hundred pastors and ministers and rabbis hauled off in zip ties for blocking the terminal where deportation flights departed.⁴ Churches opened as sanctuaries.
Thousands of people joined Signal chats organized by neighborhood, each one run by volunteer dispatchers tracking ICE movements in real time. Ad hoc intelligence networks, built overnight by civilians with nothing but cell phones. When convoys rolled through neighborhoods, people followed them, documented plate numbers, and reported locations so families had time to get inside. Some of those watchers got run off roads by federal vehicles. Agents stalked others, collected their personal information, and tried to intimidate them into stopping. They didn't stop.
Through all of it, volunteers built a door-to-door mutual aid network from scratch. They delivered groceries, dropped off supplies, checked on families who couldn't leave their homes because armed, masked men were circling their block. The Immigrant Defense Network trained nearly thirty thousand constitutional observers across 77 of the state's 87 counties, up from twenty-five hundred in November, averaging two thousand new volunteers every week by late January.¹² Lawyers fanned out through low-income immigrant neighborhoods to explain rights that people didn't know they had: that they could refuse to open their doors without a judicial warrant, that they could remain silent, that being stopped did not mean being convicted. Know-your-rights cards showed up on bus shelters and in laundromats, printed in English and Spanish and Somali. None of this infrastructure existed before the occupation. The community built it while the occupation was happening….
None of this had a single leader. None of it required permission. A grandmother delivering rice to a Somali family and a college student running Signal dispatch and a print shop owner working at cost all operated inside the same structure, and the structure held because every piece reinforced every other piece.
Our team started calling it the mosaic.
A mosaic works because no single tile carries the whole picture. Lose one and the image survives. Add one and it gets sharper….
On February 4, Tom Homan stood inside the Whipple Building and announced a drawdown, effective immediately.⁷ He said it wasn't a surrender, that mass deportations would continue. The administration claimed seven hundred agents were leaving. Whether the real number was seven hundred or something else, who knows. What I know is this: the first time I embedded with ICE watchers, right after Renee Good was killed, the scanner traffic sounded like a war zone. People getting chased off roads, agents swarming neighborhoods, abductions reported constantly. The second time, weeks later, I spent two days following ICE watch volunteers whose entire job was to find where the agents were, and we didn't hear a single abduction. Something changed….
“They demanded what Letitia James has started building in New York: trained state observers embedded in enforcement zones to document whether federal agents stay within the law, creating an official record that prosecutors can use.”
[TW: Here is one idea: state and local officials can begin to deputize volunteers, so that ICE and Homeland Security are colliding officially with state and local governments, forcing the issue of federalism to the fore.]
None of this is over. Not one federal agent has been prosecuted for an on-duty murder, beating, or kidnapping anywhere in the country since Trump's second term began. People are still in detention camps. Operations continue. The administration learned from Minneapolis that it needed better optics, so now we get fascism with improved customer service: fewer convoys in daylight, fewer cameras catching agents dragging someone into an unmarked car, the same raids run quieter so nobody films the part that polls at 23 percent. The underlying machinery hasn't stopped. But the mosaic proved that sustained, targeted pressure changes behavior. The next step is finding the next specific target. Not the big abstract fight against everything at once, but the next concrete place where pressure can be applied, ground gained, and conditions changed for real people. As soon as we win one, we find the next one. The fight moves, and we move with it.
We don't need one perfect strategy. We need dozens of imperfect ones running at the same time. Printers, lawyers, drivers, legislators, someone who knows how to cook for forty, all doing their thing without waiting for someone to hand them a role. The mosaic doesn't require a leader. It requires participants….
The EARR Training Booklet, is available as a physical booklet at TheExistentialistRepublic.com and for free at BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER. The guide teaches the Educate, Activate, Recruit, Repeat framework for building the kind of decentralized opposition Minneapolis just proved works.
Reverse Palantir: Inside The Online War to Identify ICE Agents (Exclusive)
[Migrant Insider, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2025]
A week after ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot Renee Nicole Good three times in her car on a snowy Minneapolis street, a Department of Homeland Security employee had seen enough.
The whistleblower gave Dominick Skinner, a 31-year-old Irish immigration activist living in the Netherlands, the personal information of roughly 4,500 ICE and Border Patrol personnel—2,000 frontline enforcement agents and 2,500 support staff. The leak, which Skinner received in mid-January, represents one of the largest breaches of federal law enforcement data in recent history.
“It is a sign that people aren’t happy within the U.S. government, clearly,” Skinner told me in an exclusive Q&A this week with Migrant Insider. “The shooting was the last straw for many people,” he added.
ICE List, which Skinner founded in June 2025 as mass deportation operations accelerated under the Trump administration’s second term, already had the names of 2,000 immigration enforcement personnel. The new leak more than tripled his database. The site uses facial recognition AI—trained on video footage of masked agents during raids—to unmask and identify federal officers, then cross-references the results with public databases and social media accounts….
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 02-04-2025]
Six Ways to Reform ICE and CBP
Garrett Graff, February 04, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario]
The Ferocity of Responses to Tim Walz’s Anne Frank/ICE Comments Are Revealing
[Religion Dispatches, via Naked Capitalism 02-07-2025]
...But the ferocity of the response reveals something deeper than a disagreement over rhetoric. It exposes a long-running and unresolved struggle over how the Holocaust should be remembered, taught, and politically mobilized: Should its lessons be universal, regarded as warnings about how modern states exercise power over vulnerable populations? Or should they remain strictly particular, cordoned off as uniquely Jewish history with no legitimate application to the present?
Walz’s critics clearly insist on the latter. But Kaploun, a Trump nominee, also took an odd—and revealing—detour, asserting that Anne Frank “was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law,” implying that Walz’s comments weren’t just factually incoherent, but that residency status is a meaningful data point in the debate over the terrorizing of children.
Kaploun’s claim isn’t just wrong, it’s also a falsification of history. Anne Frank and her family were in no way “legal” residents of Amsterdam. The Frank family had their German citizenship stripped from them under the “Eleventh Decree to the Law on the Citizenship of the Reich” in November 1941; since they’d lived in the Netherlands as permanent residents under their German citizenship and had never become Dutch citizens, they were from that point forward officially stateless, lacking the citizenship protections of any country….
At best, Kaploun’s statement reflects a staggering ignorance of how Nazi law actually worked on a practical level. At worst, it’s a lie that reproduces the moral logic of persecution itself: the suggestion that those subjected to state violence were, in some sense, improperly present and therefore legitimately punished. That is not a neutral historical error—it’s an ideological move….
This is where Hannah Arendt’s analysis is so indispensable—and so deeply uncomfortable for those seeking to quarantine Holocaust memory from the present. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argued that the destruction of rights doesn’t begin with camps or mass murder, but with the revocation of political belonging. Citizenship, she insisted, isn’t merely one right among others; it is the condition that makes rights intelligible and enforceable at all. Once individuals are expelled from the political community, they lose what she famously called “the right to have rights.”
What follows isn’t mere anarchy, but in some ways the opposite: a hyper-rationalized legal order in which exclusion is administered through regulations, permits, detention centers, and deportation machinery. For Arendt, the stateless person isn’t outside the law, but trapped inside a system where law functions as an instrument of domination rather than protection. This was not, in her view, a uniquely Nazi pathology, but a structural danger of modern nation-states that tie human worth to legal status. To invoke Arendt today is not to flatten history, but to recognize how legally-produced vulnerability remains the precondition for organized cruelty….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Texas AG Ken Paxton, GOP officials call on Republicans to ‘fight’ for Tarrant County
[Forth Worth Report, via Naked Capitalism 02-03-2025]
Cory Doctorow, 05 Feb 2026 [Pluralistic]
Think, for example, of all those evangelicals who would vote for Satan himself if he promised to hang any woman who obtained an abortion; the same evangelicals who, just a few decades ago, viewed anti-abortionism as a politically suspect form of crypto-papacy:
The fight against state-sponsored fascism
Richard Murphy, February 6 2026 [Funding the Future]
The far-right has long engineered the egregious spread of its evil doctrines of exploitation and hate through the propagation of networks of NGOs and think tanks.
The process began with the Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman in 1947.
Then it spread through the Atlas Network….
Now the FT has reported:
- The US state department is set to fund Maga-aligned think-tanks and charities across Europe to disseminate Washington's policy positions and challenge perceived threats to free speech.
They added:
- Senior state department official Sarah Rogers travelled to Europe in December to meet influential rightwing think-tanks and has spoken to key figures in Nigel Farage's populist Reform UK party about deploying a pot of money to spread American values, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
- The funding was linked to the 250th anniversary celebrations of US independence later this year, the people said.
What this amounts to is state-backed replication of the hate-filled rhetoric of the far right that has always been aimed at the state, except that now the state has been captured, it is being used to assist the process of its own destruction in the USA and elsewhere to ensure that any remaining elements of democracy might be destroyed….
Marjorie Taylor Greene Admits MAGA Was a Lie—and the Truth Is Worse Than We Thought
Egberto Willies, Feb 04, 2026
It finally slipped. Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly admitted what millions of Americans have known for years: MAGA was never about working people. It was a political con designed to enrich elites, protect donors, and elevate one man’s obsession with power and retribution. Her statement does not absolve her; it indicts an entire movement built on manipulation, grievance, and lies.
MAGA marketed itself as a working-class revolt while serving billionaire donors and corporate power.
Donald Trump sold “retribution” as empowerment, then weaponized government for personal vengeance.
Greene’s honesty arrived only after MAGA turned on her, not because of moral reckoning.
Millions of Americans were harmed by election lies amplified by Republican leaders.
Declining public support for Trump’s agenda reflects growing awareness of the con…..
The South Rises Again
Letters from an American, January 31, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Feb 01, 2026
[TW: Shows the recent anti-immigrant screed by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller that “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history,” rhymes historically with South Carolina slave-holding Senator James Henry Hammond’s “mudsills” screed.]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
‘Awful News for Due Process’ as Court Backs Trump’s Mass Immigrant Detention
Brett Wilkins, February 07, 2026 [CommonDreams]
A three-judge panel of the right-wing 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled 2-1 that President Donald Trump’s reversal of three decades of practice by previous administrations is legally sound under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA). The ruling reverses two lower court orders.
At the Supreme Court, a Stark Drop in Appeals From the Poor
Jimmy Hoover [The National Law Journal, via scotusblog.com, Feb 2, 2026]
New research shows that "[a]ppeals from 'indigent,' or poor, litigants have fallen precipitously over the past several Supreme Court terms," and legal experts aren't sure what's driving the trend, according to The National Law Journal. "In its most recent term, the court received around 2,500 appeals from indigent petitioners. That’s just under half of the number of indigent appeals from six years ago, and about a third of the number filed two decades ago, according to U.S. Supreme Court data." The political scientists behind the new research noted that the drop in these filings was "'much starker' than a corresponding decrease in filings from paying petitioners."
Civic republicanism
Elite Resistance to Trump: What Does It Mean?
Thomas Neuburger, Feb 05, 2026 [God's Spies]
...the Trump State’s not going away. Elites will preserve the option and tuck it away….
I predict, when the shouting is done, the elites who run the U.S. — the Few if you will — will agree our presidents do need the power Trump wields, but that Trump himself shouldn’t use it, not now, not ever.
In other words, they will blame Trump, but they won’t blame his power, nor will they take it away. There will be no formal restriction on the State itself, just restrictions on Trump the man to the extent they can limit him.
To be clear: For elites this is not an emergency like it is for the rest of us. Though they constantly tell us it is, their actions show otherwise….
We want the State to roll back. (See poster above.) Elites want Trump to roll back and not use the State. Two different things. Thus, they will talk of elections as our best fix, and pointedly not do things like close the Senate with endless blocking procedures, which any one senator can do, as a way to shut down the government itself, until Trump’s power is legally rolled back.
Because of this failure, Trump State policing will stay as a president’s choice, in the same way George Bush’s torture remains a choice, thanks to bipartisan consensus.
In Bush’s case, Nancy Pelosi, with caucus in tow, refused to prosecute or impeach George W. Bush over his crimes. Bipartisan consensus said Bush got to do what he did. In the same way, Trump will be criticized and partly restricted. ICE will be fully funded, but forced to demask, or make some marginal change….
