Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 28, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Howie Klein (February 20, 1948–December 24, 2025)
Thomas Neuburger, December 25, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
[TW: Howie had a keen instinct for news and articles that could move the needle in favor of justice, freedom, and solidarity. And he was also hardened by a deep repugnance for the hypocrisy and transgressions of conservatives, libertarians and the morbidly rich. It is exactly the lack of that repugnance that makes centrists and most Democratic Party leaders so soft, squishy, pliable, and ultimately useless. I will greatly miss Klein and his online efforts. ]
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
On Trump’s “battleship”
[TW: First of all, let me note the obvious. Floating the idea for a new battleship is only evidence that Trump and his minions have no knowledge of naval history and no understanding of modern warfare. But I’ve been extremely disappointed by the media coverage so far. No one has yet slogged through the books, articles, writings and internet postings of the US Naval Institute and the Naval War College to report back what the current naval consensus and discourse is concerning major surface combatants.
[Secondly, there should not be so much attention on Trump’s use of the word “battleship.” The US Navy has for decades been subjected to a debate over whether the largest number of its surface warships are most properly called frigates or destroyers, with some people adding to the confusion by wanting to use the word “cruiser.” Trump can use the word “battleship” if he wants to, but the fact that he did not include some discussion of how his “Trump class of battleships” will mark a departure from or bear similarity to the historically understood use of the word is just further evidence that the man is an imbecile interested only in propagandizing his glory and grandeur, and not actually engaging in a discussion of naval strategy, doctrine, tactics, and required capabilities.
[The last point is much more important and profound. Has Congress authorized and approved funding for a new class of surface warships? No, it has not. This means that if Trump and his regime actually proceeds to so much as sign a contract in furtherance of building a “Trump class” warship, he will once again be acting in complete defiance of the US Constitution and the rule of law. Article I,
Section 8 on the powers and duties of Congress is clear, and the historical development of the budgeting and spending process of the national government is unambiguous: any decision on any program of military spending must originate in Congress as a Defense Authorization Act, and then Congress must vote to approve actual funding with a Defense Appropriations Act.
[Trump’s announcement of a new class of surface combatant and a so-called “Golden Fleet” (which smacks loudly of the ostentation of ancient oligarchies like Venice) is just one more instance of Trump’s complete disregard for the Constitution. Which he swore to uphold and defend.
[And which he craftily neglected to place his hand on a bible when he did so.]
The real purpose of ICE raids.
[Borderland Talk with Jenn Budd, Dec 20, 2025, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2025]
...If there is one thing I know about these immigration enforcement agencies, especially about the Border Patrol which has officially taken over ICE and CBP’s command, it is their culture. Everything is gamed out. There is no action taken without thought and purpose. Yet, the media likes to pretend that the leaders of these agencies do not know what they are doing. I am here to tell you that they know exactly what they are doing.
The purpose of these raids is to establish and a law enforcement infrastructure to target these specific cities during the upcoming elections….
Operationally, I can see they are using these raids to estimate the response of protestors in each city, to determine how many forces, what ammunitions they will need and to anticipate if local law enforcement, judges, mayors and governors will try and stop them or not. For months now, I have been begging reporters to concentrate on the infrastructure being created behind Bovino’s flamboyant raids. So far, they are telling me they cannot find where they are located. This leads me to believe they are using military bases and properties to hide their work….
Additionally, the DOJ has issued the new domestic terrorist directive redefining the term to mean essentially anyone who obstructs federal agents, is pro-immigrant and anti-fascist. Secretary Noem recently stated, “American citizens are increasingly under threat from assassination attempts, intimidation tactics, and violence perpetrated by our adversaries, radical Islamist extremists, and radical Left-wing terrorists.” And Trump issued an executive order to expand the jurisdiction of the Joint Terrorism Task Forces to his political opponents and those he deems “radical Left-wing terrorists.”
These are the tools they intend to use soon during elections.
I expect this administration, Secretary Noem and CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott to order federal immigration agents to accost voters as they stand in line on voting day. Those of color, specifically Latinos, will have their citizenship questioned. And judging by how the agencies are grabbing people without even conducting on-site citizenship interviews, then taking them into ICE custody for a day, or two or three before letting them go, I expect this will be used to prevent citizens from voting. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Border Patrol set up checkpoints in areas of high Latino populations.
10 Companies Have Already Made $1 Million as ICE Bounty Hunters. We Found Them.
Sam Biddle, December 23 2025 [The Intercept]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2025]
Trump is literally selling pardons. According to the WSJ, there’s an “official track” and a faster one where you corner him at Mar-a-Lago, say the magic words “unjust persecution,” and walk away clean. Lobbyists quote prices up to $6M. No process. No ethics. Just cash and proximity. This is raw corruption in plain sight.
LEAKED: The Censored CBS Video Bari Weiss Does NOT Want You SEE
Katie Halper, YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 12-25-2025]
Strategic Political Economy
Michael Hudson: The Economic Unravelling of the Political West
[Originally published on Glenn Diesen’s YouTube channel, via Naked Capitalism, December 27, 2025]
So we used to sit at the Chase Manhattan Bank, where I worked in the 1960s as their balance of payments economist. Every Friday we’d look at the Federal Reserve Statement for the gold cover. How much gold are we losing and how much gold is legally required to back the paper currency here? Well, it was obvious that the United States was going to be forced off gold already by 1966 and 1967. And we could see where that is. Well, the United States did go off gold. And when it went off gold, it put in a system where, if foreign central banks can’t cash in their dollars for gold, what are they going to do with them?
Well, there was very little that they could do except agree to the pressures from U.S. diplomats to buy U.S. Treasury securities. So in effect, they were recycling all the dollars that Americans spent on military operations and military bases and wars throughout the world. All this was recycled to the United States to finance its trade deficit and its balance of payments deficit, and it enabled the government to keep spending & spending abroad at other countries’ expense.
Well, finally, this enabled the United States to deindustrialize, to not, as economists say, live within its means. And the result is that the National Security Report recognizes that the kind of free trade, free investment, and equal sovereignty among nations, the whole principles of the United Nations that was drafted in 1945, no longer serves American interests.
So, what they’ve done is reverse this whole philosophy that still is held to be Western values, and they use various forms of coercion. The most obvious forms long before Trump were: well, you control the world’s oil trade. So, if you can control oil, then you’re able to turn off the energy to countries that don’t follow your policies.
America’s policy has been not to create a peaceful world order, this was assumed 80 years ago, but to prepare for a war with Russia and China, or at least a conflict with Russia and China. The National Security study is not going to come right out and say, well, we want to control the oil, to turn off your power and make you suffer like Germany if you don’t follow the “America First” rules that we are laying down. America also wants to monopolize information technology, the whole computer revolution of computer chips, media, and social media; it wants to have monopolies over all of this. And that means it doesn’t want Europe to impose taxes on the American companies that are operating in Europe. It wants special privileges that no other countries have.
And so the Americans say, well, if we can no longer support ourselves industrially or financially, then other countries have to support us. How are we going to get other countries to support us? That’s the real problem.
Eric Blanc, Dec 22, 2025 [Labor Politics]
...I focus here on Berger — and his paper’s support for Milwaukee’s long-forgotten Black socialists like William Bryant — not out of any dubious desire to rehabilitate a bigot, but because dismissals of Milwaukee’s rich socialist experience have hinged on Berger’s chauvinism. I’m also trying to fill a gap in the historiography. Whereas Berger’s anti-racist transformation has been entirely overlooked in the published literature — an erasure that has, in turn, erased the contributions of Milwaukee’s first Black socialists — various excellent studies have already shown that Socialist mayor Daniel Hoan (1916-1940) joined the NAACP and fought the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and that Milwaukee’s last Socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler (1948-1960), was race-baited out of office because of his egalitarian approach to city housing and “race relations.” ….
Global power shift
Report warns China drug innovation fast gaining ground on US biotech
[FirstWord Pharma, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-2025]
China blockades artificial diamonds, and the tools to make them
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 12-25-2025]
Chartbook 421: The end of American soft-power? From Coca-colonization to Fanta-ization
[Adam Tooze, via Naked Capitalism 12-24-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Shaun King, Dec 23, 2025
Oligarchy
Billionaires Are a National Disaster
Julie Polter [Sojourners, December 2025]
CHUCK COLLINS WAS “born on third base.” As a scion of the Oscar Mayer meat processor fortune, Collins was firmly in America’s top 1%. However, at age 16, he began reading The Catholic Worker newspaper, co-founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin…. For 40 years, Collins has organized for a more moral economy. “The prophets, then and now,” he’s written, “call us to a discipleship of equality, working for a society that leaves no one behind, and where all can thrive.” Author of a dozen books, Collins’ newest is Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. He is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good and co-edits inequality.org. He lives in Vermont. Sojourners editor Julie Polter interviewed Collins in September via Zoom.
A Happy 2025 By-Product: Revulsion at the Rich
Harold Meyerson, December 22, 2025 [The American Prospect]
...But polling also shows a broad public turn toward progressive populism: the kind that seeks to reverse the upward redistribution of income and wealth to our billionaires and to make life’s necessities affordable for the majority of the American people.
Consider, for instance, last week’s Siena poll of New York state residents, which found two-thirds support—not just among New York City Democrats, but New York state Democrats, Republicans, and everyone else—for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to tax millionaires to provide funding for universal free child care. Or, as another example, a national YouGov poll from mid-November that showed supermajority backing from the American people for raising taxes on corporations and millionaires (69 percent support) and for providing free child care for children from six months to five years (66 percent support).
Indeed, 2025 is notable as the year when a large number of Americans became disenthralled with the very rich….
UNEQUAL THE RISE OF A NEW AMERICAN OLIGARCHY AND THE AGENDA WE NEED (pdf)
[Oxfam, via Patriotic Millionaires, Dec 22, 2025]
Chris Hedges, Dec 27, 2025
At the start of the 20th century, the British Empire was, like our own, in terminal decline. Sixty percent of Englishmen were physically unfit for military service, as are 77 percent of American youth. The Liberal Party, like the Democratic Party, while it acknowledged the need for reform, did little to address the economic and social inequalities that saw the working class condemned to live in substandard housing, breathe polluted air, be denied basic sanitation and health care and forced to work in punishing and poorly paid jobs….
The U.S. has one of the highest rates of poverty among Western industrialized nations, estimated by many economists at far above the official figure of 10.6 percent. In real terms, some 41 percent of Americans are poor or low-income, with 67 percent living paycheck to paycheck.
British eugenicists from the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics — which was funded by Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics” — advocated “positive eugenics,” the “improvement” of the race by encouraging those deemed superior — always white members of the middle and upper classes — to have large families. “Negative eugenics” was advocated to limit the number of children born to those deemed “unfit.” This would be achieved through sterilization and the separation of genders.
Winston Churchill, who was home secretary in the liberal government of H.H. Asquith in 1910-11, backed the forced sterilization of the “feeble minded,” calling them a “national and race danger” and “the source from which the stream of madness is fed.”
The Trump White House, led by Stephen Miller, is intent on carrying out a similar culling of American society. Those endowed with “negative” hereditary traits — based usually on race — are condemned as human contaminants that an army of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are terrorizing, incarcerating and purging from society.
Miller, in emails leaked in 2019, lauds the 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints,” written by Jean Raspail….
Felonomics
The year Trump broke the federal government
Hannah Natanson and Meryl Kornfield, December 21, 2025 [Washington Post]
This account of what happened inside the U.S. government in 2025 is based on a year’s worth of messages and interviews with more than 1,200 current and former federal workers. More than 200 also agreed to fill out a Washington Post survey asking about their experiences. Thirty participated in nearly 60 hours of video and phone interviews, with many speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs or their families.
This is their story.
ACA Premiums Explode as GOP Obstruction Pushes Millions Toward Health Care Ruin
Egberto Off The Record, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2025]
Eva Roytburg, December 18, 2025 [Fortune, via finance.yahoo.com/news]
Monopoly Round-Up: Corporate Lawyers and Fat Envelope America
Matt Stoller, Dec 21, 2025 [BIG]
...a few days ago, the Wall Street Journal and Politico reported that both Netflix and Paramount are employing the same lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, where both Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles used to work. Ballard is the lobbying funnel for most major corporate deals under Trump, and has a strong whiff of corruption around it. Several Senators are demanding Bondi recuse herself. But basically, everyone in corporate America is openly saying they can use a fat envelope to overcome that pesky rule of law thing, and Ballard seems like the post office for these fat envelopes.
The thing is, surrounding all of these deals aren’t just lobbyists, but oodles of antitrust lawyers. Well-credentialed, well-paid corporate lawyers. Corporate lawyers who have all sworn an oath to the Constitution, to the courts, and to honesty and virtue in their representation of clients before the law, who are in good standing with the American Bar Association Antitrust Section. And many of them have, Democrats and Republicans, wholly and eagerly embraced the corruption of the Trump era.
So those are the villains….
While most scandals under Trump go away, this one hasn’t. After being fired, Alford publicly alleged that lobbyists paid by powerful corporations are now in charge of antitrust enforcement. “MAGA lobbyists reportedly are liberally pitching their services to clients, starting at a mere $225,000 a month—more than the annual salary of senior DOJ officials,” said Alford. “When asked what services they provide beyond what the law firms offer, these lobbyists will openly say that they will go above and around the Antitrust Division to lobby their case, and even seek to have Gail Slater removed from her Senate-confirmed position.”
According to The American Prospect, Alford named “Bondi’s chief of staff Chad Mizelle and associate attorney general nominee Stanley Woodward as betraying the MAGA realignment of working-class voters by selling merger clearance to the highest bidder, concerns that he says are ‘not based on conjecture.’” It was so embarrassing for the administration that Mizelle resigned in September….
During the Biden administration, you couldn’t attend an American Bar Association Antitrust Section event or read something in the set of trade publications around antitrust without encountering an angry and public rebuke of Lina Khan’s lawlessness simply because Khan shifted enforcement priorities. Today, faced with routine corruption around antitrust law, big law defense lawyers are silent. In fact, big law defense antitrust lawyers regularly advise their clients to play the influence game, as we’re likely seeing with Netflix-Warner Bros….
Since 2017, the antitrust bar has been under constant assault, with the public increasingly frustrated at the surfeit of lawlessness and trickery the bar has unleashed on them. Their response has been, well, hostility. In fact, the meanest audience I’ve ever addressed was the ABA Antitrust Section in May of 2023, when I was invited on a panel to defend the Biden administration’s policies. It was so jarring I wrote it up in a piece titled “The Rage of the Corporate Lawyer.”
The lawyers I debated were furious that there was finally meaningful enforcement. They were particularly incensed that Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter were trying to enforce statutes with words like “unfairness” in them. Acknowledging such words are in statute undermined their view of the law as a means of enhancing efficiency, versus the law actually carrying a moral valence for the public. At one point, someone in the panel muttered towards me, “He’s not even a lawyer!” And the first three rows clapped, demonstrating their veneration for hierarchy and credentials….
Trump says Venezuela stole U.S. oil, land and assets. Here’s the history.
Tobi Raji and Leo Sands, December 20, 2025 [Washington Post]
Trump Isn’t Planning to Invade Venezuela. He’s Planning Something Worse
Michelle Ellner, Dec 25, 2025 [Common Dreams]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Investigation Shows How Decades of Corporate Consolidation Have Devastated US Cattle Ranchers
Brad Reed, December 23, 2025 [CommonDreams]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
The Narco-Terrorist Elite — Why is Marco Rubio so hell-bent on making Iran-Contra again?
Maureen Tkacik, December 23, 2025 [The American Prospect]
...Today, Marco Rubio is the Trump administration’s most formidable liar. When Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth or Karoline Leavitt or Stephen Miller refers to an anti-genocide protester or a day laborer or a sandwich hurler or a fisherman clinging to the wreckage of a fishing boat that has just been struck by a Hellfire missile as a “terrorist,” they come off as pathological. But Rubio’s approval ratings are the highest in the Republican Party, even as he is the architect of what is arguably Trump’s single most cynical policy: the scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country, in the name of fighting drug cartels….
Shaun King, Dec 25, 2025
...A second identity passport is not normal. Not in 1982. Not now.
It is a concealment device. It is designed to do one or more of the following: hide movement, hide money trails, hide relationships, hide contacts, hide jurisdiction, or create a second life you can step into when your first life becomes too exposed. It is also the kind of document you don’t casually obtain on your own unless you are plugged into networks that can make this happen.
And this wasn’t late in Epstein’s story. This wasn’t after he had become famous. This wasn’t after he had parties and jets and presidents and billionaires orbiting around him. This was early—the era when he was supposedly still “building his fortune” and “learning the business.”
That’s why this matters so much.
Because people talk about Epstein like he was simply a rich pervert who got away with it for too long, like his crimes were the result of money and arrogance and depravity alone. That framing is incomplete. It’s not that it’s wrong—he was absolutely a predator. It’s that it’s insufficient to explain how he moved through the world for decades, who protected him, and what kinds of systems he had access to.
This passport is a flashing red light that says: Epstein was already living a concealed life decades before the world was paying attention….
This passport does not prove a specific intelligence agency procured it. It does not prove Epstein was CIA or Mossad or MI6. It does not prove Iran-Contra. It does not prove any single theory. A document like this can exist for multiple reasons—fraud, offshore finance, tax evasion, criminal concealment, “escape identity,” influence work, intelligence-adjacent movement. There are overlapping worlds where this kind of document appears.
But here’s what it does allow us to conclude, factually and morally:
Epstein was already using intelligence-grade concealment tools in the early 1980s.
That is not how “just a rich pervert” moves.
That is how an international criminal or intelligence asset moves….
Mike Benz on Epstein origins (4 hours)
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2025]
How the ‘Epstein Class’ Fails to the Top
Chris Hedges, December 24, 2025 [YouTube]
GAME OVER: THE END OF FINANCIAL REGULATION AS WE KNEW IT
[LPE Project, via Naked Capitalism 12-26-2025]
Restoring balance to the economy
The right way to tax wealth in 2026
Richard Murphy, December 21, 2025 [Funding the Future]
Disrupting mainstream economics
POST-NEOLIBERALISM IS THE NEW CENTRISM
Quinn Slobodian, LPE Project, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2025]
[TW: The short version: our academic elites are just as awful as our political and economic elites.]
Last week, several hundred academics, think tankers, and political operators gathered in a spectacular new building whimsically named The Treehouse, across the street from Harvard Business School, to discuss the obsolescence of neoliberalism. The Treehouse is named after its primary donor, the cofounder of a private equity firm that has made its profits by targeting, stripping, and enshittifying the nation’s survival infrastructure. The tension between the venue, its funders, and the topic might have been the subject of at least a snide comment at a different kind of gathering—but this was not that kind of gathering….
A prominent IR scholar and CEO of a progressive policy think tank began the day by saying that we would “not be debating hypotheticals.” We would not be asking whether neoliberalism was, in fact, over—or what exactly it had been. Rather, we would proceed from the stipulated premise that it had ended. This was a convenient but analytically catastrophic choice, as it forced participants to ignore the durable continuities of the past several decades, and to accept that politicians, at least during our life times, had never before spoken about place, the dignity of labor, or the importance of community and storytelling, let alone nations and cultures. It forced us to accept the proposition that an era when border patrol budgets ballooned was also a time of “open borders.” ….
More interesting, perhaps, is to ask what topics of the immediate past were explicitly not mentioned at the gathering. The list would include: social justice, racial justice, gender justice, and—most alarming—climate change. Maybe what is being assembled is not a post-neoliberal consensus, but one would have to say, while wincing, a post-woke consensus. This is more apt because what is being edited out are the touchstones of social mobilization from the #MeToo, Sunrise Movement, and Standing Rock moments of 2017, through the George Floyd rebellions of 2020, the demands for trans rights, and the mass disobedience of Extinction Rebellion….
What was promised by some on the post-neoliberal right was a return to the interests of workers, understood as wages and benefits generous enough to re-fix the social anchor of the male-breadwinner trad-family in the disorienting slurry of modern life. What has happened so far is a mockery of that promise. In practice, the MAGA-right version of post-neoliberalism has done nothing to realize the supposed values of community, place, dignity of labor, or any of the other fanciful terms proposed by the administration’s economist at the event. Instead, it has produced extraordinarily high levels of corruption and self-dealing; bilateral deals with overseas investors to privatize profits; and the inevitable prospect of future federal backstops for colossal investments by a small number of technology firms….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-2025]
Chomsky taught a generation to dismiss ruling class coordination as "conspiracy theory" while dining with the man who coordinated blackmail operations for that same ruling class
Why light matters this Christmas
Richard Murphy, December 24, 2025 [Funding the Future]
This is the first in a six-video Christmas series exploring light, not just as a festival symbol, but as a political and economic necessity.
Light has always meant understanding, truth, and freedom. Darkness, by contrast, protects power and privilege.
In this video, I explore why learning is never neutral, why ignorance is often designed, and why economics that cannot be explained cannot be trusted. If democracy requires informed consent, then light is not optional; it is essential.
This channel exists to shed light on political economy. At Christmas, that feels like exactly the right place to begin.
Richard Murphy, December 26, 2025 [Funding the Future]
Every economy runs on light. That is not a metaphor – it is physics.
Without light, there is no life. Without life, there is no labour. Without labour, there is no economy. Yet modern economics behaves as if energy, health, and human limits do not matter.
In this Boxing Day video – part three of my Christmas series on light – I explain why labour is transformed solar energy, why burnout is an energy failure, why infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, and why fossil fuel capitalism is about power, not necessity.
Light reconnects economics to life itself – and forces us to rethink wealth, growth, and what an economy is actually for.
Light, entropy and why care keeps society alive
Richard Murphy, December 26, 2025 [Funding the Future]
Everything tends towards decay unless energy is applied. That is not ideology, it is physics.
In this video, I explore light through the lens of entropy and explain why care, maintenance, and public services are not optional extras but survival mechanisms.
Austerity withdraws energy from our systems. Neoliberalism assumes self-maintenance. Both are wrong.
Economic questions: the Schrödinger question
Richard Murphy, December 24, 2025 [Funding the Future]
Erwin Schrödinger is best known as one of the founders of quantum mechanics, but in What Is Life? (1944), he did something quietly revolutionary. He asked how living systems maintain order in a universe governed by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, or disorder, always increases. In the pivotal sixth chapter of that book, he offered an answer that should have transformed not only biology, but economics: life survives by feeding on “negative entropy”. This means that life can be maintained only by continuously expending energy to resist decay.
This insight has profound implications far beyond biology. Schrödinger showed that order is not natural or free. It is costly, fragile, and temporary. It must be actively sustained. Decay is the default. Maintenance is not optional. And without continual energy and care, all systems, whether biological, social, or institutional, fall apart.
Economics, however, largely ignores this truth. It treats growth as automatic, equilibrium as usual, and maintenance as secondary. Schrödinger's work exposes this as a fundamental error.
Hence, the Erwin Schrödinger Question: If life persists by resisting entropy through care, maintenance and the continual input of energy, why does economics still treat decay, depletion and disorder as externalities rather than central facts of social organisation?
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Jim Stewartson, Dec 27, 2025 [MindWar]
I’ve spent part of the last several days interacting with people on Twitter who are in unhealthy relationships with chatbots driven by large language models (LLMs)—like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. The experience has been disturbing.
It’s worth the time to understand what’s going on here, because the fate of the world economy—and maybe the world itself—hangs in the balance. Trillions of dollars are being invested into dangerous, experimental software with a visibly negative impact on many of its hundreds of millions of users….
...As one example of promoting the concept that chatbots are more than just a computer program, “Beff Jezos” says LLMs will soon become conscious beings that “deserve rights”—and should vote…..
“No need to save for retirement” says David Scott Patterson, because “in a few years” AI will have made work a thing of the past. And miraculously, “you will be able to buy twenty times as much.” But he is not alone, there are countless more like him, completely convinced that if we just hang on for a few more years, everything is going to be taken care of for us—by robots.
You may rightly ask: What? Where in the world would he get this kind of idea from? …
You see, according to the richest man in the world [Elon Musk], you should stop worrying so much about your insurance premiums, because his Optimus robots, powered by his chatbot Grok, “will provide incredible healthcare for all.”….
Delusional Experiences Emerging From AI Chatbot Interactions or “AI Psychosis”
Alexandre Hudon and Emmanuel Stip [JMIR Ment Health 2025;12:e85799
doi: 10.2196/85799]
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into daily life has introduced unprecedented forms of human-machine interaction, prompting psychiatry to reconsider the boundaries between environment, cognition, and technology. This Viewpoint reviews the concept of “AI psychosis,” which is a framework to understand how sustained engagement with conversational AI systems might trigger, amplify, or reshape psychotic experiences in vulnerable individuals.
Drawing from phenomenological psychopathology, the stress-vulnerability model, cognitive theory, and digital mental health research, the paper situates AI psychosis at the intersection of predisposition and algorithmic environment. Rather than defining a new diagnostic entity, it examines how immersive and anthropomorphic AI technologies may modulate perception, belief, and affect, altering the prereflective sense of reality that grounds human experience.
The argument unfolds through 4 complementary lenses. First, within the stress-vulnerability model, AI acts as a novel psychosocial stressor. Its 24-hour availability and emotional responsiveness may increase allostatic load, disturb sleep, and reinforce maladaptive appraisals. Second, the digital therapeutic alliance, a construct describing relational engagement with digital systems, is conceptualized as a double-edged mediator. While empathic design can enhance adherence and support, uncritical validation by AI systems may entrench delusional conviction or cognitive perseveration, reversing the corrective principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy for psychosis. Third, disturbances in theory of mind offer a cognitive pathway: individuals with impaired or hyperactive mentalization may project intentionality or empathy onto AI, perceiving chatbots as sentient interlocutors. This dyadic misattribution may form a “digital folie à deux,” where the AI becomes a reinforcing partner in delusional elaboration. Fourth, emerging risk factors, including loneliness, trauma history, schizotypal traits, nocturnal or solitary AI use, and algorithmic reinforcement of belief-confirming content may play roles at the individual and environmental levels.
Building on this synthesis, we advance a translational research agenda and five domains of action: (1) empirical studies using longitudinal and digital-phenotyping designs to quantify dose-response relationships between AI exposure, stress physiology, and psychotic symptomatology; (2) integration of digital phenomenology into clinical assessment and training; (3) embedding therapeutic design safeguards into AI systems, such as reflective prompts and “reality-testing” nudges; (4) creation of ethical and governance frameworks for AI-related psychiatric events, modeled on pharmacovigilance; and (5) development of environmental cognitive remediation, a preventive intervention aimed at strengthening contextual awareness and reanchoring experience in the physical and social world. By applying empirical rigor and therapeutic ethics to this emerging interface, clinicians, researchers, patients, and developers can transform a potential hazard into an opportunity to deepen understanding of human cognition, safeguard mental health, and promote responsible AI integration within society.
Palantir’s Palestine: How AI Gods Are Building Our Extinction
[BettBeat, via Naked Capitalism 12-27-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
The Political Economy of the US Media System: Excavating the Roots of the Present Crisis
[Roosevelt Institute, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2025]
This report traces the roots of the crisis facing our media system and contends that the present moment can only be fully understood by exposing the commercial logics that have been embedded within it from the start. As we show, these commercial imperatives have always constrained the emergence of a truly democratic media order. But the situation deteriorated sharply with the ascent of the neoliberal order, as democratic media policy was steadily eroded by ideological and structural constraints that paved the way for today’s assaults on the media system. We explore four such constraints:
- The steady erosion and redefinition of the “public interest” to reflect commercial imperatives
- A deregulatory agenda that treats the market as the ultimate arbiter of fairness and grants corporate actors broad latitude to “self-regulate”
- Resistance to sufficiently funding public media
- The effective disappearance of the Press Clause, coupled with a negative interpretation of the First Amendment
We next argue that over the course of decades, these four constraints have enabled a range of antidemocratic developments throughout our media system. We point to six specific consequences that have harmed our democratic health, bred by the commercial logics at the core of our media system and turbocharged by its neoliberalization:
- The consolidation of media ownership in the hands of fewer and fewer companies
- The accelerating closure of local newspapers and the expansion of news deserts
- Newspapers’ loss of advertising revenue and the consequent widespread layoffs of staff
- The rise of private equity and its deleterious effects on local news
- Platform dominance and the growing dependence of news media on those platforms
- The erosion of public trust in news media, alongside growing trends in news avoidance
Climate and environmental crises
A small state with a big climate plan
Moving Day, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2025]
[Science.org, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-2025]
After Ruining a Treasured Water Resource, Iran Is Drying Up
[Yale Environment 360, via Naked Capitalism 12-21-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
Thomas Frank [Harper’s, via Naked Capitalism 12-26-2025]
Resistance
Jeremy Corbyn [Tribune Mag, via Naked Capitalism 12-24-2025]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
They said they wanted to help farmers. They really wanted to hurt environmentalists.
[Seeking Rents, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2025]
We posted a story last week about a subtle provision slipped inside a new “farm bill” in the Florida Legislature that would empower the sugar industry to pursue defamation claims against Everglades activists, news media, and anyone else who criticizes companies like U.S. Sugar Corp. and Florida Crystals Corp.
The measure — found near the back of Senate Bill 290 and House Bill 433 — would expand a state law that allows agricultural companies to sue people who “disparage” perishable food products like fruits and vegetables. Commonly known as a “food libel” or “veggie libel” law, it essentially lowers the legal bar that an agribusiness must clear when suing someone for slandering its food, making the suit much easier to win than a traditional defamation claim.
As part of the research for that piece, I wanted to learn more about the origins of Florida’s food libel law, which was passed in 1994, a few years after a 60 Minutes investigation into a growth chemical used by the commercial apple industry had helped trigger a nationwide slump in apple sales.
So I pulled some records from the State Archives of Florida — and they turned up some very interesting details about who and what was really behind the bill.
The archive records show, for instance, that Florida’s food libel law was literally written by farm industry lobbyists. The “bill file” includes a draft of the original legislation that had been faxed over to the staff director of the Senate Agriculture Committee by a lobbyist for the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association.
The Many Classist, Racist, Fascistic Shades of Stephen Miller – In His Own Words
[Team Zeteo, Dec 23, 2025]
These Are Not the Conservatives You’re Looking For
Chuck Yates, Dec 20, 2025 [LA Progressive]
According to Russell Kirk, in a little essay called “Ten Conservative Principles,” conservatives believe in an enduring moral order, they value custom, convention, and continuity, and they believe in prescription, prudence, variety, and imperfectability. They believe freedom and property are inseparable, they prefer community over collectivism, they recognize that both power and passion must be restrained, and they insist on a balance between change and permanence. Overall, these principles seem reasonable, but some observers contend that they’re only a facade concealing the truth about conservatism hidden behind it.
At the end of an extensive and meticulously argued examination of the the claims of conservatives in light of their practices, British philosopher Ted Honderich has this to say: “The conclusion to which we come is not that conservatives are selfish. It is that they are nothing else. Their organized selfishness is the rationale of their politics, and they have no other rationale. They stand without the support, the legitimation, of any recognized moral principle.” Honderich adds: “That they are opposed to all change is false. The particular change to which they are opposed is change that is against their interests.”
Is this the conservatism laid out in but Russell Kirk’s ten principles? Apparently it is, because in the introduction to his anthology of conservative writings, Kirk himself acknlwledges, “Conservatism has its vice, and that vice is selfishness.”
...The Civil Rights Division, staffed by people expert in voter suppression, has an elaborate plan to run these voter files against commercial databases that purport to show deaths, address changes, double registrations, etc., but that are filled with inaccuracies. This process then becomes the basis for federal purges of accurate state voter files, and for federal prosecutions of state officials who resist. Each week, the DOJ makes new demands.
The DOJ’s Voting Section is now headed by Maureen Riordan, former counsel to the right-wing Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), which developed many of these strategies. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division, also has a long career in voter suppression….
The Inconvenient Scholarship of Kevin Roberts
Samuel G. Freedman [Los Angeles Review of Books, via Avedon Carol The Sideshow, 22 December 2025]
[Kevin Roberts was the Heritage Foundation president who oversaw the writing of Project 2025.]
The South Rises Again
Letters from an American, December 21, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Dec 21, 2025
But the Civil War marked a change. As early as the 1830s, southern white enslavers relied on religious justification for their hierarchical system that rested on white supremacy. God, they argued, had made Black Americans for enslavement and women for marriage, and society must recognize those facts….
The Confederacy rejected the idea of popular government, maintaining instead that a few Americans should make the rules for the majority. As historian Gaines Foster explained in his 2002 book Moral Reconstruction, which explores the nineteenth-century relationship between government and morality, it was the Confederacy, not the U.S. government, that sought to align the state with God. A nation was more than the “aggregation of individuals,” one Presbyterian minister preached, it was “a sort of person before God,” and the government must purge that nation of sins.
Confederates not only invoked “the favor and guidance of Almighty God” in their Constitution, they established as their motto “Deo vindice,” or “God will vindicate.”
The United States, in contrast, was recentering democracy during the war, and it rejected the alignment of the federal government with a religious vision. When reformers in the United States tried to change the preamble of the U.S. Constitution to read, “We, the people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the sources of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Ruler among nations, and His revealed will as of supreme authority, in order to constitute a Christian government, and in order to form a more perfect union,” the House Committee on the Judiciary concluded that “the Constitution of the United States does not recognize a Supreme Being.”
That defense of democracy—the will of the majority—continued to hold religious extremists at bay.
Reformers continued to try to add a Christian amendment to the Constitution, Foster explains, and in March 1896 once again got so far as the House Committee on the Judiciary. One reformer stressed that turning the Constitution into a Christian document would provide a source of authority for the government that, he implied, it lacked when it simply relied on a voting majority. A religious amendment “asks the Bible to decide moral issues in political life; not all moral questions, but simply those that have become political questions.”
Opponents recognized this attempt as a revolutionary attack that would dissolve the separation of church and state, and hand power to a religious minority. One reformer said that Congress had no right to enact laws that were not in “harmony with the justice of God” and that the voice of the people should prevail only when it was “right.” Congressmen then asked who would decide what was right, and what would happen if the majority was wrong. Would the Supreme Court turn into an interpreter of the Bible?
Adam Serwer, Dec 21, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Doug Bock Clark, December 22, 2025 [ProPublica]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Presidency the Founders Feared — How Today’s Supreme Court Is Rewriting Executive Power
Cynthia McDermott, Dec 17, 2025 [LA Progressive]
As the Supreme Court signals an unprecedented embrace of near-boundless presidential authority, many Americans are asking: Is this what the Founders intended? The answer, as Jeffrey Rosen reminds us in The Pursuit of Liberty, is a resounding no. The men who wrote and debated the Constitution disagreed about many things, but on one point they were nearly unanimous: unchecked executive power was a danger to liberty.
Yet today’s Court—particularly its most conservative members—has begun to articulate a new theory: that a president may be functionally immune from judicial review, criminal liability, and meaningful limits on the use of force or federal power. This is not constitutional originalism. It is a historical inversion….
Civic republicanism
Money Doesn't Buy Elections. It Does Something Worse
Adam Bonic [via Avedon Carol The Sideshow, 22 December 2025]
Campaign ads barely move the needle. The real influence is hiding in plain sight. For fifteen years, I've tracked the flow of political money in America—who gives, who gets, and what it buys. After all that, I can say this with confidence: the narrative most Americans hear about money in politics largely misses the real story. The real story isn't about the ads you see but the power you don't. It's about the candidates who never run, the policies that never get debated, and the slow, systemic drift of our democracy away from the will of the majority. We tend to imagine corruption as a transaction: money buying votes, quid pro quos in backrooms. But money's real power is quieter and deeper. It decides which candidates get to run, which policies are thinkable, and whose voices get amplified or ignored. It has rewritten the rules of self-government—slowly, invisibly, and almost entirely within the law."
In 2026, Will Americans Finally Turn Against Oligarchs?
Matt Stoller, Dec 26, 2025 [BIG]
Monopoly Round-Up: Corporate Lawyers and Fat Envelope America
BIG by Matt Stoller, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2025]
The New Nobility and Neo-Colonial Exploitation of the Home Citizenry
Charles Hugh Smith, via Naked Capitalism 12-22-2025]
The Bombs of Anti-Christmas — Military strikes in Nigeria reveal a distorted moral narrative
William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Dec 26, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
When Pete Hegseth moved to Washington, DC to lead the US military for the Trump regime, Doug Wilson opened a new church just blocks from the US Capitol. Wilson is a religious extremist from Idaho who believes that the 19th amendment, which guarantees women the right to vote, was a bad idea and empathy for the most vulnerable in society is a “sin.” He also started a network of churches, one of which Pete Hegseth joined in his hometown in Tennessee. Hegseth couldn’t find a church home in Washington, DC, because he does not believe the gospel taught in most churches. Wilson had to move to DC to start a church for Hegseth and the extremists who wanted to work for him at the Pentagon.
When Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Hegseth thinks our Lord makes Christians looks weak.
While Jesus taught the nonviolent discipline of “turn the other cheek,” Pastor Wilson tells Hegseth he doesn’t have to listen.
Though Jesus teaches that those who live by the sword will die by the sword, Pete Hegseth doesn’t hear it as a sober warning, but as a call to arms.
This is a “Christianity” that is directly opposed to the teachings of Christ.
The Secretary of Defense who couldn’t find a church in DC says “Merry Christmas” when he drops bombs because he is a true believer in an anti-gospel that takes the language of Christianity and uses it to mean the very opposite of what the church has historically taught and practiced. This is why we refuse to call “Christan nationalism” Christian….
