Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 27, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges
[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]
Officials Prepared to Return Abrego Garcia—Until Trump Intervened
Malcolm Ferguson, April 25, 2025 [The New Republic]
Some officials in the Trump administration tried to bring back Kilmar Abregoa Garcia just days after he was deported, but the president shut them down.
Since Abrego Garcia was unlawfully deported last month due to an administrative error, the White House has vehemently maintained that it will not try to return him to the United States. But a report in The Atlantic Friday revealed that in the days after Abrego Garcia’s deportation, some officials did in fact try to bring him home.
A lawsuit from Abrego Garcia’s family reportedly “sparked urgent conversations among attorneys at the Departments of State, Justice, and Homeland Security,” and concern about the lack of evidence behind Trump’s claims that Abrego Garcia was part of MS-13, sources told The Atlantic.
The officials floated plans for the father of three’s return and sought ways to protect his safety while he was detained in El Salvador’s notorious megaprison, CECOT. But at the same time, backlash against the administration’s response (or lack thereof) took off, prompting the White House to change course entirely. Abrego Garcia’s case was no longer an “administrative error” but now the justified deportation of a “foreign terrorist” and MS-13 member—an evidenceless story Trump is now using to defend his unlawful deportation efforts as a whole.
“Abrego Garcia’s deportation became far more than just the case of one man; it developed into a measure of whether Donald Trump’s administration can send people—citizens or not—to foreign prisons without due process,” The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff wrote.
Trump Makes Alarming Confession on Wrongly Deported Immigrant
Malcolm Ferguson, April 25, 2025 [The New Republic]
Donald Trump is openly admitting his defiance of the Supreme Court on Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
DOJ Memo Shows Trump Admin Ordered ICE to Conduct Warrantless Home Invasions
Brett Wilkins, April 26, 2025 [CommonDreams]
The U.S. Department of Justice dubiously invoked a centuries-old law in directing immigration agents to carry out home invasion searches without warrants, an internal memo revealed.
USA Today—which obtained a copy of the March 14 memo issued by the office of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi—reported Friday that the Trump administration ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to pursue suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua into homes, sometimes without warrants, under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA).
Here's the first U.S. citizen who is a political prisoner under the Trump regime
Dean Obeidallah, April 26, 2015
Donald Trump and his rogue regime have just taken their next step in embracing fascism with the arrest Friday of Wisconsin state Judge Hannah Dugan on BS charges. And that’s not just my view, U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen wrote in response to Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi vowing more arrests of judges who defy Trump: “This is what fascism looks like.”
Judge Dugan’s arrest by Trump’s FBI cannot be viewed in a vacuum. It’s part of Trump and the GOP’s efforts to re-envision the United States as an autocratic nation….
To be clear, the arrest of Judge Duggan is about sending a message that if you defy the Trump regime you will be criminally prosecuted. For starters, the FBI arrested the judge in public while she was walking into her courthouse. Obviously, they could’ve coordinated with her counsel a voluntarily surrender but they wanted a very public spectacle to intimidate others. That is why Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley slammed this public arrest as a “large performative showing of law enforcement officials” and accused the Trump administration of trying to “instill fear and hostility across our community.”
When you examine the facts of the case it’s less than flimsy as legal experts including former federal prosecutors have noted….
The Executive Order to End Voting
Joyce Vance, April 25, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
On March 25, 2025, he issued an executive order—“PRESERVING AND PROTECTING THE INTEGRITY OF AMERICAN ELECTIONS”—that is a vehicle for making it more difficult for people the Republican Party apparently thinks won’t vote for them to vote. It’s the culmination of decades of voter suppression work, a wish list of measures designed to make it harder to vote, signed off on in the Oval Office, the same place where the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed. Trump’s EO went beyond even the Save Act.
Today, a federal judge put substantial portions of that executive order on pause in League of Women Voters et.al. v. Trump. The rationale: presidents don't have the authority to regulate federal elections. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a senior judge in the District of Columbia, issued a preliminary injunction that will prevent key parts of the executive order from going into effect while the litigation moves forward. Her opinion, 120 pages of it, is a careful exposition of the flaws in the EO.
As we’ve discussed in other cases, district judges frequently write detailed opinions like this one when they want to make sure there is a solid basis for the courts of appeals to affirm their decisions and as little room as possible for them to reverse. This is a detailed, well justified explanation that will not be easy for an appellate court to dismiss, and it’s not one-sided; it denies some of the relief the plaintiffs requested on technical legal grounds. If you’re so inclined, there’s a master class on what the Framers of the Constitution intended and how our voting infrastructure developed beginning on page 9 that you may enjoy reading. And, Judge Kollar-Kotelly starts with the basics, explaining what executive orders can and cannot be used for. A president, she writes, “cannot make new law or devise new authority for himself—by executive order or otherwise. He may only wield those powers granted to him by Congress or by the Constitution.”
Chief among the measures the Judge disallowed was the requirement that voters provide proof of citizenship before they register or update their registration to vote. Trump wanted to force the Election Assistance Commission to change its forms and make voters comply with this requirement, but the court said no. The reason our elections, which are held in all 50 states and over 3,100 counties, as well as in some territories and for military members and citizens abroad, are not consigned to the control of the president is fairly obvious. The decentralization makes it more difficult for a president or his party to manipulate outcomes in national elections. Trump is nothing if not transparent in this regard.
Losing DOJ’s Civil Rights Division
Joyce Vance, April 24, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
On Tuesday, Reuters reported that leadership at the Department of Justice has reassigned “about a dozen senior career attorneys” in the Civil Rights Division to perform perfunctory tasks usually assigned to lower level attorneys, like responding to FOIA requests. Three senior career attorneys who managed offices that handled cases involving excessive force and other abuses by police, voting rights, and the rights of people with disabilities were among the casualties of this wave of efforts by the Trump administration to disrupt the work done in the Civil Rights Division, which is frequently referred to as the crown jewel of the Justice Department. The changes have not been publicly announced by Attorney General Pam Bondi or her staff, according to Reuters.
Is a Military Coup Unfolding at the Pentagon?
Ken Klippenstein, April 22, 2025
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is embroiled in yet another scandal, but there’s a far greater crisis lurking behind his leaky ship, one that has real consequences for America.
It is a campaign of subversion carried out by the military brass, one that is undermining the very principle of civilian control of the military. Through leaks, forced firings, insubordination and other forms of bureaucratic intransigence, the Pentagon bureaucracy is going out of its way to destroy his tenure (something he was plenty capable of himself!)
“As much as Hegseth’s detractors might be right that he is chaotic and ‘unqualified,’” a senior serving officer said in an email exchange with me this week, “he is Senate confirmed. It’s up to Donald Trump to remove him, not the uniformed military because they want someone else to lead them.”
Trump blasts Supreme Court while arguing trials for migrants ‘not possible’
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 04-22-2025]
The United States is forcing four-year-olds to defend themselves in court
tomocean, April 23, 2025 [DailyKos]
[Public Citizen, via Naked Capitalism 04-22-2025]
“Cases against 11 of these corporations have already been dismissed or withdrawn, and six have been halted.”
Justice Department Shutting Branch That Prosecutes Consumer Fraud Cases
David Dayen, April 24, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Several attorneys will be moved to defending the federal government from lawsuits.
Medical Journals Get Letters From DOJ
[Medpage Today, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2025]
A federal prosecutor sent a letteropens in a new tab or window to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is "partisan" when it comes to "various scientific debates."
Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles "misinformation" and "competing viewpoints," among other things.
MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters….
Muscular Arrests, Feds Killing Wifi, and a Chinese Trump
Thomas Neuburger, April 22, 2025 [God’s Spies]
• Intimidating the immigration attorneys (Radley Balko via Twitter)
The Twitter text gives the context, and a snippet of the underlying text. It’s a chilling read.
“Insane story from @radleybalko about agents showing up at a lawyer's home to intimidate him about representing immigrants. They appear to have cut his wifi to turn off his ring cam recording. As Radley notes, it fits with a pattern of immigration attorney intimidation.”
It ends with this interesting note regarding the thirty minutes when the lawyers Wifi “went out.” The first paragraph is the lawyer speaking; the second is Balklo.
“I have a buddy who’s former federal law enforcement and is now a lawyer. So I called him and asked him if federal agencies have the technological capability to shut someone’s Wifi down without them knowing, and if that’s something they do. And he said ‘Hell yes.’ He said they do it all the time when they want to have an informal interview with somebody and don’t want to be recorded.”
“People I spoke to who have expertise in these matters said (a) it would not be difficult to shut down someone’s Wifi, and (b) doing so without a court order would be illegal.”
I think we’re way past illegal. A reminder: This didn’t start yesterday.
Men DOGEbags at Work
House Democrats: DOGE is building a ‘master database’ of Americans’ sensitive information
[The Verge, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2025]
DOGE gains access to sensitive immigration data from Justice Department: Report
[Andolu Agency, via Naked Capitalism 04-23-2025]
[TW: And just what do they want that data for?]
Rosemary’s Lobotomy: RFK Jr.’s Mission to “Cure” Autism
Jim Stewartson, April 26, 2025 [MindWar]
The “Disease Registry for Autism” is eugenics in action….
Autism is not a disease. It is not an epidemic. People on the Autism Spectrum Disorder range from those who are highly disabled, to those who are billionaires, to those who are poets, programmers and school nurses. It is a different way of thinking that is sometimes inconvenient to those around it. But people like RFK Jr. do not believe those on the ASD spectrum should be supported and treated as all humans should, he feels they must be curable, just as his grandfather did.
As a neurodivergent person, I don’t need a cure. And I certain don’t need the kind of treatment that RFK Jr. and his Nazi grandfather would prescribe.
Nazi Germany had a similar program of registering those it deemed deficient. It was called Aktion-14 and ended up in hundreds of thousands of forced sterilizations and murders to eliminate people from the chain of heredity.
FDA pauses milk quality testing amid Health and Human Services cuts; lab transfer planned
[USA Today, via Naked Capitalism 04-24-2025]
Elon Musk’s 25-year-old DOGE minion screamed at federal employees during 36-hour firing spree
[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2025]
Nathan Tankus, 25 April 2025 [Notes on the Crises]
Trumpillnomics
David Dayen, April 24, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…A TERM OF ART IN GLOBAL SHIPPING is “blank sailings.” It refers to canceled voyages, or the skipping of ports along a route. Since the tariffs were initially announced on April 2, blank sailings, particularly across the Pacific Ocean, have increased more than sixfold, from 60,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs, a standard measurement of cargo capacity) to 367,800. One of the three major freight alliances has suspended an entire route that stops in several Chinese cities on the way to Vancouver and Tacoma, Washington.
Overall, there’s been a sharp decline in container volume from China to the U.S. at the main ports that take in Chinese goods. One logistics CEO says that bookings have been reduced by 60 percent….
Trump Admin Will Garnish Struggling Borrowers’ Wages as Student Loan Payments Resume
Brett Wilkins, April 21, 2025 [CommonDreams]
[NY Post, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2025]
Strategic Political Economy
[TW: Below, two differing views on the difficulties involved in rebuilding industrial capacity. Both imply, but do not explain in detail, the hostility of Wall Street to investing in real industry. See, for example, Michael Hudson’s book, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy.]
America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back
[Molson Hart, via The Big Picture April 26, 2025]
The 14 Reasons Why these Tariffs Will Not Bring Manufacturing Back.
4. The effective cost of labor in the United States is higher than it looks
Most people think that the reason why we make products in China instead of the United States is cheaper labor. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. Frankly, the whole story is hard to read. People are not machines, they are not numbers on a spreadsheet or inputs into a manufacturing cost formula. I respect everyone who works hard and the people I have worked with over the years, and I want Americans to live better, happier lives.
Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.
In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.
Chinese workers are much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.
And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.
Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.Sadly, what I describe above are not theoretical situations. These are things that I have experienced or seen with my own eyes. It’s fixable, but the American workforce needs great improvement in order to compete with the world’s, even with tariffs.
So yes, Chinese wages are lower, but there many countries with wages lower than China’s. It’s the work ethic, knowhow, commitment, combined with top notch infrastructure, that makes China the most powerful manufacturing country in the world today.
5. We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture
The inputs to manufacturing are not just materials, labor, and knowhow. You need infrastructure like electricity and good roads for transportation, too.Since the year 2000, US electricity generation per person has been flat. In China, over the same time period, it has increased 400%. China generates over twice as much electricity person today as the United States. Why?
Manufacturing.
To run the machines which make the products we use, you need electricity, a lot of it. We already have electricity instability in this country. Without the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output….
7. Uncertainty and complexity around the tariffs
The tariffs have frozen business activity because no one wants to take a big risk dependent on a policy that may change next week.
Even further, the tariffs are confusing, poorly communicated, and complex. Today, if you want to import something from China, you need to add the original import duty, plus a 20% “fentanyl tariff”, plus a 34% “reciprocal tariff”, and an additional 25% “Venezuelan oil” tariff, should it be determined that China is buying Venezuelan oil. The problem is there is no list of countries which are importing Venezuelan oil provided by the White House, so you don’t know if you do or don’t need to add that 25% and you also don’t know when any of these tariffs will go into effect because of unclear language.
As such, you can’t calculate your costs, either with certainty or accuracy, therefore, not only do you not build a factory in the United States, you cease all business activity, the type of thing that can cause a recession, if not worse.
For the past month, as someone who runs a business in this industry, I have spent a huge portion of my time just trying to keep up with the constant changes, instead of running my business….
13. The tariff policies are structured in the wrong way
To make and sell in America, first you must get the raw materials and components. These tariffs will bankrupt manufacturers before it multiplies them because they need to pay tariffs on the import components that they assemble into finished products.
And it gets worse.
They put tariffs on machines. So if you want to start a factory in the United States, all the machinery you need which is not made here, is now significantly more expensive. You may have heard that there is a chronic shortage of transformers needed for power transmission in the United States. Tariffed that too….
Tariffs are applied to the costs of the goods. The way we’ve structured these tariffs, factories in China which import into the United States will pay lower tariffs than American importers, because the Chinese factory will be able to declare the value of the goods at their cost, while the American importer will pay the cost the factory charges them, which is of course higher than the factory’s cost....
How to Prepare for the Coming Supply Chain Shock
Matt Stoller, April 25, 2025 [BIG]
I am writing this piece because we’re going to hit some rocky shoals in the next few months, when the ships from China stop coming and the inventories of key materials draw down. It’s not clear how bad the damage will be. It could be gradual enshittification, like worse selections of consumer goods, no more spare parts for air conditioning units and industrial systems, and higher prices for everything from baby gear to packaging materials. Or it could be much worse, like rolling black-outs as vital utility systems break down. We just don’t know. As Mike Beckham, the CEO of Simple Modern, an Oklahoma-based consumer products company said, “The trade war is setting up a supply chain disaster that could dwarf the chaos during COVID.”
And yet, in such a breakdown, a lot of things that seem improbable happen, and the political contours of what is possible change.
For instance, in the early months of the pandemic, America was facing a shortage of cotton swabs to test for Covid, and the only factory that made FDA approved swabs was located in Maine and run by two cousins who hated each other. Eleven months later, that company was churning out 15 times as many. How? The government provided capital and had machine tooling specialists from a major military contractor expand production facilities….
There are a bunch of business practices that bloat our operational environment, and make it harder for businesses to adjust to shocks. For instance, John Deere makes billions of dollars making it harder to fix agricultural equipment, using copyright, contract, trade secrets, and patent law. That’s not great in a normal business world, but when we can’t get new stuff and have to repair the old stuff, it’s a catastrophe.
This dynamic can be fixed without any physical changes. For instance, there are contracts that prohibit the ability of people to repair their own equipment, or copyright prohibitions on being able to modify software to fix a piece of hardware. Additionally, there are rules saying it’s illegal to reengineer products without permission from their software provider. Ford, not exactly a small company, is caught up in that problem, because it doesn’t have the right to modify the software of the subcontractors who sell components that go into its cars. These barriers can easily be voided with either courts or legislative changes.
Uncertainty Over Trump’s Tariffs Paralyzes U.S. Businesses
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 04-26-2025]
How Monopolies Could Exploit the Tariff Shock
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 04-24-2025]
Beyond Tariffs: What the U.S. Can Learn from China’s Industrial Playbook
[RAND, via Naked Capitalism 04-24-2025]
Global power shift
Chinese universities are dominating global research on chips, US report says
[South China Morning Post, 22 Apr 2025]
While institutions from China take up most places on top 10 rankings for published papers and citations, there are none from the US
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 04-26-2025]
If this gets confirmed and Trump indeed folds, this will be seen as one of those seminal events that confirm, beyond all the propaganda, a fundamental rebalancing of power between China and the US, and an end to the era of US economic dominance.Factually speaking, the US launched an extraordinary attack on China's economy, as according to Trump and others around him the tariffs were largely about a "grand encirclement" plan of China (Bessent's characterization: https://bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-04-12/bessent-has-a-grand-encirclement-plan-for-china-bloomberg-new-economy…).But China didn't get intimidated and responded in kind, and 21 days after not a single country - not one - made a "deal" with the US against China, or even signaled their intention to do so.Quite the contrary, many countries publicly stated their intention to get closer to China as a result and to derisk from the US.
Beijing threatens countermeasures against countries that ‘appease’ Washington in trade war
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 04-23-2025]
China launches Shenzhou 20 astronauts to Tiangong space station (video)
[Space.com, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
China invites global cooperation on 2028 Mars sample-return mission
[Andolu Agency, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
China’s non-nuclear hydrogen bomb generates fireball to burn targets at 1800°F: Report
[Interesting Engineering, via Naked Capitalism 04-21-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 04-24-2025]
After meeting with "senior Republicans" at Mar-a-Lago, [Israel Minister of National Security] Itamar Ben-Gvir said: "They expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed."
Oligarchy
Aurelien [Trying to Understand the World, via Naked Capitalism 04-24-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Opinion: The United States has a literacy problem
[Washington Square News, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
A Palantir Primer: Tools for the Muscular State
Thomas Neuburger, April 22, 2025 [God’s Spies]
Below are just a few notes on what Palantir does, how deeply embedded it is in American and Israeli wars, its take on police surveillance, and promotion of tech that’s born in Orwellian dreams and nightmarishly real.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
When AI writes the laws: UAE’s bold move forces a rethink on compliance and human touch
[CIO, via Naked Capitalism 04-23-2025]
[Reclaim the Net, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2025]
7 simple things I always do on Android to protect my privacy – and why you should too
[ZD Net, via Naked Capitalism 04-23-2025]
Sam’s Club phasing out checkouts, betting big on AI shopping
[Fox News, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2025]
FBI: US Ransomware Attacks Up 9%, Crypto Fraud up 66%
[PYMNTS, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
Scams 2.0: How Technology Is Powering the Next Generation of Fraud
[Fortra, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
CBS News Falls to Trump: The Shocking Resignation of Bill Owens
Parker Molloy, April 25, 2025 [The New Republic]
How corporate pressure and a $10 billion Trump lawsuit against “60 Minutes” gutted one of America’s most trusted news programs.
Saving the free press — before it’s too late
[Editor & Publisher, via Naked Capitalism 04-20-2025]
Local News Is Disappearing. Lawmakers Need to Ask the Right Questions
[Free Press, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
...We have ample evidence that our current media system — dominated by corporate chains, hedge funds and wealthy commercial broadcasters — is top-heavy and too often beholden to shareholders instead of community members. On the flip side, we know that building a diversified and sustainable local-media system will require a strong stable of independent newsrooms, nonprofit outlets, ethnic media outlets and public-media options. These are the sectors of our media system that know their communities best and tend to put mission over profits.
So why have Democratic lawmakers in California, Illinois, New York and Oregon all introduced legislation that could further entrench the power of the Sinclairs, the Gannetts and the Foxes of the world while marginalizing — and in a worst-case scenario, harming — smaller independent publishers? And how can we reorient these policy debates so that lawmakers don’t cement a media hierarchy that isn’t serving our ailing democracy? ….
Climate and environmental crises
Seeing lost winters, not just rising temperatures, shakes climate indifference
[PhysOrg, via Naked Capitalism 04-26-2025]
In both versions of the experiment, the scientists showed half of the study participants a graph of temperature increases from 1940–2020, and the other half a graph showing whether temperatures caused the lake to freeze each winter. Whether charting temperatures or lake freezes, each pair of charts drew from the same slowly warming weather information.
As temperatures gradually climbed, the lakes stopped freezing as often. For the real towns, study participants hearing about the lake also learned about the decline of activities like ice skating and ice fishing.
When the researchers asked participants to rate from 1 to 10 how much climate change impacted the town, people who learned about a range of temperatures responded lower than people who learned whether the lake froze—on average, 6.6, compared to 7.5, or 12% higher.
Democrats' political malpractice
Democrats Need to Make Republicans Fear the Consequences of Attempting a Dictatorship
David Atkins, April 23, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
The threat of prosecution must hang over those who break the law in the second Trump administration….
That fear of reciprocal power and legal accountability was once enough to preserve American political norms. It was the logic of mutually assured destruction: if you break democracy now, they’ll break you later. That’s how informal guardrails were enforced, even through dark chapters like Watergate or Iran-Contra. But those norms no longer hold because no one believes Democrats will retaliate.
This is the context for the quiet battle raging within the Democratic Party leadership. A few anonymous but influential centrists are urging party leaders to soft-pedal Trump’s detention of legal residents in foreign internment camps and pivot to kitchen-table economics instead. Even as constituents demand action and donors grow restless, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries still signal caution, urging patience and restraint.
How Democrats Changed Their Social Base to Defend Their Neoliberal Program
[Left Notes, via Naked Capitalism 04-24-2025]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The Architect: Behind Trump’s imperial presidency (and Elon), there’s Russell Vought.
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture April 26, 2025]
The Trump loyalist who’d just been named director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as well as acting director of the CFPB. A self-described “boring budget guy,” he’s best known for co-authoring the 900-page policy playbook of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has become something of a bible for Trump’s second term. Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, has produced numerous policy papers that advocate for such Trump fixations as the annexation of Greenland (“a prudent aim,” according to a CRA paper) and enacting broad tariffs (“just as sometimes a nation must go to war with guns and bombs, so sometimes are trade wars necessary”), among others. At the center of Vought’s ideology is the unitary executive theory, which critics say amounts to an argument that Trump should have wide latitude to do whatever he wants.
Monopoly Round-Up: Monopolies and Fascism
Matt Stoller, April 20, 2025 [BIG]
...some historical perspective on the relationship between fascism and monopoly power….
The 1920s was a very different decade than that of the 1930s; in the 1920s, disdain for democracy was taken for granted among a large swathe of the intelligentsia, as American businessmen raged against the new Soviet Union. But after the market crash, the stakes changed. Hitler was mostly loathed, not just because he was much more obviously brutal and malevolent, but also because, unlike Mussolini, he refused to pay war debts. But also, New Dealers saw in the murderous leadership of the German state one possible fate of a failed democracy, something that could happen here if they didn’t deliver.
And delivering meant something specific, it was to liberate the public from corporate oligarchy. This stuff is all over the archives, speeches, and commentary of the time.
“Monopoly constitutes the death of capitalism and the genesis of authoritarian government,” said the Federal Trade Commission in 1939. In 1940, populist Democrat Rep. Wright Patman went on NBC radio and attacked domestic chain stores like A&P for driving small stores out of business. “We, the American people, want no part of monopolistic dictatorship in either our American government or in our American business,” he said. “Think of Hitler. Think of Stalin. Think of Mussolini. Let’s keep Hitler’s methods of government and business in Europe.” It’s unusual now to allege that Walmart or Amazon are bulwarks of fascism, but back then, seeing bigness as a political alternative to democracy was routine….
The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America
Michael J. Thompson [New York, NY, Columbia University Press, 2007]
...the economic egalitarian tradition that I will present here is so crucial because it is at the heart of the American republican project itself. The American idea of a democratic republic had always been premised on an antipathy toward unequal divisions of property because early American thinkers saw in those unequal shares of economic power echoes of what had been historically overturned: a sociopolitical order of rank and privilege; a static society that sought to crystallize power relationships and hierarchical economic and social relations characterized by corruption and patronage; in short, a feudal order where the exercise of power was arbitrary and the prospect of domination pervaded everyday life. The reason I trace the historical development and inevitable dissolution of the discourse on economic inequality in American political thought is to show that the American republican project was, in fact, deeply tied to the issues of economic inequality as a reaction to feudal social relations. Any political community that suffers from severe imbalances between rich and poor is in danger of losing its democratic character, and I will investigate this theme in detail in the pages that follow.
American political thought has therefore been characterized over the centuries by an overriding concern with the problem of economic inequality, and the reason for this should come as little surprise. Students of American political thought and political theory know the Enlightenment foundations upon which the American political project has always rested. Rooted in the political concern for equality and for democratic republicanism, it has also been marked by a liberal economic ethos and the rapid development of a capitalist economy, class conflict, and competing views of the "public good." The clash between these two impulses in American political history occurs frequently….
This leads me to a second, not unrelated argument: that the contemporary tolerance of economic inequality is actually the result of liberalism and liberal thought itself. Although the liberal economic ethic was central in combating feudal forms of political and social life, liberalism—defined here as the political philosophy that emphasizes individualism and property rights—has become ascendant at the expense of republican themes in American political culture. Economic inequality needs to be seen not simply in terms of different economic outcomes; I argue that—keeping with the majority of American political thought on this topic—economic inequality must also be seen in political terms: in the ways that it creates new forms of hierarchy, social fragmentation, and constraints on individual liberty. American political thought was, at least through the beginings of the twentieth century, a mixture of liberal and republican themes. Politically, the emphasis on individual liberty was matched by a concern for a community of equals. Republican themes emphasized the need for the absence of domination, which was itself understood as the ability of one person to arbitrarily interfere with another. This was a more robust understanding of freedom than liberalism offers since it was sensitive to the ways that institutions bound working people to conditions that eroded their substantive freedom and rights.
I highlight the various ways that economic inequality was either probkmatized or praised (there was, and still is, an inegalitarian tradition in American political thought as well). What writers and thinkers within the economic egalitarian tradition sought to emphasize was the way that the growing disparity of economic power would form the groundwork for distortions in political and social power. New forms of economic life would foster not individual liberty and independence but a new form of economic dependence of working people on others (namely owners) and the erosion of social and political freedom. At the root of the American economic egalitarian tradition is the notion that economic divisions lead inexorably to political and social inequalities of power; that the essence of any real sense of political equality could only be guaranteed by a sensibly equal distribution of property and wealth. This meant that political and economic life were in fact inseparable and that social power was a function not only of political power but of the ways that individuals had the power over their own economic life and the ability to direct their lives independently of others—whether political tyrants or factory owners. Historically, Americans were reacting against the memories and vestiges of aristocracy and feudalism. This formed part of a political-historical consciousness that militated against class divisions. The fear of the aristocracy and the destruction of America's republican experiment were therefore at the core of early American ideas about inequality. The political moment was therefore always explicit, and this is something that has been lost in contemporary American attitudes toward economic power and class inequality.
…. what the New Deal and the rise of the American welfare state ushered in was a new interpretation of democracy, one that saw, both implicitly and explicitly, that political democracy was untenable without a substantial degree of economic equality as well….
MN Republicans introduce vaccine criminalization bill drafted by Florida hypnotist
[News from the States, via Naked Capitalism 04-24-2025]
ENDING 30 YEARS OF RESISTANCE, TRUMP AND ABBOTT BREAK THE ‘PEOPLE’S HOUSE’
[Texas Observer, via Naked Capitalism 04-21-2025]
[The New Statesman, via Naked Capitalism 04-21-2025]
“The eccentrics of the new right aren’t rebelling against our political regime – they are its twisted successors.”
Trump’s transactional regime
How Trump Worship Took Hold in Washington
[New Yorker, via The Big Picture April 25, 2025]
The President is at the center of a brazenly transactional ecosystem that rewards flattery and lockstep loyalty.
Civic republicanism
Against the Tyranny of Opinionated Ignorance
[Quillette, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]
[TW: The foundation of civic republicanism is that all individuals are capable of discernment and reason. The purpose of liberty, as originally understood by the 17th and 18th century revolutionaries who set about overthrowing the political and ecclesiastical authorities of England and Europe, is not to allow every individual to seek to maximize their pleasure, but to allow every individual to investigate the state of nature and the state of society, and reach their own conclusions protected from any repressive pressure originating from authority.
[It is the process of citizens inquiring into the state of nature and of society and discussing their conclusions, that is supposed to be — at least according to the tenets of republicanism — that moves humanity forward toward “a more perfect union.” The conservative / libertarian / Trump / MAGA / DOGE assault on the research institutions in the name of “efficiency and cost savings” shows that they entirely reject that process. They believe that society ought be organized according to their ideological beliefs and prejudices, not according to any truths that are discerned by the human mind.
[It is extremely indicative of exactly who funded conservatives / libertarians / Trump / MAGA / DOGE that the only expertise respected in USA is that of rentiers and financiers. ]
Computational analysis of US congressional speeches reveals a shift from evidence to intuition
[Nature, via Naked Capitalism 04-26-2025]
How Gen Z Became the Most Gullible Generation
[Politico, via The Big Picture April 25, 2025]
The almighty algorithm is fueling conspiracy theories among young people and ruining their ability to tell fact from fiction on the internet. (Politico)
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 04-26-2025]
We ELIMINATED measles in the US with safe & effective vaccines in 2000.We are losing that status NOW. Decades of progress: gone.People listen to conspiracy theorists over scientists.Measles killed millions before vaccines.We are heading back there if this continues.
