Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 26, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
ICE Agents Can Now Be Arrested in Chicago
[Migrant Insider, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2025]
A FEDERAL JUDGE IN CHICAGO RULED last Wednesday that starting this week ICE agents can now face arrest and contempt proceedings if they conduct unlawful, warrantless arrests, marking a dramatic shift in immigration enforcement oversight in the city.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings found that ICE agents violated the terms of a consent decree by detaining people without proper warrants, following a surge in such arrests amid increased enforcement activity. According to the judge’s order, ICE agents must now wear body cameras and have them turned on. They also cannot arrest anyone complying with their appointment dates at immigration courthouses.
Letters from an American, October 23, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Oct 24, 2025
Julia Ainsley and Didi Martinez of NBC News reported today that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s rush to get new recruits onto the street has meant they have pushed into their training program more than 200 people who have disqualifying criminal backgrounds, fail drug testing, or don’t meet the academic or physical requirements.
The budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed in July—the one they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—included more than $170 billion over four years for immigration and border security. The law tripled ICE’s annual budget, giving it “more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined,” according to Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy law and policy institute.
Part of that money was to hire about 10,000 deportation officers. As O’Herron notes, a 2017 report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found that to hire 10,000 officers would require vetting 500,000 applicants….
In August, ICE began to offer a $50,000 signing bonus and got rid of its age limits. To fill the ranks, Ainsley and Martinez note, ICE has already shortened its training program from 13 weeks to 6. They report that nearly half of those dismissed from ICE over the past three months could not pass an open-book exam. Others could not run 1.5 miles in less than 14 minutes, 25 seconds, or do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups.
Sociologist Ian Carillo called attention to a 2020 article by political scientists Adam Scharpf and Christian Glässel looking into why secret police agents are often “surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect.” By examining the 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina from 1975 to 1983, they discovered that the ranks of secret police are filled by those who perform poorly in merit-based systems. Facing firing for their poor performance, they turn to more burdensome secret police work.
Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker established the “Illinois Accountability Commission” to compile evidence against federal agents who have harassed, intimidated, brutalized, and detained American citizens and legal residents in Illinois. “None of this is about crime or safety,” Pritzker said. “If it were, there would be coordination with local law enforcement and judicial warrants…. Under normal circumstances,” he said, “federal agency supervisors and inspectors general would enforce proper legal procedures and protocols and hold accountable those who violate them.” But Trump has fired 17 inspectors general and installed cronies at the Department of Justice, while MAGA congress members refuse to hold hearings or conduct oversight. Administration officials are acting as if they are “immune from investigation or accountability,” Pritzker said “They are not.”
‘Evil, Fascist, Wannabe Authoritarian’ Stephen Miller Threatens IL Gov. Pritzker With Arrest
Jessica Corbett, October 25, 2025 [CommonDreams]
...Trump himself has called for jailing Pritzker and Democratic Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “for failing to protect” ICE officers. Priztker, a billionaire and potential 2028 presidential candidate, has suggested Trump should be removed from office via the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Miles Taylor, who served as Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during the first Trump administration and authored an infamous, anonymous 2018 New York Times editorial, said Friday, “Feels like we’re going down the rabbit hole pretty fast here, folks.”
California state Sen. Scott Weiner (D-11), one of the Democrats running for former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s seat in the next cycle, said: “They’re now explicitly taking the position that state and local elected officials are committing crimes when they attempt to protect their communities from the ICE secret police.”….
ICE boosts weapons spending 700%
[Popular Information, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2025]
“…there have also been significant purchases of chemical weapons and “guided missile warheads and explosive components.”
[TW: What does ICE want guided missile warheads for?]
Did Donald Trump Nearly Get Hakeem Jeffries Killed?
Peter Rothpletz, Oct 22, 2025 [Zeteo]
Yesterday, one of the men Trump freed from accountability was arrested for allegedly plotting to murder the House minority leader.
A story in three parts.
“I will kill him for the future,” 34-year-old Christopher Moynihan stated via text, according to New York court records. “Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” he went on.
“Even if I am hated he must be eliminated.”
Mike Johnson Says No Kings Protest Is Worse Than Threats on Jeffries
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, October 21, 2025 [The New Republic]
House Speaker Mike Johnson brushed off assassination threats against Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Tuesday, claiming that—despite the wannabe assassin’s conservative politics—the left is still at fault….
...Johnson chose to throw the responsibility back at America’s ideological left.
“I will tell you this, the violence on the left is far more prevalent than the violence on the right,” Johnson said Tuesday. “The assassination culture that’s been advanced now—this is the left, in almost every case that is advancing this, and not the right. Let’s not make this a partisan issue, you don’t want me to go there.
“The rhetoric that you saw on display Saturday, we highlighted yesterday, it plays into this. There are people that get triggered—there are deranged people in society when they hear elected officials participating in a rally that was paid for by [George] Soros and sponsored by Communists, with signs and placards and mantras that were repeated that, ‘We should bring death to fascist politicians.’ They call every Republican a fascist now,” Johnson said, referring to the peaceful No Kings protests that took place across the country this past weekend….
Akela Lacy, October 20 2025 [The Intercept]
In addition to deploying tens of thousands of federal agents from across the federal government to carry out his deportation agenda, President Donald Trump is rapidly expanding the network of state and local police going after immigrants through partnerships with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
The aggressive, nationwide law enforcement regime, all taking place under orders from the White House, amounts to what scholars, attorneys, and now a federal judge say are steps toward the creation of a national police force. And the ranks of ICE partners won’t be filled with just local cops: In at least three states, the administration is joining forces with agencies typically tasked with environmental and marine protection, lottery control, and gaming to target immigrants….
“No Kings” Protest (and Arrests) Have Begun
Ken Klippenstein. “NSPM-7 is already being used to detain protesters over speech.”
Trump Said to Demand Justice Dept. Pay Him $230 Million for Past Cases
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2025]
Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal
[WaPo, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2025]
The Man Who Wants You Dead — Trump’s Golem Stephen Miller Wants to See Your Blood in the Streets.
Malcolm Nance, Oct 21, 2025 [Black Man Spy]
Every Thursday afternoon I do a Substack live with Michael Cohen (@therealmichaelcohen) and Lev Parnas (@levparnas) we call “Unleashed”. I amusingly refer to it as “Two Felons and a Spy.”
These two men have a decade and a half of experience working directly for Donald Trump on a day-to-day basis: Cohen as Trump’s personal lawyer and Parnas as his Russia-Ukraine fixer on the project that got Trump impeached. They both suddenly found themselves and their integrity by turning against Trump when investigated for charges of fraud.
But no good deed goes unpunished, and Trump’s Department of Justice quickly prosecuted both of them….
Of all the people who are on the never-Trump train, these two have special insight that no other people in the never-Trump world have. They know what is in Trump’s mind, and they also know all of his cabinet members personally. So when Parnas and Cohen speak, I listen very, very carefully.
In the continued discussions about the rising levels of rhetoric equating the Democratic Party to violent extremism. I had to pose one question:
Will Trump order violence against Americans?
Cohen was unequivocal, “No. He won’t. That’s not the way he operates. He does nothing directly.” Lev Parnas agreed that Trump himself is a coward and won’t order violence with the words coming out of his mouth, “Go kill people.”
But … they added a caveat.
They both agree that Trump will let someone else order the killing for him.
A few weeks ago, I asked them, “Who in the administration will get Trump to issue the order that will result in killing Americans?”
Almost simultaneously, they both said, “Stephen Miller.”
The role of Stephen Miller is now to shape the political environment to get Trump to allow him and his secret Police, ICE, to characterize the opposing party as a terrorist organization. In a further step towards single-party rule and dictatorship, on August 26, Miller stated, “the Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” ….
Stephen Prager. Oct 23, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Letters from an American, October 20, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Oct 21, 2025
...According to Reuveni, “Bove emphasized, those planes need to take off, no matter what. Then after a pause, he also told all in attendance, and if some court should issue an order preventing that, we may have to consider telling that court, ‘f*** you.’” ….
“What’s to stop them if they decide they don’t like you anymore, to say you’re a criminal, you’re a member of MS-13, you’re a terrorist,” Reuveni told 60 Minutes. “What’s to stop them from sending in some DOJ attorney at the direction of DOJ leadership to delay, to filibuster, and if necessary, to lie? And now that’s you gone and your liberties changed.”
When Reuveni refused to sign a brief calling Abrego Garcia a terrorist, the administration fired him….
The 60 Minutes story noted that the nonpartisan law journal Just Security has discovered more than 35 cases in which judges have said the government is lying to them. One judge warned that “trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.”….
Thomas Mills, Oct 22, 2025 [PoliticsNC]
Before I get to my main subject, I want to chime in on the destruction of the East Wing of the White House. Democrats should lean into it hard. It’s a metaphor for what Donald Trump is doing to the country. He’s destroying institutions, programs, and guardrails with little input from others and no restraint from anybody.
He unilaterally decided to destroy a recognizable public building to build a monument to himself, a gaudy 90,000 square foot ballroom, while laying off public employees, starving children who depend on USAID for food, kicking people off Medicaid, and doubling health insurance premiums. I think most people will be shocked and dismayed to see what’s he’s done despite objections from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and without consulting oversight authorities. Americans revere the White House as more than just a building, but as a symbol of our democracy. Trump just trashed it….
I read and follow a lot of traditional conservatives, most of whom have become ardent anti-Trumpers. I respect most of them because they have held onto their values instead of selling out to the lure of Trumpism. One annoying complaint, though, is that they resent having been called racists and fascists for years before the racists and fascists took over their party….
...they were motivated by ads like George H. W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” and Jesse Helms’ “Hands” ads. They cheered Helms as he opposed the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday and bashed King as a communist. People at conservative think tanks and publications did not protest the implicit racism or the racists that these actions were meant to appease. Instead, they looked the other way, often throwing around accusations of communism or Marxism to define their Democratic opponents….
The seeds of MAGA were planted decades ago and they grew like weeds in a garden that the ideological warriors at places like the Heritage Foundation, National Review, and the John Locke Foundation refused to tend. Today, they’ve strangled the classical liberalism that once flourished in the Republican garden with roots that are too deep to extract.
The accusations of fascism may have been a bit over-the-top, but no more so than ones of communism directed at people like me who wanted less discrimination and more equality. The accusations of racism, though, derived from a Republican Party willing to excuse or defend bigoted behavior in the interest of political gain. I watched people who once voted reliably Democratic become loyal Republicans over issues of race, homophobia, and xenophobia, not any interest in defending classical liberal values. Today, they are soul of MAGA.
The Latest From The Ninth Circuit
Joyce Vance, Oct 25, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
Last night, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated, at least for now, Federal District Judge Karin Immergut’s first temporary restraining order, which prohibited the Trump administration from deploying the Oregon National Guard in Portland. It had been set aside, but the Circuit Court has put it back in place while determining whether the court will rehear the panel’s decision en banc.
The technicalities of the legal procedures here are intricate, but the bottom line is that it’s a setback, at least temporarily, for the Trump administration….
...on Thursday, the state of Oregon filed a letter brief with the court, advising of what the state characterized as “a material factual error by defendants on which the panel relied to grant a stay pending appeal.” ….
The state says that DOJ’s argument was contradicted by material DOJ turned over to the state in discovery Wednesday evening, and that representations DOJ made in court previously were false:
DOJ told the court that protests had forced the redeployment of 115 Federal Protection Service (FPS) officers, about 25% of the nationwide force, of DHS employees responsible for protecting federal buildings, to Portland.
At oral argument in the matter, DOJ emphasized that having the 115 FPS officers deployed away from their posts to Portland was unsustainable for the government. Counsel for the administration was asked whether all 115 of the officers remained in Portland. The response was that “some” had returned home, but “many” remained in Portland.
The state claims that in the discovery DOJ produced, it admitted that the “115 FPS officers have never been redeployed to Portland” and that “only a fraction of that number was ever in Portland at any given time before the President’s directive.”
Unless the government can explain the discrepancy satisfactorily, the court will likely want to inquire into the source of the misrepresentation….
Strategic Political Economy
Gaslighting us on private debt, Why private debt is the real problem, and a solution
Steve Keen, Oct 19, 2025 [Building a New Economics]
Not a day—barely a second, it seems—goes past without some sage warning about the dangers of America’s huge government debt.
On the other hand, you barely even hear a mention of private debt. So government debt must be far bigger than private debt, right?
Wrong. In the USA, and almost all developed countries, private debt is way bigger than government debt. As Figure 1 shows, before the Global Financial Crisis, government debt was relatively low—just 60% of GDP—while private debt, at 170% of GDP, was almost 3 times higher. Government debt has risen since, both in reaction to the GFC, and because of Covid. But even so, it’s still lower than private debt….
...Economic crises are caused by excessive private debt, not excessive government debt. They occur when credit—the rate of growth of private debt—turns negative, at a time of already high private debt….
[TW: very informative to see that when private debt soared there is a crash, not when government debt soared during World War Two.]
Warmongers
Supercarrier USS Ford Being Pulled From Europe And Ordered To Caribbean
[War Zone, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2025]
Inside Marco Rubio’s Push for Regime Change in Venezuela
Ryan Grim, Saagar Enjeti, and Jack Poulson, Oct 24, 2025 [Drop Site]
U.S. intelligence has assessed that little to none of the fentanyl trafficked to the United States is being produced in Venezuela, despite recent claims from the Trump administration, a senior U.S. official directly familiar with the matter tells Drop Site.
The official noted that many of the boats targeted for strikes by the Trump administration do not even have the requisite gasoline or motor capacity to reach U.S. waters, dramatically undercutting claims by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth….
Rubio cycled through multiple arguments for regime change in Venezuela during the early months of the administration, largely based around human rights and election concerns, which were unconvincing to Trump. After assuming a position on the National Security Council in the spring, Rubio then presented a new argument to Trump: that Maduro was a narcoterrorist drug trafficker, based on a 2020 indictment by the Department of Justice under the first Trump administration over alleged cocaine trafficking….
Global power shift
China’s emerging export control regime
[High Capacity, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2025]
China’s rare earth magnet exports to US plunge 29% as tensions simmer
[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2025]
[Military Watch magazine, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
The International Court of Justice Just Rejected EVERY SINGLE LIE Israel Told to Them
Shaun King, Oct 22, 2025
One target at a time: The logic that helped Israeli liberals commit genocide
[972 Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2025]
The Congressional Black Caucus’s Silent Partnership With AIPAC
[The Nation, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2025]
AG PAM BONDI CLEARED THE WAY FOR ISRAEL’S FOREIGN INFLUENCE OPERATION
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2025]
AG PAM BONDI CLEARED THE WAY FOR ISRAEL’S FOREIGN INFLUENCE OPERATIONOn her 1st day, newly appointed AG Pam Bondi, disbanded the Foreign Influence Task Force, the DOJ office responsible for enforcing FARA. The change specifically limits DOJ prosecutors from criminally charging those involved in public-relations work & policy advocacy on behalf of foreign businesses & nonprofits.This is key to understanding how Israel’s current foreign influence campaign is structured. The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) states a Foreign Agent is "an individual who agrees to operate within the US subject to the direction of a foreign gov or official." The penalty for unregistered Foreign Agents is 10yrs in prison.
Chris Hedges: 'Requiem for Gaza'
Chris Hedges, Oct 21, 2025
Chris Hedges recently gave the Edward Said memorial lecture to a sold out audience at the University of South Australia in Adelaide….
...Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement, which Israel did almost immediately by refusing to open the border crossing at Rafah, killing a half dozen Palestinians and cutting in half the agreed upon aid trucks to 300 a day because the bodies of the remaining hostages have yet to be returned. And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”….
“We Estimate That Nearly One Million of Gaza’s 1.1 Million Olive Trees Have Been Destroyed”
Drop Site News, Oct 20, 2025
Israel's Untold Environmental Genocide
Kit Klarenberg, Oct 20, 2025 [Global Delinquents]
...Resultantly, the genocide “has all but eliminated Gazan fishing livelihoods.” Israel’s “destruction of institutional capacity” in the sphere means “there are no effective controls of contamination in the food chain from fish supply, leading to consumption of poisonous fish” by starving Palestinians. “Marine ecosystems have clearly been contaminated with munitions, sewage and solid waste,” the UN gravely concludes. The situation demands “urgent re-installation” of the Strip’s water supply and wastewater collection capacity “to prevent further human health impacts and prevent future outbreaks of communicable diseases.”
Elsewhere, “remote sensing assessments” conducted by the UN indicate that by May, 97.1% of Gaza’s tree crops, 95.1% of its shrubland, 89% of its grass/fallow land and 82.4% of its annual crops had “been damaged.” As such, “production of food is not possible at scale,” and “soil has been contaminated by munitions, solid waste and untreated sewage.” The UN concludes the Zionist entity’s “military activity” has resulted in the “degradation of soils through loss of vegetation and compaction,” with disastrous results….
[GeoPolitiQ, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2025]
Team Zeteo, Oct 20, 2025
Veteran diplomat Robert Malley also reveals to Mehdi what really went down at Bill Clinton’s Camp David Summit in 2000 and why Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians weren't to blame.
Oligarchy
Tyler Pager, Oct. 25, 2025 [New York Times]
Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump, is the anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown, according to two people familiar with the matter….
[TW: It is clear that the rich are too rich. In a republic, no individual, no family, and no group of individuals (whether they be incorporated or not) should be able to privately fund military operations. Period. That’s a hard and fast rule of civic republicanism — whether or not it’s been codified into law or legal precedent.
Vices of the Political System of the United States
James Madison, April 1787
[Madison’s notes in preparing for the Constitutional Convention]
According to Republican Theory, Right and power being both vested in the majority, are held to be synonimous. According to fact and experience a minority may in an appeal to force, be an overmatch for the majority. 1. If the minority happen to include all such as possess the skill and habits of military life, & such as possess the great pecuniary resources, one third only may conquer the remaining two thirds. .
The Rise of the Thielverse and the Construction of the Surveillance State (w/ Whitney Webb)
Chris Hedges, Oct 22, 2025
The descent into a new, mutated and technology-focused form of American fascism is already here. Those who have kept track of the rise of the Thielverse, which includes figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and JD Vance, have understood that an agenda to usher in a unique form of authoritarianism has been slowly introduced into the mainstream political atmosphere….
It’s clear that the architects of mass surveillance and the military industrial complex are beginning to coalesce in unprecedented ways within the Trump administration and Webb emphasizes that now is the time to pay attention and push back against these new forces.
If they have their way, all commercial technology will be completely folded into the national security state — acting blatantly as the new infrastructure for techno-authoritarian rule. The underlying idea behind this new system is “pre-crime,” or the use of mass surveillance to designate people criminals before they’ve committed any crime. Webb warns that the Trump administration and its benefactors will demonize segments of the population to turn civilians against each other, all in pursuit of building out this elaborate system of control right under our noses….
Felonomics
Trump’s Corrupt Argentina Bailout
Daniel Larison [via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2025]
Trump pushing Allies to Buy US Gas is bad Economics and a Climate Catastrophe
The Conversation, 10/21/2025 (via R. Summers]
The price of partnership with the United States has changed. Washington is now using assurances of defence and trade access to pressure allies in Europe and Asia to buy more of its fossil fuels under decades-long contracts.
The scale is immense. The European Union intends to import up to A$1.15 trillion of US energy – mostly liquefied natural gas (LNG) – by 2028. That would be more than four times its current imports, though analysts are sceptical it will eventuate.
Indonesia has signed up for $24 billion in US energy imports and Japan is exploring a similar option.
These deals aren’t based on free trade. They represent the Trump administration’s geopolitical play using trade and security carrots and sticks to lock in long-term fossil fuel profitability and dominance. The goal: prop up energy sources facing cost pressures from clean technology, strengthen US control of the energy flows, and shut out China, the world’s top manufacturer of clean tech….
Federal agency overseeing US nuclear stockpile will furlough most of its workforce starting Monday
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2025]
SNAP Benefits: Trump Admin Rejects Use of Emergency Funding Amid Shutdown
[Newsweek, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2025]
POTUS 47 Says Gateway Tunnel Project is ‘Terminated’
David C. Lester [Railway Track & Structures — RT&S Engineering News]
[TW: The Gateway Tunnel is being built under the Hudson River between New Jersey and Manhattan in New York City.]
The New York Times yesterday reported that POTUS 47 “abruptly” announced this during a White House press conference that addressed a variety of issues. The Times went on to report that POTUS 47 took aim at Sen. Chuck Shumer (D-N.Y.) with the statement “It’s billions and billions of dollars that Schumer has worked 20 years to get. Tell him it’s terminated.”
The Times also reported Schumer’s response to the news from POTUS 47. “Gateway is the most important infrastructure project in America –– period. Donald Trump trying to kill it again is pure spite and stupidity. It’s petty revenge politics that would screw hundreds of thousands New York and New Jersey commuters, choke off our economy and kill good-paying jobs.”
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
[Unherd, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2025]
Rents for poorest tenants increased more than twice as much as rents for rich tenants since 2021
[Private Equity Stakeholder Project, via Naked Capitalism 10-24-2025]
Americans can’t afford their cars any more and Wall Street is worried
[Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2025]
Yet Another Proxy for Immiseration — Car loan delinquency rate
Peter Turchin, Oct 21, 2025
...The data is from Fitch Ratings on the US auto loan delinquency index, which tracks the proportion of car loans where payments are 60 days or longer past due. The index tracks separately customers with good credit rating (prime) and those with poor credit (subprime).
Because I am interested in the long-term trends, I annualized the monthly data from Fitch Ratings (by averaging over 12-month periods). And here’s the result:
There are two interesting features here. First, borrowers with poor credit, which usually means the poor, are increasingly unable to keep up with car payments. Second, there are substantial fluctuations around the trend, with peaks roughly corresponding to recessions in the United States (except for the 1996-7 peak, which was due to an auto credit bubble correction). What is interesting is that initially peaks in the prime sector paralleled those in the subprime sector, but with time these prime fluctuations smoothed out. I am not entirely sure why this happened, but one possible explanation is that the economic conditions for these two sectors have increasingly diverged since 2000….
Health care crisis
The cost of health insurance for a family jumps to $27,000
[STAT, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2025]
‘It’s only gotten worse’: As ACA premiums are set to climb, some Americans opt to go uninsured
[NBC News, via Naked Capitalism 10-24-2025]
The Secret Campaign to Silence Critics of a Hospital Real Estate Empire
[Mother Jones, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2025]
Private equity takeover of hospitals led to rise in Medicare emergency patient deaths, says study
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Shaun King, Oct 21, 2025
Money, Women and Taxes: Jeffrey Epstein’s Fiery Friendship with a Wall Street Titan
Matthew GoldsteinDavid EnrichSteve Eder and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Oct. 18, 2025 [New York Times]
New emails show how Mr. Epstein pressured Leon Black, his longtime friend and patron, to fork over millions for financial services….
Mr. Black had co-founded Apollo in 1990. The firm, which was a trendsetter in using debt to buy distressed companies, became a powerful force on Wall Street.
Mr. Epstein had no formal training in tax and estate planning. But after a few years working at an investment bank, he convinced a few business elites to hire him for financial advice. They included Elizabeth Johnson, an heiress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, and Leslie Wexner, the billionaire behind Victoria’s Secret and the Limited.
Mr. Black found Mr. Epstein to be impressive and a little mysterious. It wasn’t just his ties to the ultrawealthy; he also seemed to always be surrounded by beautiful women. “He was almost like a James Bond villain,” Mr. Black told the publication Puck last year….
Most important, he found ways to minimize the taxes that Mr. Black’s estate would owe after his death. Years earlier, at the suggestion of Mr. Epstein, Mr. Black had set up a so-called grantor-retained annuity trust. Such trusts allow the ultrawealthy to pass along potentially unlimited sums to their heirs, free of any estate tax. In 2013, Mr. Epstein came up with a way to rework the trust to potentially avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes for Mr. Black’s four children….
Restoring balance to the economy
Unveiled Today: The First Politically Viable Wealth Tax
Harold Meyerson, October 23, 2025 [The American Prospect]
A proposed 2026 California ballot measure would tax billionaires’ fortunes to fund imperiled health access for 15 million state Medicaid recipients.
Disrupting mainstream economics
Top Economist: Elon Musk Doesn’t Say ‘Thank You Enough’ for All the Government Support He Has Had
Mehdi Hasan and Team Zeteo, Oct 22, 2025 [Zeteo]
Marianna Mazzucato, the Professor of Economics and best-selling author, doesn’t believe in “tech billionaires,” she tells Mehdi. “I don’t call them tech billionaires, I just call them billionaires.”
Why? Government investment, not billionaires or corporations, “got us everything that’s smart in our iPhones. The internet, GPS, touchscreen, Siri — these were all government-financed.”
In this wide-ranging interview with Mehdi, Professor Mazzucato, who was praised by the late Pope Francis and has been namechecked by the British prime minister, says Elon Musk doesn’t say “thank you enough” for all the government support his companies have received. It’s “important for the billionaires, once they make the money, to also admit all the public investments that they benefited from,” she says….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2025]
People Who Lost Their Jobs To AI Are Opening Up About Their Experiences, And It’s Genuinely Scary
[BuzzFeed, via Naked Capitalism 10-19-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
CNN Cuts Off Pelosi Primary Challenger’s Discussion of NSPM-7
Julia Conley, October 21, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Democrats' political malpractice
Taylor Swift, The White House Demolition, And Pathways Of Persuasion
Brian Beutler, Oct 24, 2025 [Off Message]
...Everyone I’ve asked, from all walks of life, had a visceral reaction to this week’s images of physical wreckage at the White House. Nearly all of them understood intuitively that if Joe Biden or Barack Obama had spent bribe money to bulldoze the East Wing, their presidencies would have ended. They knew enough about politics, in other words, to intuit this difference between how Republicans and Democrats react to shocking developments.
I suspect most elected Democrats had the same visceral reaction you and I did to those images. But they largely suppressed their indignation. They did not treat it as an emergency (i.e. a political opportunity) and reverted instead to their own, socially-constructed, default opinion that Regular People™️ would not care….
And so Democrats did not reach for their phones, or race to TV cameras, or rush legislation to the floor. They followed the advice of the people in the party who do what’s known as “persuasion work,” who tell them to exercise tremendous discipline and avoid the pitfall of driving excess attention to stories and developments that are unlikely to change anyone’s mind.
What kinds of things do they believe are persuasive? Policy issues. Economically significant developments in the world. The great moral issues of our time.
An astute commenter on BlueSky put it this way: Democratic outrage over the White House demolition was “not as strong as the [Republican] pushback against the change in the Cracker Barrel corporate logo.”
This perfectly captures one of the most important sub-ideological differences between the parties: How their respective strategists conceptualize the process of changing people’s minds. The difference between politicians who lift their fingers into the wind, and those who make the weather, knowing it’s the wind that carries voters along….
Monopoly Round-Up: Does the Left Have Trouble with Making Things in America?
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2025]
Resistance
CHICAGO MAYOR BRANDON JOHNSON HIGHLIGHTS THE ‘ANCESTORS’ IN PUSH FOR A GENERAL STRIKE
[Black Enterprise, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2025]
The Making of Italy’s Pro-Palestine General Strike
Tasnima Uddin, Oct 18, 2025 [Z Article, via www.defenddemocracy.press]
On October 3, 2025, more than two million workers and young people took to the streets of Italy in a historic general strike for Palestine — the largest protest of its kind in the country’s history. Under the slogan “Blocchiamo Tutto” (“Let’s Block Everything”), demonstrations swept across more than eighty cities. Ports in Livorno, Naples, Salerno, and Genoa were shut down; railways and highways were disrupted; schools, universities, and workplaces were closed as students, teachers, and workers walked out. In Rome, a one-million-strong demonstration followed the nationwide strike.
The twenty-four-hour strike was called by Italy’s largest trade union, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), alongside the grassroots Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), in response to the illegal interception of the Global Sumud Flotilla by Israeli forces. CGIL declared the strike “in defence of the flotilla” and “to stop the genocide,” as protests erupted across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East….
The September and October strikes were sparked by an urgent, uncompromising demand from Riccardo Rudino, a dockworker with the Autonomous Port Workers’ Collective (CALP) in Genoa. Addressing a crowd of 40,000 who marched to see off the Global Sumud Flotilla, he declared: “If, even for twenty minutes, we lose contact with our comrades on the flotilla, we will block all of Europe: from Genoa’s docks, not a single nail will leave, it will be a global strike.”
The declaration electrified the movement. For two years, the horrors in Gaza had felt distant; Rudino’s call made them immediate. Workers, students, and citizens across Italy and beyond felt the weight and the power of collective action, proving that solidarity can disrupt systems of complicity and force global attention….
Dean Obeidallah, Oct 23, 2025
….
2. The Jeffrey Epstein ballroom—or perhaps the Jeffrey Epsetin-Ghislaine Maxwell multi-purpose room. This room would be filled with photos of Trump with his BFF’s Epstein and Maxwell—together with a timeline of Trump hanging out with them as the two were running a child sex ring….
4. All the women Trump Ever Harassed museum. Again, a bigger venue would be needed but this could be filled with the stories of the more than twenty women who bravely came forward to share how Trump had harassed and even sexually assaulted them. Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape would play in a loop so people could hear and see Trump say about women he found attractive: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Jan. 6 Rioter Pardoned by Trump Arrested for Plot to Kill Dem Leader
Malcolm Ferguson, October 21, 2025 [The New Republic]
Abbott: ‘Texas is targeting professors’ over ‘leftist ideologies’
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2025]
Anti-Union, Pro-Israel Billionaires Are Behind Tim Walberg and His Show Trials
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 10-24-2025]
Missy Ryan, October 22, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Pop-Up Database Siphoned Crypto From Conservatives to Doxx Charlie Kirk Critics, Then Went Dark
Phoebe Huss, Oct 22, 2025 [Drop Site]
Anonymous web developers doxxed people, and gained thousands of followers, submissions, and dollars—then disappeared.
Civic republicanism
The American Augean Stables — How Corruption Has Amended the Constitution
Thomas Neuburger, October 22, 2025 [God's Spies]
Letters from an American, October 19, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Oct 20, 2025
...Several administration videos and images have responded to Americans saying “No Kings” by taking the position “Yes, We Want Kings,” an open embrace of the end of democracy. But they are more than simple trolling. Led by Trump, MAGA Republicans have abandoned the idea of politics, which is the process of engaging in debate and negotiation to attract support and win power. What is left when a system loses the give and take of politics is force.
The idea that leaders must attract voters with reasoned arguments to win power and must concede power when their opponents win has been the central premise of American government since 1800. In that year, after a charged election in which each side accused the other of trying to destroy the country, Federalist John Adams turned the reins of government over to the leader of the opposition, Thomas Jefferson. That peaceful transfer of power not only protected the people, it protected leaders who had lost the support of voters, giving them a way to leave office safely and either retire or regroup to make another run at power.
The peaceful transfer of power symbolized the nation’s political system and became the hallmark of the United States of America. It lasted until January 6, 2021, when sitting president Trump refused to accept the voters’ election of Democrat Joe Biden, the leader of the opposition….
Michael Tomasky, October 24, 2025 [The New Republic]
[TW: Tomasky misses the two most important enablers of Trump. A. The reactionary rich, who have assiduously funded and cultivated the conservative and libertarian movements for eight decades now, dating from their fevered opposition to Roosevelt and the New Deal. And, B. The ideologues, Tomasky approaches this group, when he describes the Supreme Court:
The six conservatives on the Supreme Court, in contrast, aren’t cowards. They know what they’re doing, and they have no voters to fear. We must assume that they are consciously creating the America they want. That’s most true of the two deepest reactionaries, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
[I think Jim Stewartson, on his MindWar substack, provides some of the best material on some of the the cultish ideologues, such as Curtis Yarvin. Tomasky has quite a waysto go to reach the level of uncomfortable truths Stewartson regularly deals in.]
Steve Bannon and the ‘Plan’ for a Neverending ‘Age Of Trump’
Nicole Lafond, Hunter Walker, Allegra Kirkland, Khaya Himmelman and Emine Yücel, October 25, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
Steve Bannon, the MAGA broadcaster and once-and-future adviser to President Donald Trump, just gave an interview to The Economist where he openly discussed a potential “plan” for a third term.
“Well, he’s going to get a third term. So, Trump ‘28,” Bannon said. “Trump is going to be president in ‘28 and people just ought to get accommodated with that.”….
Many observers have dismissed all of this out of hand given that the 22nd Amendment seemingly serves as a hard line enforcing the two term limit. There are, however, actual legal experts who think there could be loopholes to this including a technique essentially pioneered by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, where the president joins a ticket as the vice president with the tacit understanding their running mate would move aside or serve as a mere figurehead. Another potential avenue experts have raised involves challenging whether the 22nd Amendment means solely two terms or actually only two consecutive terms….
In this interview, Bannon didn’t say which route Trump’s allies are focused on, but he insisted that there is a “plan” in place.
“There’s many different alternatives. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ‘28,” Bannon said.
Bannon also cast the effort to erode one of the core traditional curbs on presidential power in positively Biblical terms.
“President Trump will be the president of the United States and the country needs him to be president of the United States,” he said. “We have to finish what we started and the way we finish it — through Trump … He’s a vehicle of divine providence. He’s an instrument. He’s very imperfect. He’s not churchy, not particularly religious. but he’s an instrument of divine will.”
Bannon also offered a distinctly dictatorial vision for the “endpoint” of what he termed the “Age of Trump.” He said it would include Trump allies taking “control” of both “the institutions” and the “political process” en route to establishing “an entrepreneurial capitalism paradise.”
“We have to seize the institutions, seize them and then purge them,” Bannon said. “It’s not the DOGE crap, this is serious people like Russ Vought and others that have spent years thinking this whole plan through.” ….
Stephen Prager, October 23, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trump Is Actually Failing Fast—and the Rabid MAGA Bigwigs Know It
Virginia Heffernan, October 24, 2025 [The New Republic]
Yes, he’s done enormous damage. But he’s unpopular, the courts are checking him, and freako-extremists like Curtis Yarvin have thrown in the towel….
Vought has done his share of impounding, but he has lost Musk as a frontman, and the DOGE fever broke long ago. For all the shrieking and posing, Musk’s heavy-metal shtick managed to cut from the federal budget only about 5 percent of the $1 trillion in cuts that the big man promised.
Since then, Vought, with his stealthier tactics, has proven unable to fully demolish the rule of law. Of the 470 legal challenges to the Trump administration, a significant number have been filed against DOGE and OMB. Since April, Trump has signed only 66 EOs—and only one so far this month. Project 2025 has achieved fewer than half of its objectives.
As the year has worn on, Trump’s neurotic preoccupations have slowed Vought’s agenda. Having kicked off the shutdown vowing at last to slash jobs with abandon, Vought has gotten bogged down once again by judges who keep halting the layoffs in response to union lawsuits. Vought has also been busy catering to the big-spending president who insists Vought scramble to find funding for his pet projects, including the popular nutrition program WIC, which would hurt Trump politically if it were cut….
But this liberation-by-king keeps not happening in America. Instead, six in 10 Americans blame Republicans for the shutdown, according to a new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Trump’s approval rating remains solidly underwater.
Yarvin, for his part, believes that if democracy were going to yield to Trumpocracy, it would have happened already. He’s now demoralized by the administration’s unwillingness to act more quickly—or violently—to wipe out democracy and the rule of law altogether. Earlier this month, he wrote dejectedly on his blog that the Trump administration is now “failing because it deserves to fail.”
Trump has spent too much energy “getting rid of one liberal judge,” Yarvin complained, when he should have been “getting rid of the whole legal system” and “the whole philosophy of government.” Yarvin is now so panicked about Democratic victory in Congress and the coming liberal vengeance that he has plans to leave the country. The moment for the Dark Enlightenment revolution has passed….
[TW: So is the TPM crew correct, or is Heffernan correct? Are they mutually exclusive? Can they both be correct? I think so — many of the ideologues are no doubt chafing that the USA government is not being destroyed as spectacularly and rapidly as a movie special effects explosion, but other ideologues are planning their steps for after Trump’s term is over.]
“No Kings” Is About More Than Trump
Ken Klippenstein, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2025]
Protesters I talked to expressed opposition to more than just the president and Trumpism, but the entire national security apparatus, including the FBI, ICE, homeland security, the National Guard and the military. Unlike the protests during Trump’s first term, this one doesn’t see a savior in the FBI or even the Democratic Party, instead putting their faith in ordinary people like themselves. Seven million-plus Americans gathered with homemade signs and costumes rejecting the relentless threat mongering about some domestic terrorism “enemy from within.”
Fear, Greed, Civic Virtue and the Fall of the Elites
Josh Marshall, Oct 24, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
Members of America’s founding generation had an ambivalent and evolving understanding of the role and importance of public or civic “virtue.” In the 1760s and 1770s, many of them were caught up in a kind of republican idea world which made this kind of virtue the cornerstone of any republic. The anchor of republican government wasn’t well-designed constitutions or legal accountability. It was the virtue of the free citizenry. By the late 1780s, many were developing a more pragmatic and jaded view of human nature and focused more on creating systems in which greed, the drive for power and other unlovely parts of human nature could be placed into some kind of enduring counterbalance. That was the basis of what became the federal Constitution and the driver especially the two young ideologues, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, both men in their thirties, who pressed the project forward.
I was thinking about this this morning when I saw a post by Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible. She commented on the “utter moral failure of the elite of this country” when referring to a passage from an article by journalist Ed Luce who recounted talking to numerous leaders throughout the American power structure, all of whom said how critical it was for powerful public figures to set an example by speaking out and defying Trump, and none of whom agreed to speak on the record….
The only check-and-balance that actually matters
Garrett Graff, October 22, 2025 [Doomsday Scenario]
The destruction this week of the East Wing of the White House has been uniquely shocking, a physical manifestation of what Donald Trump is doing to our presidency and our country — the excavators and heavy equipment demolishing a 120-year-old literal piece of American history feels in many ways a microcosm of so many Trump controversies. It came out of left field, with no real warning or public debate, no permissions asked or given, to serve Donald Trump’s personal whims and vision of building an insane outsized gilded Kremlin-esque ballroom, was done contrary to the administration’s promises (“It won’t interfere with the current building.”), and involves deep deep corruption, as the construction is being funded outside normal appropriations channels, purportedly by some opaque set of “donations” from some unknown mix of companies and individuals who have been promised who-knows-what in exchange.
It feels personal in some ways, like someone is taking a wrecking ball to America itself. And it feels like another failure of the American system that someone can destroy an entire wing of the White House without notice.
Time and time again this year, I’ve been thinking about the failure of our system of checks and balances.
It turns out, in the end, that there’s only one check and balance that actually matters: Good character. Everything else in a constitutional system follows and relies on that simple foundation.
I’ve spent the last twenty years covering national security and have, over the years, interviewed or met almost every senior decision-maker in the intelligence community and federal law enforcement from the 21st century — FBI, CIA, NSA, and ICE directors, CBP commissioners, the directors of national intelligence, and most of this century’s attorneys general, DHS and defense secretaries and secretaries of state, not to mention dozens of sub-Cabinet officials — the deputies, under secretaries, assistant secretaries, and deputy assistant secretaries who make up the day-to-day decision-making at most levels of government. Many I’ve gotten to know quite well. Some are good friends.
Prior to January 2025, almost to a person I trusted that they took seriously the rule of law and their constitutional obligations under their oaths of office. I didn’t always agree with their decisions and sometimes debated with them the morality underlying their decisions, but never once doubted that there had been a robust discussion and debate about the legal and constitutional obligations behind the scenes before they made their decisions.
Those officials — across administrations and regardless of whether they were Republicans, Democrats, or nonpartisan apolitical civil servants — abided by norms of governing and participated willingly (albeit sometimes grudgingly) in oversight responsibilities by the judicial and legislative branches, understood checks and balances, cared deeply about the appropriations process and whether they were spending money in the manner congress had intended, and jumped through required ethics hoops….
[TW: I refer you again to Malcolm Nance on Stephen Miller, at the top of this wrap.]
