Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 07, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
A Hard Truth About the DC Shooting
Corbin Trent and America’s Undoing [via Naked Capitalism 12-02-2025] Important.
Trump’s Kill List, Brought To You By Obama And Cheney
David Sirota, December 02, 2025 [The Lever]
More than a decade ago, I asked a question that seemed fit for a Black Mirror episode: Who cannot be put on a president’s extrajudicial kill list?
Only that query wasn’t something out of a dystopian sci-fi series. It was in response to some real-world news: In the name of fighting terrorism, President Barack Obama had asserted the power to order executions without a judge, jury, or trial.
At the time, some of us were concerned that the power would be abused both by Obama’s administration (which extrajudicially executed three U.S. citizens) and by future presidents. Those concerns intensified after a federal court rubber-stamped Obama’s kill list, and after Obama’s spokesman brushed off the drone killing of an American teenager by saying he “should have [had] a far more responsible father.”
Fast forward to today, and the fears expressed more than a decade ago seem justified as President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth order extrajudicial murders on the high seas in the name of fighting the drug war (all while Trump pardons a drug trafficker convicted in a court of law).
Fears grow inside military over illegal orders after Hegseth authorized follow-up boat strike
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 12-02-2025]
“They have questions, because this didn’t come up before. This was never an issue throughout both administrations of the global war on terror in Iraq or Afghanistan. No one ever came down and said, ‘You’re immunized for any potential crimes you commit,’” Rosenblatt told The Hill of the increase in calls to his organization, which was established in 2020. He said such “activity was generally very low until three months ago.”
Entire Chain of Command Could Be Held Liable for Killing Boat Strike Survivors, Sources Say
Nick Turse, December 2 2025 [The Intercept]
Why Hegseth’s Alleged War Crime Will Never Be Revealed
Ken Klippenstein L 12-4
It’s Not Only About Venezuela: Trump Intends a Wider Domino Effect
[defenddemocracy.press, Nov 30, 2025]
Team Zeteo, Nov 30, 2025
Dean Obeidallah, Dec 04, 2025
...This latest pardon was of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez—a narco-terrorist who was a business associate of the notorious drug dealer El Chapo. Hernandez served as President of Honduras from 2014 to 2022--but in reality his real business was flooding the United States with cocaine. As the U.S. Department of Justice put it, Hernandez “was at the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.” (Below is from DOJ Press release after the conviction.)
Trump knew that by pardoning Hernandez it would destroy his claim that the reason he’s executing people in small boats off the coast of Venezuela was to protect Americans from drugs….
Strategic Political Economy
Richard Murphy, December 04, 2025 [Funding the Future]
...Rutger Bregman begins by insisting that honest analysis requires starting with the misery. Ours is an age of moral collapse amongst elites — one where power is accumulated not through competence, courage, or service, but through shamelessness….
William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Dec 04, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
...In recent books like Toxic Empathy and The Sin of Empathy, Christian writers who want to cash in on this distorted moral narrative have been laying out carefully-reasoned arguments, much like their forebears who wrote the tomes to justify the slave system that so offended Dickens. These books are not compelling, nor have they sold incredibly well. PRRI’s latest American Values Survey found that 80% of US adults still say empathy is a moral value that underpins a healthy society. But a closer look at the data makes clear that nearly four in ten respondents who believe that America was founded as a “Christian nation” say empathy is a dangerous emotion that undermines the ability to set up a society guided by God’s truth. In the spaces where this distorted moral narrative dominates, the heresy is sounding more and more like truth.
What we are seeing with this attack on empathy is as egregious as Pharaoh and his paid religionists resisting Moses’ ancient call to “Let my people go.” The trouble with every heresy is that it doesn’t need to be compelling to do its lethal work. As it did with Ebeneezer Scrooge, this heresy about empathy can steal our humanity through thousands of daily decisions to turn away from our human family in need. It doesn’t take any big decision to become a Scrooge. Heresy normalizes the broad path that Scripture says leads to destruction - not with any fanfare, but as any highway directs its travelers toward a destination….
Global power shift
The China rare earths problem isn’t as bad as we think. It’s much worse: a look at gallium
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 12-03-2025]
China releases white paper on arms control
ZHAO JIA | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2025-11-28
BREAKING: Putin Signs Visa-Free Decree for 1.4 Billion Chinese Citizens. Effective Immediately.December 1, 2025.The day the post-Western order became irreversible.While Washington debates, Moscow just opened a demographic valve to one-fifth of humanity. No visas. No barriers. Thirty days of unrestricted access for tourism and business until September 2026.The market spoke before the ink dried.Booking surges of 400% within 48 hours. Russian hotel reservations for December up 50% year-over-year. Vladivostok arrivals climbing 37%, with 67,000 passengers flooding through. Fliggy reports flight reservations to Russia have nearly doubled compared to last year.
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Shaun King, Nov 30, 2025
Two men with their hands up, crawling as ordered, are shot dead on video. The minister in charge hugs the killers and hands out promotions.
Starve Them, Shoot Them, Bulldoze Them: CNN Documents Atrocities & Mass Graves in Gaza
Shaun King, Dec 03, 2025
A new CNN investigation shows Palestinians shot while trying to get flour, left to rot, and bulldozed into unmarked graves near an aid crossing.
A French Historian Got Into Gaza. There He Witnessed the IDF Helping to Loot Palestinian Aid Trucks
Shaun King, Dec 01, 2025
In other words, while Israelis went on TV and blamed Hamas for “stealing aid,” Filiu says he watched the Israeli military shoot the people trying to protect the trucks and clear the way for gangs.
[Mediate, via Naked Capitalism 12-03-2025]
Russia / Ukraine
Kushner’s Moscow mission wasn’t just corrupt. It was unconstitutional.
[Popular Information, via Naked Capitalism 12-03-2025]
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has been traveling the world to participate in high-stakes foreign policy negotiations on behalf of the president. On Tuesday, Kushner traveled to Moscow and sat across the table from Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine. The entire United States delegation consisted only of Kushner and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. Kushner and Witkoff were joined at the table by an interpreter….
Kushner is engaged in activities that can only be conducted by government officials. The Logan Act bars private citizens from engaging in negotiations with foreign governments without authorization. Kushner is acting in an authorized capacity, under Trump’s direction, and that creates a host of legal issues.
As a de facto SGE with substantial authority, the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits Kushner from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Since leaving the White House in 2021, Kushner has raised at least $4.8 billion for Affinity Partners, his private equity firm. Nearly 99% of Affinity Partners’ funding comes from foreign sources. The largest investment, $2 billion, came from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF)….
Kushner is continuing to collect these fees as he serves in a top foreign policy role for the Trump administration. This is precisely the kind of behavior the Foreign Emoluments Clause was designed to prevent….
Oligarchy
The billionaire-backed techno-utopia at the heart of Trump’s controversial pardon
[Oligarch Watch, via Naked Capitalism 12-05-2025]
Felonomics
Forget Whether Or Not DOGE Exists: Will Anyone Be Held Accountable For 600,000 Deaths?
Mike Masnick, Dec 3rd 2025 [TechDirt, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2025]
...The “headline” from a recent Reuters piece is the claim that DOGE has been disbanded eight months before its scheduled demise. Except that appears not to be true. The White House later disputed this story….
“DOGE” took over a non-temporary organization: the previously highly effective US Digital Services group, and like a parasite, took over its host by expelling all of those who did good work. It will remain.
And, as Wired rightly notes, the DOGE bros are now fully embedded throughout the federal government.
“That’s absolutely false,” one USDA source says of reporting that DOGE has disbanded. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks.”
Wired’s report has details on a bunch of DOGE bros with little-to-no relevant experience who are continuing the DOGE grift while employed throughout the federal government, detailing the new (and constantly changing) set of job titles of a bunch of the DOGE crew, almost all of which they seem wholly unqualified for….
The question of whether or not DOGE still exists completely misses the point. This team of overconfident know-nothings created real damage not just to the institution of the federal government, but to many essential projects around the globe. And they will never, ever, try to take responsibility for their ignorant smashing of the system….
This answer deserves calling out specifically what Musk is doing here: he’s dismissing programs that distribute HIV medications, prevent malaria deaths, and provide tuberculosis treatment as if they were all hypothetical panda scams. These aren’t abstract NGOs of questionable provenance. These are well-established US government programs, that were run through USAID, with decades of documented outcomes, rigorous monitoring, and yes, those Inspectors General that Trump systematically fired to clear the way for DOGE’s rampage.
Musk’s condescending little fable about demanding photos of pandas would be merely insufferable if he were actually talking about pandas. But he’s not. He’s talking about programs where we don’t need to guess whether they work—we have the data. We know how many people received antiretroviral therapy. We know how many children were vaccinated. We know the mortality rates before and after these interventions. The “picture of the panda,” in this case, is six hundred thousand excess deaths since these programs were gutted. There’s your fucking picture, Elon….
The real tragedy here is that Elon Musk gets to sit in a podcast studio and spin cute parables about imaginary panda fraud while actual children die from diseases we know how to prevent. The obscenity of comparing tuberculosis programs and HIV treatment to a hypothetical panda scam is breathtaking, even if it is totally predictable. This is what happens when you let tech billionaires play government efficiency expert: they’re perfectly comfortable with mass death as long as they can frame it as fighting “waste.” Six hundred thousand people—two-thirds of them children—aren’t hypothetical. They’re not pandas. They’re dead.
So no, the question isn’t whether DOGE “still exists” as an organizational chart entry. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for six hundred thousand deaths and the systematic dismantling of programs that took decades to build….
Inside the DOGE Succession Drama Elon Musk Left Behind: What really happened when he logged out of Washington.
[Politico, via The Big Picture, November 30, 2025]
More chaos at FEMA as agency “re-suspends” employees it just reinstated last week
[Balanced Weather, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2025]
Poor Hiring Data Points to US Economic Weakness
Agence France-Presse, Dec. 3, 2025 [via IndustryWeek]
While medium and large establishments added jobs last month, small establishments lost 120,000 jobs, according to ADP.
More Americans are getting their power shut off, as unpaid bills pile up
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture, November 30, 2025]
Nearly 1 in 20 households, or about 14 million Americans, were so behind on utility debt that it was reported to collections agencies or in arrears as of June, according to an analysis by the Century Foundation and Protect Borrowers, a nonprofit that advocates for consumers. Meanwhile, the average overdue balance of $789 has risen 32 percent since 2022.
Trump DOJ Sides With Roundup Manufacturer Over Cancer Victims in Supreme Court Case
Stephen Prager, December 02, 2025 [CommonDreams]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
The Bank of England is warning a financial crash is coming
Richard Murphy, December 06, 2025 [Funding the Future]
The Bank of England has issued a stark new Financial Stability Report — and beneath the cautious language lies a clear message: the global risk environment has deteriorated sharply. From AI bubble valuations to fragile shadow banking systems, from overstretched credit markets to potential contagion across sovereign debt, a systemic crisis now looks more like “when” than “if”.
In this video, I explain what the Bank is really saying, why markets are repeating 2008 mistakes, and why the UK is deeply exposed.
Investigation Reveals How Amazon Is Fleecing Public Schools With ‘Algorithm-Driven Pricing’
Jake Johnson, December 05, 2025 [CommonDreams]
A detailed investigation released Thursday reveals that the e-commerce behemoth Amazon is using its market dominance and political influence to gain a foothold in local governments’ purchasing systems, locking school districts into contracts that let the corporation drive up prices for pens, sticky notes, and other basic supplies.
The new report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), titled Turning Public Money Into Amazon’s Profits: The Hidden Cost of Ceding Government Procurement to a Monopoly Gatekeeper, is based on purchasing records from nearly 130 cities representing more than 50 million Americans.
ILSR found that “cities, counties, and school districts spent $2.2 billion with Amazon in 2023—a nearly fourfold increase since 2016.”
“Through its Amazon Business platform, the company has maneuvered to become the default source for office products, classroom materials, cleaning supplies, and other routine goods,” the report states. “Today, it is embedded in most local governments, making inroads into state agencies, and dominating a new program designed to reshape how federal agencies buy commercial products.”
Unlike the fixed pricing that’s typical for government contracts, the agreements that Amazon has secured with local governments across the US entail “algorithm-driven pricing” to “covertly raise prices and inflate costs for governments.”
“The result is dramatic price variation: One city bought a 12-pack of Sharpie markers for $8.99, while a nearby school district paid $28.63 for the identical pack that same day,” ILSR said. “Our data contain thousands of similar examples, with some agencies paying double or even triple what others paid for the same items.”
Health care crisis
Veronica Riccobene, Dec 4, 2025 [Lever Daily]
Nursing home and hospital industry groups are celebrating after the Trump administration revoked a rule establishing minimum staff requirements at Medicare- and Medicaid-certified long-term care facilities. Blaming a “disproportionate burden” placed on nursing homes, regulators revoked the Biden-era provision after powerful industry groups fought tooth and nail against it, claiming that staff minimums would force facilities to close and jeopardize patients’ access to care.
- The long-term care industry and its lobbyists have cited financial struggles to justify chronic understaffing, but research shows they’re concealing billions in hidden profits made through rabid corporatization.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-02-2025]
Just 28 days without parabens and phthalates turned off breast-cancer-linked activity in healthy breast cells. Scientists tracked women who had been using everyday personal-care products — the usual shampoos, body washes, moisturisers, makeup — the kinds that often contain parabens and phthalates. These chemicals can act like weak estrogens in the body, and too much estrogen signalling has long been connected to increased breast cancer risk.
Dairkee SH, Moore DH, Luciani MG, Anderle N, Gerona R, Ky K, Torres SM, Marshall PV, Goodson Iii WH. 2023 May. Chemosphere. 322:138014. doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2023.138014. Epub 2023 Feb 4. PMID: 36746253.
[TW: Trump regime has defunded almost all this kind of research.]
Predatory finance
Take-Down of the Take-Down: The Bankers are Wrong About Interest Rate Caps
Brian Shearer, Dec 04, 2025 [Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator]
Recently the American Bankers’ Association published a purported take-down piece attacking a report I authored in September showing that the bipartisan proposal to cap credit card rates at 10% would save billions of dollars without much downside. There are sleights of hand in this piece that are pretty typical of the banking industry lobbyists’ analysis on rate caps, which they claim are always a bad idea. It followed the four basic tactics in the corporate lobby playbook:
Claim business is too complicated for policymakers to understand, with the goal of making them nervous that they might accidentally break something;
Make it sound like policy proposals supported by long (in this case millennia old) historical precedent are actually radical departures from the norm;
Cite to unrelated studies or data to make sweeping conclusions (and what do you know, it happens to support their clients’ cash cows); and
Use generic Econ 101 principles when they simply don’t apply
Instead of just letting this go as more lobbyist noise, I decided to go through it to debunk the banking lobby’s points paragraph-by-paragraph….
Breaking Burry: Totally perverse unnatural massive market distortions: 1, Michael Burry: 0.
[QRT’s Fringe Finance, via The Big Picture, November 29, 2025]
One major headline today is that Michael Burry, of The Big Short fame, is shuttering his fund, Scion Capital. In his letter calling it quits, he wrote: “Sometimes, we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.” I’ve been around markets long enough to believe that short sellers are generally more objectively right than most investors.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Palantir CEO Says Making War Crimes Constitutional Would Be Good for Business
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2025]
The Construction Industry’s Invisible Villains
DW Gibson, December 1, 2025 [The New Republic]
They’re called labor brokers. They enable contractors to cheat vulnerable workers. And they’re almost impossible to catch. Will anyone do anything to stop them?
Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna’s months-long campaign to outmaneuver the White House on the Epstein files started with a text. Inside the effort to force Trump’s hand on Epstein.
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture, November 28, 2025]
Congress’ Leaders Have A Capital Gains Problem
Veronica Riccobene, Dec 4, 2025 [The Lever]
Congressional leaders perform 47 percent better than their peers on the stock market, thanks to their increased legislative influence and access to nonpublic information.
Restoring balance to the economy
Brock Hrehor, December 06, 2025 [The Lever]
Starbucks Shells Out
In what officials are calling the largest worker protection settlement in New York City’s history, New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection ordered Starbucks to pay roughly $35 million to more than 15,000 workers for allegedly denying them stable schedules and arbitrarily cutting their hours.
The department began investigating the coffee chain in 2022 after receiving dozens of worker complaints. The agency’s officials reportedly documented more than half a million violations of New York’s Fair Workweek Law, which requires fast food employers to give workers regular schedules that stay the same week to week.
Many Starbucks employees could now receive thousands of dollars under the agreement, which provides $50 for each week they worked from July 2021 through July 2024….
Guaranteed Income, Forever!
Last week, the Cook County Board of Commissioners in Illinois unanimously approved a permanent basic income program. The move will provide $500 a month to thousands of low-income households, including those in Chicago, the largest city in the Midwest and the third largest in the country.
The county has allocated $7.5 million to the program for 2026, which will come from the county’s “equity fund.” The county will also be able to utilize reserve federal pandemic funds to help finance the program.
The program is an extension of the Cook County Promise Guaranteed Pilot program, which provided $500 in monthly cash payments to 3,250 low- and middle-income households in Cook County for two years. Participants were selected by lottery, and the payments began in December 2022 and continued through December 2024.
Exit surveys show that those funds went toward basic necessities, especially food, rent, utilities, and transportation. Seventy-five percent of residents reported feeling more financially secure thanks to the program, and 94 percent used program funds to help manage a financial emergency….
A Radical Solution To Housing Costs
In an effort to counter rising rents and a growing affordability crisis, Santa Fe, New Mexico, just made history by enacting a first-of-its-kind ordinance that pegs wages to housing costs. Proponents say it could assist working people who have increasingly been squeezed by the rising cost of living in the small, high-desert city.
“The purpose is to make a serious difference in assuring that people who work here can live here,” said Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber. “Santa Fe’s history and culture is really reflected in the diversity of our people. It’s that diversity that we’re trying to preserve.”
Under the new plan, the city’s hourly minimum wage will increase from $15 to $17.50 in 2027. After that, the city will use a new formula to calculate annual increases based on the Consumer Price Index, which measures inflation as experienced by everyday consumers, and fair market rent data….
New York Now Requires Retailers To Tell You When AI Sets Your Price
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-02-2025]
Can New York City Break Wall Street’s Grip?
Ellen Brown, Dec 3, 2025 [Web of Debt, via L A Progressive]
As Albany resists new taxes, NYC’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, turns to public banking as the path to funding housing, transit, and climate resilience without triggering capital flight….
How North Dakota Escaped the Shutdown
This difference has become particularly evident during the 2025 federal government shut down. While other states suffered SNAP disruptions and budget shortfalls, North Dakota leveraged BND [state owned Bank of North Dakota] funds without waiting for Washington:
- No state employees were furloughed, despite federal funding interruptions.
- The BND launched the Furloughed Federal Employee Relief Program, issuing nearly $1 million in emergency loans to federal workers, including those at Minot and Grand Forks Air Force bases.
- It rolled out a $1.5 million food assistance package to offset SNAP disruptions.
- It developed a debt refinancing program for farmers, responding to high interest rates, low commodity prices, and inflation.
BND’s 2024 Performance: A Model for New York City
According to its latest annual report, the BND has over $10.8 billion in assets and more than $200 million in net income, much of it reinvested in agriculture, education, and sustainable development. More than $1 billion was transferred to the state’s general fund and special programs through 2018, most of it in the previous decade. That is a substantial sum for a state with a population that is only about one-tenth that of New York City (780,000 versus 8.3 million). The BND keeps interest payments in-state, funds infrastructure and cushions shocks that would seriously impair other states’ budgets. In October 2024, Truth in Accounting’s annual Financial State of the States report rated North Dakota #1 in fiscal health, with a budget surplus per taxpayer of $55,600….
[In New York City] pension funds alone are a vast reservoir of potential capital — managing nearly $295 billion across five systems as of mid-2025. Scott Baker, Economics Editor at OpEdNews and New York State Coordinator for the Public Banking Institute, observes in a November 2025 article that current pension investments are seriously underperforming after fees. Former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer produced a report showing that for the 10-year pension period ending in 2015, the New York City pension funds generated zero ROI (return on investment) when he included $2.5 billion in management fees.
In 2024, the city contributed $9.6 billion to the funds, while employees contributed about $2.5 billion. Offset by $2.5 billion in management fees, the total contribution for investment was $9.6 billion, the sum coming from the city….
The missing piece in the affordability debate: Higher paychecks
Heidi Shierholz, December 1, 2025 [Economic Policy Institute]
...Today’s affordability debate, however, focuses almost entirely on prices, as if the only way to make life affordable is to make things cheaper. But that approach misses the bigger picture. Affordability depends on both prices and wages. The roots of today’s affordability crisis actually lie not in recent price spikes, but in the long-term suppression of workers’ pay.
For more than four decades, employers have been actively suppressing the wages of working people, so that corporate managers and owners can claim an ever-larger share of the income generated by what workers produce. Government policies facilitated these efforts….
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
Armed Madhouse – How DARPA Lost Its Mojo
Haig Hovaness, December 2, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Why won’t so much of the left believe in the sovereign power to make money?
Richard Murphy, December 01, [Funding the Future]
There are days when I genuinely wonder what parts of the left think the state is for.
The capacity to create money is the most fundamental power any modern government possesses. It is the basis of its authority. But most importantly, money creation is how the resources to pay for the essential fabric of society, whether they be health, education, care, energy, infrastructure, or more, are mobilised. It is the very foundation of democratic economic choice.
And yet, as is apparent from debate here, swathes of the political left refuse to acknowledge this. They deny the reality that the UK government, like every government with its own central bank and free-floating currency, spends by creating new money, and always has. They cling to the fiction that the state must first tax or borrow before it can act.
Why? Let me suggest the reasons.
First, many on the supposed left have internalised neoliberal ideology. They have swallowed whole the myths crafted to constrain democracy: that governments “must live within their means”, that “the markets” decide what is possible, and that public purpose must bend to private confidence. They confuse households, who really do have financial constraints, with the state, which has the legal authority to create the currency we all rely upon.
Second, some on the left reduce everything to class struggle alone. Power, they say, is all that matters. Understanding the plumbing of money is seen as technocratic, and technocracy is the enemy. The irony, of course, is that they grant the finance sector unchallenged power precisely because they won't understand how the system works.
Third, scarcity suits their politics. When money is claimed to be scarce, the left can pose as noble defenders of whatever is available.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2025]
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 12-05-2025]
Journalists win a key battle over AI in the newsroom
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2025]
Unpacking the Mechanics of Conduit Debt Financing: Understanding the pass-through financing model behind the AI infrastructure boom.
[This Is Not Investment Advice, via The Big Picture, December 01, 2025]
Collapse of independent news media
The Washington Post Wants to Protect Its Owner From a Wealth Tax
Bob Lord, Dec 03, 2025 [Zeteo]
The editorial board at Jeff Bezos’s newspaper railed against a wealth tax without noting the Amazon founder stands to benefit from its tax policy prescriptions.
Jeff Bezos’s Very Own Editorial Page
Harold Meyerson, December 4, 2025 [The American Prospect]
The Washington Post’s new editorialists have turned the page over to screeds defending not just laissez-faire capitalism but Bezos himself.
Climate and environmental crises
‘Renewable’ No More: The Trump Administration Renames the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Dan Gearino, December 2, 2025 [Clean Power Roundup]
A key driver of U.S. renewable energy research is now called the National Laboratory of the Rockies.
Democrats' political malpractice
Les Leopold, Dec 04, 2025
...The vast majority of Democratic politicians, consultants, operatives, and funders do not see a conflict between capital and labor, between their wealthy corporate donors and working people, or between their own wealth and growing inequality. In their ideological universe there is no class conflict. We’re all in this together, no matter what our wealth, our education, or our level of job insecurity. Runaway inequality may be a concern, but it is not viewed as an existential problem that is ripping our country apart.
Instead, the Democrats who control the party support policies that avoid progressive economic populism. They’re not interested in government forcing corporations to stop needless mass layoffs, raising the minimum wage, breaking up monopolies, facilitating unionization, and guaranteeing jobs for all. These policies are threats to corporate interests and therefore discouraged, no matter what public opinion data shows. You don’t bite the hands that feed your candidacy and, by the way, may provide highly paid jobs for you, your family, and your staff once you leave office.
But none of this is viewed as corruption or a betrayal of the public’s trust. Party leaders really believe that centrist policies will grow the pie for everyone. They cherish the “opportunity society” that gives everyone a fair chance at the American dream. They believe that the capitalist drive for wealth, free of burdensome government controls, will produce the good jobs of the future, and that effective educational policies will prepare working people for them—or at least give their children a shot at success. It’s kumbaya economics, unhinged from recent history and future progressive goals.
We’ve heard all this for more than a generation. This was the justification for deregulating Wall Street: the justification for free trade deals that wiped out millions of industrial jobs; the justification for permitting corporations to lay off workers to pay for leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks while avoiding taxes; and the justification for public-private partnerships that enriched the private partners at taxpayer expense.
Nearly all the members of the Democratic Party establishment, as Bernie so often points out, are wealthy and really have no clue about what working people are experiencing...
The New Jersey senator is opposing his own party’s efforts to defang anti-corruption measures. In an interview, he depicted the fight as critical to regaining public trust.“It’s not comfortable for me to go to the state capitol and have arguments with members of my own political party,” Sen. Kim said in an interview with the Prospect. His adversaries at the hearing made sure of that discomfort. Kim showed up to speak early, trying to fit in testimony before catching a train to Washington for votes Monday night. But the committee made him wait for over five hours, ignoring other speakers who wanted to cede their time to him. One of the few proponents testifying on the bill got 40 minutes to state his views; Kim got three minutes.
When he finally took to the microphone to an ovation, he got quickly to the point: “We live in the time of the greatest amount of distrust in politics in modern American history. And the people want a politics that isn’t some exclusive club for the well-off and the well connected.” How could Democrats credibly fight corruption in Washington if they are simultaneously inviting corruption in Trenton, Kim insisted.
Sen. Beach interrupted. “You have three minutes, please conclude.”
“Sir, I have been here for five and a half hours …” Kim interjected.
“So what?” Beach replied. “Why do you think you’re special? You’re not.” He proceeded to heckle Kim about cherry-picked votes for Trump’s nominees. By the end, every Democrat on the committee supported the bill.
No, Progressives Don’t Want “Purity.” They Just Want Some Courage.
Virginia Heffernan, December 5, 2025 [The New Republic]
When left-leaning Democrats complain about corporate influence, it’s not a “purity test.” It’s a demand for a better politics….
And if the Democratic leadership doesn’t want to watch satire on TikTok to understand their own party, they can at least look at the polls. According to Gallup in September, fully 66 percent of Democrats view socialism, by that name, favorably. Bullishness on socialism is up a whopping 16 points since 2010, Obama’s heyday.
At the same time, per the Gallup poll, only 17 percent of Democrats view big business favorably, while—and this is especially surprising—a mere 36 percent of independents do. Anti-monopoly views are clearly no longer the province only of sullen Occupy alumni. Look at those numbers. The vast majority of the gettable electorate can now be spooked by even a hint that the Democratic Party is ignoring the people in favor of rich or ideological donors, corporate interests, Black Rock, Blackstone, and billionaire PACs….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Trump 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS)
Heather Cox Richardson, December 5, 2025 [Letters from an American]
Jim Stewartson, Dec 05, 2025 [MindWar]
Your Private Data Is Building Trump’s Voter Purge Machine
Abby Vesoulis and Ari Berman, December 5, 2025 [Mother Jones]
... an escalation of a yearslong coordinated effort by conservatives to obtain voter roll data from numerous states, compare it to incomplete datasets they’d found on the commercial market, then attest that mismatches between the two are clear evidence of people illegally voting. The apparent goal: buttressing decadeslong, though still unproven, claims of rampant voter fraud and removing allegedly ineligible voters from the rolls, with potentially dire consequences for future elections.
In the past, these sorts of legal gambits came from right-wing groups like the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank co-founded by Brooke Rollins, now the secretary of agriculture; the Dhillon Law Group, whose founder, Harmeet Dhillon, is now the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the DOJ; and the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative legal group whose former counsel, Maureen Riordan, now leads the DOJ’s voting section. Riordan and Dhillon remain in the same line of business, citing familiar statutes in their barrage of new lawsuits against state election officials like Bellows; the key difference now is that they are promoting their routinely debunked theories from within the US government. Specifically, from the highest law enforcement agency in the country….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
A 2-1 Panel of the D.C. Circuit Makes the Presidency More Muscular
Joyce Vance, Dec 05, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
This morning, a panel of the D.C. Circuit that split 2-1 ruled that presidents can remove members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) or Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) despite the existence of laws that are intended to shield them from removal without cause. That’s precisely what Donald Trump did. This opinion, with Judges Neomi Rao and Gregory Katsas, both Trump appointees, in the majority, blesses it. This case is too important to get lost in the crush of other news….
Justice Kagan’s Dissent to the Supreme Court’s Approval of Texas Gerrymandering
GREG ABBOTT, ET AL. v. LEAGUE OF UNITED LATINAMERICAN CITIZENS, ET AL.ON APPLICATION FOR STAY [December 4, 2025]
Justice Kagan’s dissent begins on page 4.
