Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 21, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Harold Meyerson, December 03, 2025 [The American Prospect]
...As Emma Janssen has reported in these pages, marketers are going where the money is, like bank robber Willie Sutton. First-class and business-seat travel on the airlines is booming, so much so that seating arrangements on Delta and United are being reconfigured to create more room for the affluent, while coach seats are going unfilled and “discount” airlines struggle. Revenues are up 3 percent this year at the Ritz-Carltons, the Four Seasons, and other luxury hotels, yet down by 3 percent at economy hotels. And when it comes to life’s biggest purchase—a home—the median age of first-time buyers reached 40 this year, an all-time high according to the National Association of Realtors….
Life in the nonaffluent nation is getting harder. According to a Brookings Institution analysis from last year, 43 percent of American families don’t earn enough to pay for housing, food, health care, child care, and transportation; every week, they must juggle which to pay and which not to pay. Among Black and Latino families, those figures rise to 59 percent and 66 percent, respectively….
What would America look like if the gap between worker pay and productivity hadn’t opened? A RAND Corporation study from earlier this year found that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners received about 67 percent of all taxable income in 1975. In 2019, the last year for which this data was available, they received 46.8 percent. Had that bottom 90 percent continued during the past half-century to make the same share of the national income they’d had in 1975, RAND calculates that by 2023 they would have made an additional $79 trillion. Just in the year 2023, they would have made an additional $3.9 trillion. As the size of the bottom 90 percent of the U.S. workforce is roughly 140 million people, that means that the average earner would have made about $28,000 more in 2023 than they actually did.
Where have all those missing $28,000 paychecks gone? Well, our nation was home to 1,135 billionaires this year, whose aggregate net worth in 2024 came to a cozy $5.7 trillion. That’s $1.8 trillion more than what it would take to cut 140 million $28,000 paychecks.…
[TW: Meyerson then summarizes the responsibility of Ronald Reagan for this economic devastation, enumerates the specific policy changes Reagan implemented, and seven policy changes needed to reverse this descent and begin to rebuild the US economy and restore general widely shared prosperity.]
The Housing Crisis Is A Democracy Crisis
Evelyn Quartz, Dec 16, 2025 [The Lever]
...French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, among the young nation’s first chroniclers, came to believe that Americans’ propensity to form civic associations created the lasting bonds that were the country’s real defense against tyranny. Without communal ties and shared responsibilities, Tocqueville feared individuals would fall prey to paternalistic “soft despotism,” in which top-down state administration replaces self-government.
In such an arrangement, he wrote, “Each [citizen], living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest… he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.”
In 2025, both Jefferson’s and Tocqueville’s warnings could not be more relevant. An all-powerful corporate state has robbed ordinary citizens of the ability to put down roots. Without a stable, affordable place to live, civic associations, and the bulwark they provide against tyranny, wither away. The housing crisis is thus a democracy crisis….
America’s housing stock — once supported by strong public initiatives like the New Deal housing programs — was steadily financialized with the help of policymakers. Under the rhetoric of “individual choice” and the rise of neoliberal economics, public housing programs increasingly subsidized the private market.
The clearest example of this is the federal Section 8 voucher program, launched in 1974. The program required qualifying tenants to redeem affordable-housing vouchers in the private housing market. This allowed policymakers to back away from bold investments in public housing and hand responsibility instead to private actors.
In 2008, the neoliberal outsourcing of the housing market to Wall Street imploded the global financial system. As a result, millions of Americans lost their homes and were driven deeper into financial instability, as banks and private equity firms tightened their control over American life.
President Barack Obama inherited a collapsing economy, much as Roosevelt had seven decades prior. But instead of rescuing the common citizen — a mission central to Roosevelt’s response — Obama bailed out banking executives while offering struggling homeowners technocratic private-sector solutions like the Home Affordable Modification Program, which sought to modify loans rather than provide direct relief.
As a result, private equity giants subsequently cashed in on the financial crisis by buying up hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes to rent out for profit.
Now, instead of helping more people become rooted in their communities, housing is dominated by rentier capitalism: a system in which homes are treated not as places to own, nor to participate in democratic life, but as financial assets. Today, a handful of consolidated private landlords dominate the rental market. The largest, Greystar Real Estate Partners, manages nearly a million rental units in the United States and was sued by the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year for allegedly burdening tenants with hidden junk fees…
A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance
Cory Doctorow, 18 Dec 2025 [Pluralistic]
How Capitalism Replaced America
[Murtaza Hussain, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-2025]
Why economic policy matters for the Greens
Richard Murphy, December 15, 2025 [Funding the Future]
... This results, first, in their inability to explain the role of money, tax, borrowing, and the whole fiscal management cycle that lies at the core of macroeconomics, and second, in their failure to confront how economic power is exercised in modern economies, which confrontation is inevitably required to deliver the green transition we need....
The green transition, on which I have campaigned for a long time, will not be delivered by good intentions, ethical markets, or better pricing signals alone. It will only be delivered when political movements are willing to challenge the power of finance and markets directly, together with the flawed ideas on which their supposed power is based. And that cannot be done without understanding the role of money creation and the state's capacity to use it for public purposes.
The problem is not that the Greens care too little about economics. It is that too many of them might accept an economic framing that treats markets as the ultimate arbiters of what is possible. Within that potential framing, government is cast as financially constrained, dependent on private capital, and permanently at risk of market punishment. As a result, green ambition could be trimmed to what markets will tolerate, not what climate science demands, and that is how radicalism is quietly neutralised, as I fear might be possible if those whom I am challenging get their way.
If you accept that the state must first persuade or appease financial markets before it can act, then the green transition is already compromised. Large-scale public investment becomes conditional. Industrial strategy becomes hesitant. Public ownership becomes politically “difficult”. And climate action is reduced to nudging private behaviour rather than reshaping the economy….
Markets do not lead transitions that undermine their own profitability. They resist them. That resistance can only be overcome by a state willing to act decisively: investing directly, owning strategically, regulating firmly, and accepting that public purpose must take precedence over private return. But that requires abandoning the idea that the state must ask permission from capital before it acts….
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
White House Refuses to Rule Out Summary Executions of People on Its Secret Domestic Terrorist List
Nick Turse, December 12 2025 [The Intercept]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.
Letters from an American, December 16, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Dec 17, 2025
… at 6:46 this evening, [Trump] posted on social media: “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Unchecked Waters: The Constitutional Crisis of Trump’s Venezuela Oil Blockade
Angel Gomez, Dec 20, 2025 [CommonDreams]
‘Absolute Dereliction of Duty’: House Republicans Kill Venezuela War Powers Resolutions
Brett Wilkins, Dec 17, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State
Greg Sargent, December 15, 2025 [The New Republic]
Stephen Miller’s ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903. That’s when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser disembarked at Ellis Island after leaving behind his hometown in Antopol, a small town in the part of the czarist Russian empire that is now Belarus. Wolf Laib, who was fleeing a life marked by anti-Jewish pogroms and forced conscription, quickly set about trying to raise more money to bring over relatives.
“Wolf Laib found work in New York City peddling bananas and other fruit on street corners, and began sending small sums of money back to the family,” reads an unpublished book about the family that one of Stephen Miller’s relatives shared with The New Republic. The book—which tells the story of some of Miller’s ancestors’ immigration to the United States and their subsequent thriving here—was written by Miller’s grandmother, Ruth Glosser. Now that Miller has accumulated such extraordinary power over the future of our immigration system, it’s worth turning to this remarkable document, which we’re making available online for the first time….
“There is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World,” declared one congressman not long after. As historian Gary Gerstle, author of the great book American Crucible, noted in an email to me, many nativists at the time lamented the “civilizational vulnerability” of the United States, believing that “white, Christian, and western European culture” stretching back to “ancient Greece and Rome” represented the “summit of human achievement” and the core of American civilization. This was under dire threat from “groups outside that culture” who were “unassimilable, with Jewish ranks full of Bolsheviks and Italian ranks full of anarchists.”
More than a century later, those diatribes about people like Miller’s ancestors are very similar to claims Miller makes today about the threat to “civilization” supposedly posed by those emigrating from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere….
...in a series of tweets, interviews in right-wing media, and statements made elsewhere, Miller has outlined something more comprehensive and sinister—an elaborate worldview that has escaped notice in the mainstream media. It centers immigrants as a threat to “civilization” in terms that echo the rhetoric of those determined to exclude people like his ancestors….
“The basic idea is that if you don’t come from a cultural background that comes from a traditional Western perspective—ideally Anglo-Saxon—then you aren’t equipped for and properly formed for freedom,” Laura K. Field, author of Furious Minds, a great new book about the intellectual roots of MAGA, told me. In this worldview, Field continued, without that shared philosophical, cultural, and ancestral foundation, “civilization is impossible.”….
ICE Detention Deadlier Under Trump 2.0
Farrah Hassen, Dec 13, 2025 [LA Progressive]
At least 25 people have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office, making 2025 the deadliest year for people in ICE custody since 2004.
Donald Trump files $10bn lawsuit against the BBC
[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism 12-16-2025]
Letters from an American, December 16, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Dec 17, 2025
The Department of Justice today argued in court that Trump’s ballroom project must go forward for reasons of national security despite the lawsuit filed on Friday. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop the project from going forward without legally required reviews and public input. Secret Service deputy director Matthew Quinn told the court that when Trump tore down the East Wing in October, he destroyed the security infrastructure under the building. Now, he said, “any pause in construction, even temporarily, would…hamper the Secret Service’s ability to meet its statutory obligations and protective mission.”
[TW: If I were in Congress, I would want to know if the Trump regime took measures to assure the continuity of military command and control, especially over US nuclear forces, by creating or moving that “security infrastructure” elsewhere. If not, was there any assessment of whether command and control would be degraded or hampered? What exactly was that “security infrastructure” ? Was it the White House situation room? Was there any assessment at all of how command and control would be affected by relocating “security infrastructure” elsewhere? What measures were taken to ensure continuity while that “security infrastructure” was being relocated? Or did Trump proceed to demolish the East Wing and the “security infrastructure” underneath it, heedless of the consequences?]
Drop Site Daily: December 17, 2025
Adelson consults Dershowitz about a third Trump term: Billionaire Trump donor Miriam Adelson said she spoke with attorney Alan Dershowitz in Israel about the legality of President Donald Trump serving a third four-year term. “We can do it… think about it. I will give you another $250 million,” Adelson said to an audience at the White House.
Trump Announces Full Naval Blockade of Venezuela’s “Sanctioned” Oil Exports
[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
This Week in Democracy – Week 48: From Swastikas to Sexual Predators
[Zeteo, Dec 20, 2025]
- Trump signed an executive order designating fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. The order directs the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute groups that are trafficking fentanyl. It also orders the Defense Department to determine if military resources are needed to help the DOJ conduct federal law enforcement to combat the threat of fentanyl.
Trump’s Colonized Mind: The Cognitive Dysfunction Destabilizing the Planet
Jim Stewartson, Dec 16, 2025 [MindWar]
The neurological, psychological, and political breakdown of the American president—and the people taking full advantage of it.
[Vanity Fair, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-2025]
Susie Wiles Talks Epstein Files, Pete Hegseth’s War Tactics, Retribution, and More (Part 2 of 2)
Vanity Fair, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-2025]
Impeachment, 25th Amendment, Or Fire The Help — Parsing Vanity Fair's crazy Susie Wiles profile
Brian Beutler, Dec 17, 2025 [Off Message]
Letters from an American, December 17, 2025
Heather Cox Richardson, Dec 18, 2025
[TW: a summary of the past week of Trump’s and (anti)Republicans’ transgressions, worth reading in full.]
Meryl Kornfield and Hannah Natanson, December 17, 2025 [Washington Post, via Letters from an American, December 17, 2025]
This Week in Democracy – Week 48: From Swastikas to Sexual Predators
[Zeteo, Dec 20, 2025]
- Reuters reported that over the past eight weeks, the DC US Attorney’s office, led by Jeanine Pirro, has seen a 21% dismissal rate of criminal complaints, compared to a 0.5% dismissal rate over the last 10 years.
Global power shift
Edward Ongweso Jr. [via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2025]
In Le Monde Diplomatique, Evgenvy Morozov reframes “sovereign AI” offerings as “the final act of a three-act play” of US imperial management, featuring an evolution from “dollar diplomacy” to “oil diplomacy” to “compute diplomacy” centered around deploying our state apparatus and capital to preserve global hegemony:
”Act I opened in the early 20th century, when the US promoted dollar diplomacy to Latin American governments as a path to political stability through economic prosperity and sound finance; Theodore Roosevelt used this as a pretext to gain control of the Dominican Republic’s customs collection. By 1912 Brown Brothers bank controlled Nicaragua’s customs collection through loan receivership. The majority of the revenue was collected in New York. When Nicaraguans objected, US marines occupied Nicaragua for 21 years (1912-33), with peak deployment reaching nearly 4,000 troops. In 1922 The Nation called it the ‘Republic of Brown Brothers’.
“Act II began in 1974. Nixon had killed the gold standard and the dollar was wobbling. Kissinger flew to Riyadh with an offer: charge whatever price you like for oil, as long as it’s in dollars, and invest your profits in US Treasury bonds – a deal backed by implicit security guarantees and the unmistakable threat that deviation would be treated as hostile to US strategic interests. And between 1974 and 1981, a substantial part of OPEC’s approximately $450bn in accumulated surpluses was reinvested in US Treasuries. No marines required; the threat of capital exile was enough.
“Act III is still being written, but the scale of operations exceeds everything we have seen so far. The commodity isn’t bananas or barrels but the raw processing power that lets machines calculate faster than central banks can print money.”
….
As Larson puts it, “India long been seen as the world’s back office: a land of coders, clerks, and call centers” but today it is also home to 1,600 Global Capability Centers (GCCs) which employ 1.66 million professionals involved in “software engineering, data analytics, AI research, cybersecurity, and even core product development.” These GCCs are key to the West’s “digital ambitions at scale and at lower cost” and are a rapidly growing part of India’s services exports (well over a third)….
Abdullah Alzabin’s recent essay, PetroCompute, provides the blueprint for how the G.C.C. plans to execute a maneuver that essentially swapping potential energy (oil) for digital work (inference)….
Another key pillar proves to be how the United States realizes extraterritorial control through legal mechanisms:
The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act, which sets up a legal framework for U.S. access of data stored overseas as well as foreign access to data held by U.S. firms.
The Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR), an export control rule that allows the U.S. to prohibit the sale of products made with American tech, even if made in a foreign country. U.S. sovereignty now extends into the “atoms” of any “chip, wafer or screw that has brushed up against American software or research dollars”
The Chip Security Act, proposed this may, which would “make it compulsory to fit Nvidia’s H11 and B200 chips with location-tracking system[s]. The same kind of surveillance architecture that the West accused Huawei of building into its products would become federal policy, but only applying to American chips.“ (emphasis added) ….
Ownership of the means of thinking
[Archedelia, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2025]
As near as one can tell, the business rationale for AI rests on the hope that it will substitute for human judgment and discretion. Given the role of big data in training AI systems, and the enormous concentrations of capital they require to develop, the AI revolution will extend the logic of oligopoly into cognition. What appears to be at stake, ultimately, is ownership of the means of thinking. This will have implications for class structure, for the legitimacy of institutions that claim authority based on expertise, and for the credentialing function of universities….
China Fossil Fuel Generation Set for First Drop in Decade
[Bloomberg News, December 15, 2025, via rigzone.com]
INDIA AND RUSSIA COMBINE TO RESIST TRUMP’S INDIAN OCEAN STRATEGY
John Helmer [via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Chris Hedges, Dec 15, 2025
The Genocide in Gaza has not stopped. It has been rebranded. And that is enough of a linguistic subterfuge to get the world to ignore it.
Killing the ‘brain trust’: How Israel targeted Iran’s nuclear scientists
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
Oligarchy
Advent Joy Interrupts Reigns of Terror
Bishop William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Dec 14, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
...Matthew’s [gospel] story zooms in on characters we don’t ask our children to dress up as – an autocrat and the professionals who work to prop up his regime. They are the clergy and lawyers who get paid to advise the king. Supporting them - even if just off stage - are administrative staff, doctors, architects, soldiers, journalists, accountants. Then, as now, a regime didn’t run itself. It took a lot of people cooperating with Herod for him to carry out the mass murder of every child under two years old in Bethlehem.
Advent has something to say to professionals living in a time of authoritarianism. The God who chooses to take on flesh and be born in a manger challenges every abuse of power; this same Advent also calls each of us to ask how we might use the knowledge and power we have to protect the innocent, serve the most vulnerable, and bring justice here on earth….
If Herod cannot abuse power without the complicity of professionals, then what does professional ethics demand of each of us in a time of authoritarianism? We hope you’ll take time to listen to this conversation and consider the discussion questions below, either in-person with people in your community or in the comments section of this post….
MAGA leaders warn Trump the base is checking out. Will he listen?
Natalie Allison, Kadia Goba and Hannah Knowles, December 15, 2025 [Washington Post]
...Many supporters … have been turned off seeing what was once a full calendar of rallies in Middle America replaced with opulent events with business leaders, deal-signings with billionaires and travel to other continents. While meeting with Trump, [conservative pollster Mark Mitchell] told the president his base of supporters wanted to see him “smash the oligarchy, not be the oligarchy.”
“Building billionaire-funded ballrooms and jet-setting around the world and trillion-dollar investment deals looks a lot like oligarchy stuff,” Mitchell told The Post.
How I Almost Became a Palantir Democrat
[Un-Diplomatic, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
...Throughout 2015 and 2016, I was straddling the intersection of academia, think tanks, and the national security state. A freshly minted PhD, I was interviewing for tenure-track academic gigs and adjuncting at Hawai’i Pacific University. My day job, though, was at a Department of
DefenseWar halfway house for defense intellectuals nestled in the Pacific—part think tank, part university, part military academy. I had intentionally fled Washington for Honolulu, but the Beltway was trying to pull me back in.In April 2016, three different people approached me to join Hillary Clinton’s campaign as a foreign policy adviser (unpaid). The pitch from each was basically, “There is no alternative, and working on the campaign is your ticket to a political appointment.” Clinton was pursuing a monopoly strategy on foreign policy talent, trying to lock in anyone and everyone as part of her sprawling technocratic empire; if you were with her, it meant you couldn’t be against her. I thought Clinton was a terrible candidate but I seriously considered joining her team, as a hedge if nothing else. I really didn’t want to go back to Washington, but Honolulu felt unsustainable too….
My time in the Pentagon convinced me that “the future of war” required spinning technology from the private sector into the hands of the national security state—a reversal of the military acquisition paradigm up to that point. And I knew that everyone who ventured West shared this belief that “spinning in” commercial innovation was the only hope for sustaining US dominance.
I had not yet lost my religion—military primacy and American exceptionalism. I also hadn’t thought through all the implications that followed from collusion between Silicon Valley and the national security state. I knew it presupposed social ties between tech and foreign policy—a scheme I wanted to capitalize on.
Yet it also meant massive, unending wealth transfers from taxpayers to Big Tech companies to make them into military contractors. This project meant the tech economy would fuse with the permanent war economy. Military-industrial largesse, in turn, would allow American oligarchy to sustain itself without ceding anything to the working class; a way to buoy “national” economic growth despite growing unemployment and inequality. A permanent war economy meant permanent economic insecurity for even skilled workers. Worst of all, there was no way to expect democracy or anything resembling peace to survive if this project succeeded.
But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I had never even heard of the permanent war economy. I was just trying to be a Californian again and get out of this career bind….
Much about me has changed in the past decade, which has zoomed by. It had been a while since I thought about my 2016 soak-and-poke in Silicon Valley, but it all came rushing back a few days ago. A friend sent me an op-ed in the Washington Post by someone I worked with in the Pentagon. Until recently, she was a senior executive at Palantir. Her arguments were logical extensions of the way I had once thought about American power and Big Tech; arguments I’d have made if I ended up in Palo Alto. They were also appallingly out of step with any claim to peace, democracy, or equality.
The take in her op-ed amounted to advocating for tech monopolies, vilifying Lina Khan, and urging US taxpayers to transfer a further $50 billion of society’s wealth to make a slush fund that would subsidize Silicon Valley on top of the already trillion-dollar war machine. I’m not even exaggerating. The kicker was that the point of the piece was to urge the Democratic Party to embrace companies like Palantir—to stop worrying and learn to love the death-tech industry, lest they fund Republicans.
There was an irony in her Jeff Bezos-approved pitch: The CEO of Palantir had been a Democrat; Palantir’s bottom line had flourished during the Biden administration; Palantir’s senior leaders counted among their ranks several Obama-era policy officials; and Palantir even contributed to the electoral campaigns of Democratic politicians. In being the party of the national security state, the Democratic Party was also the party of Palantir. The op-ed was pushing on an open door….
‘The Fraud’ Reveals How a Pro-Israel, Centrist Faction Engineered Keir Starmer’s Rise
Team Zeteo and Mehdi Hasan, Dec 18, 2025 [Zeteo]
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s approval ratings are in the gutter and critics point to him having abandoned many of the traditional Labour Party policies, and moving his party to the right, as prime reasons for his deep unpopularity.
Now, a new book is uncovering how a faction of pro-Israel, corporate-aligned centrists took over the left-leaning Labour Party to bring Starmer into power. It’s called The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy.
During a wide-ranging interview with Mehdi, the book’s author, Paul Holden, breaks down the key players involved in the conspiracy to take over the Labour Party “to make sure you could never have another moment where a left-wing leader like Jeremy Corbyn was elected again.”
All the Dominant Models Are Collapsing
[Charles Hugh Smith, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
Felonomics
Monopoly Round-Up: Trump Is About to Take Control of How Money in America Works
Matt Stoller, Dec 14, 2025 [BIG]
...as Justice Alito once wrote, is that the Fed is not a normal part of government, it “should be regarded as a special arrangement sanctioned by history,” as it is a “unique institution with a unique historical background.” This rationale makes no sense; every regulatory agency is unique and and arose due to special historical circumstance. But of course, everyone knows the court has to organize its decision in a laughable inconsistent manner because it can’t say the real reason. And that is that the court is protecting our real constitutional order, which is one in which Wall Street and the Federal Reserve structure our society.
That’s a bold claim, so here’s what I mean. The day after the court heard the Slaughter case, Fed Chair Jay Powell quietly announced that the Fed would once again begin buying forty billion dollars worth of bonds a month, with jargon about enhanced liquidity and reserves and other words meant to confuse ordinary people. That’s $125 per American per month, pushed into the bond market, yet the announcement barely made a ripple. Powell also radically expanded another program which will allow hedge funds to bank more easily at the Fed. There were no outraged hearings in Congress, Trump offered no comments, and it generated no newspaper headlines….
Here are some of the historic shifts happening at the Fed, which are going to reorder the institution:
New Vice Chair for Supervision, Michelle W. Bowman, is cutting 30% of the staff of the Division of Supervision and Regulation. Many of these people have been there for decades, which means there’s a huge loss of institutional knowledge and habit. There will be new people coming in.
Trump will soon be picking a new Federal Reserve Chair, who will likely have less interest in maintaining the institutional precedents that serve to block out political influence over the Fed. Since Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has already bought into reforming the institution, it means that we might actually get reform. An aligned Treasury Secretary and Fed Chair can defeat the “blob” of bureaucrats who want to maintain the status quo.
Bessent’s essay, “The Fed’s New Gain-of-Function Monetary Policy,” is important. His view is that the Fed’s actions since the financial crisis have been far outside the bounds of traditional monetary policy and have served to accelerate an upward transfer of wealth in America. He seeks to strip the Fed of authority.For the first time, Federal Reserve board governors, the actual political appointees, are able to bring in external political staff to help execute their agenda. Traditionally, individual Fed governors had almost no power. Over the past few decades, the practice has been to internally rotate career staff to serve as advisors to the governors. They were blocked from bringing in people from the outside and that helped ensure the blob would crush governors who wanted to get even small things done. New Trump Fed governor Stephen Miran bulldozed through this practice and hired his own advisors.
Trump is likely seeking to change how the Reserve bank Presidents are picked. The Fed board just sought to short-circuit that move by reappointing 11 reserve bank Presidents before their terms are up. It won’t matter, when Trump has a majority, he has the legal authority to remove them….
Trump targets defense giants’ shareholder payouts as cost overruns mount, sources say
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-2025]
The Trump administration is planning an executive order that would limit dividends, buybacks and executive pay for defense contractors whose projects are over-budget and delayed, according to three sources briefed on the order.
President Donald Trump and the Pentagon have been complaining about the expensive, slow-moving and entrenched nature of the defense industry….
Desi Cortez, Dec 17, 2025 [L A Progressive]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Power Brokers — What’s really behind your soaring utility bills
[Harper’s, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
...I’ve spent the past year speaking to people in the utility industry, attending its conferences, and sounding out its critics. What I’ve found is that beneath the sector’s undeniable need for new and upgraded infrastructure lies a deeper problem concerning how the industry makes its money. When utilities earn substantial profits, one might expect customers to see some relief in their monthly bills. But as a result of the ownership model of the utilities that serve most Americans, this is rarely what happens. Rather, utilities earn substantial profits because regulators allow them to require ordinary people to pay more. Far from responding to an affordability crisis, electric utilities are helping to create it….
Health care crisis
Another Mass Staffing Purge at the VA
Suzanne Gordon and Russell Lemle, December 18, 2025 [The American Prospect]
...Department of Veterans Affairs’ leaders in Washington were imposing lower caps on employee positions nationwide. Directors of local VA medical centers and clinics had a month to decide which vacant positions to eliminate, and which job offers to rescind. None of these identified positions would be filled because they would be swept from organizational charts entirely. At his facility, 60 percent of the unfilled positions would be lost, including 23 in mental health.
“The past nine months have been very challenging,” the mental health leader told the Prospect. “But this is really going to impact patient care.” He also worried about the effect of cuts on the VA’s critical teaching mission. “The VA trains 50 percent of psychologists in the country,” he said. “Now, we may not have enough staff to supervise trainees.” In the midst of a national mental health professional shortage, reducing VA training capacity ultimately impacts access to mental health care for both veterans and nonveterans alike….
How Health Care Became a Financialized Hellhole
[Commonplace, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
Trump’s 9 New Prescription Drug Deals ‘No Substitute’ for Systemic Reform
Jessica Corbett, Dec 19, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Predatory finance
How Wall Street Ruined the Roomba and Then Blamed Lina Khan
Matt Stoller, Dec 18, 2025 [BIG]
This week's bankruptcy of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum, is about more than a robot cleaner. It's about monopolies, Wall Street, and economists leading America on a path of destruction….
The co-founder of iRobot, Colin Angle, was not introspective about this collapse, nor did he associate it within the broader context of the many firms who have had their technology transferred to China. Instead, he, like much of Wall Street, blamed the bankruptcy on Lina Khan. Why? Well she ran the Federal Trade Commission when it investigated Amazon’s possible acquisition of the company in 2022, a deal the two companies ultimately called off….
Many Wall Street dealmakers and foes of antitrust enforcement echoed this sentiment. For instance, former Obama chief economist Jason Furman, who is now the Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, used it as an example of the problem with populist economics. Blocking mergers, he believes, leads to destructive outcomes and national security problems….
So is Furman right? This critique matters, because the goal here is to return to the economic statecraft of Bush and Obama, a time when the consensus was that concentrating capital would generate positive outcomes, while restraints on capital would hinder growth. The modest burst of populism around antitrust under Joe Biden deeply shook Furman. With iRobot’s bankruptcy, there is now an opportunity to make the claim that any attempt to restrain Wall Street is a mistake….
I watched a 2017 hearing in the House Armed Services Committee where a former Vice Admiral for the Navy, Joe Dyer, testified. After leaving the Navy, Dyer worked in operations at the robotics firm, when the company was far more than a consumer firm focused on importing automated cleaning tools from China. Here’s Kunce:
- iRobot, which started in 1990 as a spinoff of MIT, was founded by three experts in robotics, artificial intelligence, and man-machine interface. In 1998, the company got a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the government agency that financed the creation of the internet, SIRI, the predecessor to GPS, and other conveniences of modern life. Their mission was to build an advanced robot that eventually came to be known as the PackBot. Packbot helped search the rubble after 9/11 and aided US troops in clearing mines in Iraq and Afghanistan. iRobot’s robotic technology has gone to Mars on rovers and was deployed in the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown to measure radioactivity. Its iRobot Seaglider was used to peer underwater after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill….
In the mid-2010s, during Furman’s tenure running economic policy under Obama, the company sold its defense business, offshored production, and slashed research, a result of pressure from financiers on Wall Street.
- “An iRobot shareholder and former Goldman Sachs partner running a hedge fund called Red Mountain Capital, Willem Mesdag, sent a letter demanding that the company sell or shut down every part of its business that didn’t have to do with robots that clean things.
- “He demanded that the company slash its research budget, use the excess cash for dividends, and focus on branding and extending its near-monopoly in automated vacuum cleaners (68 percent of the global market share, according to Mesdag’s letter). Mesdag engaged in a proxy fight to wrest control of the company from its engineering founders, accusing one of its founders and iRobot Chairman Colin Angle of engaging in “egregious and abusive use of shareholder capital” for investing in research.
“In my trips to Wall Street,” Dyer told the panel, “one of my analyst friends took me to lunch one day and said, ‘Joe, you have to get iRobot out of the defense business. It’s killing your stock price.’ And I countered by saying ‘Well, what about the importance of DARPA and leading-edge technology? What about the stability that sometimes comes from the defense industry? What about patriotism?’ And his response was, ‘Joe, what is it about capitalism you don’t understand?’” ….
In other words, the story here is Wall Street destroying a promising robotics enterprise through financial engineering, aiding the Chinese in the process, and then demanding a bailout via amnesty from antitrust laws so that shareholders wouldn’t lose any money, while refusing to acknowledge that a key Trump ally of Wall Street facilitated the transfer of the firm to China….
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices Across the Economy
Matt Stoller [BIG]
The Secret Algorithm Behind Your $20 Burger
Brock Hrehor, Dec 11, 2025 [The Lever]
Epstein, Israel, and the CIA: How the Iran-Contra Planes Landed at Les Wexner’s Base
Ryan Grim, Murtaza Hussain, and Harrison Berger, Dec 18, 2025 [Drop Site]
Restoring balance to the economy
This Is How To End Citizens United
David Sirota, Dec 10, 2025
There’s an anti-master plan: A state-based initiative to use the Supreme Court’s own precedent to effectively circumvent Citizens United’s “corporations are people” paradigm. And here’s even better news: Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, one of the leading Democratic candidates for governor, has jumped aboard the campaign to pass this right now in the upcoming legislative session. Here’s his Denver Post op-ed with Democratic State Rep. Javier Mabrey:
- “We don’t have to wait for the Supreme Court to overturn Citizens United to fix the mess we are in. Citizens in Montana are now advancing a ballot initiative to get corporate money out of politics… Colorado should join Montana and advance a similar concept to change Colorado law. And it can be done by a bill from the legislature — amending our laws to make it explicit that corporations are not human beings, and, therefore, do not possess the rights of human beings.
Baby steps. You might be eyerolling right now, presuming that this kind of thing only matters if all 50 states pass such a measure. But you would be wrong: Each state can do this inside its own borders, instantly weakening the power of corporations to buy elections within its jurisdiction right now. For more on how this all works, listen to our recent Lever Time episode that went deep into this anti-master plan to wrestle back control of our electoral system.
Disrupting mainstream economics
Steve Keen, Dec 14, 2025
It’s a very concise explanation of the role of private credit in causing booms that lead to busts like the Great Depression. Please watch it—till the end for the YouTube Algorithm—and share it widely. Now that it’s almost 2 decades since the Global Financial Crisis, Neoclassical economists are disparaging my approach to economics because they’ve forgotten that the GFC took them completely by surprise, whereas my Minskian economics forewarned of it.
Has public debt become unmanageable?
Richard Murphy, December 20, 2025 [Funding the Future]
John Plnder, in the Financial Times today, has asked whether public debt in the developed world has become “fundamentally unmanageable”…. That conclusion, however, is not just wrong: the article itself supplies the evidence for why it is wrong, but then draws exactly the opposite lesson….
Disrupting mainstream politics
Richard Murphy, December 17, 2025 [Funding the Future]
...what I want to do is take on the real problem, which is the claim that so many people make that "It's my money. Why should the government take it?"
And that view is everywhere, and it feels logical, and to many people, it even feels moral, but it's deeply misleading. This matters because that mindset shapes how people vote. It drives hostility to tax. It undermines public services. It weakens democracy, and this point cannot be stressed enough; it has been deliberately cultivated.
This belief is not based upon stupidity, nor is it based upon irrationality. It's not even selfishness in a sense. It is learned behaviour. Forty years of neoliberal political messaging from those who promote that antisocial idea has left tax framed as if it is theft….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
[Future Pathways, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
AI’s water and electricity use soars in 2025
Justine Calma, Dec 17, 2025 [theverge.com, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
AI created as much carbon pollution this year as New York City and guzzled up as much H20 as people consume globally in water bottles, according to new estimates.The study paints what’s likely a pretty conservative picture of AI’s environmental impact since it’s based on the relatively limited amount of data that’s currently available to the public. A lack of transparency from tech companies makes it harder to see the potential environmental toll of AI becoming a part of everyday tasks, argues the author of the study who’s been tracking the electricity consumption of data centers used for AI and crypto mining over the years.
AI billionaires’ 2026 intimidation campaign is already working
[Rolling Stone, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2025]
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2025]
Are the Broligarchs Ready to Be on the Downward Turn of the Wheel?
Josh Marshall, December 11, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
...One of the things I’ve noticed most conspicuously over the last year is how new to politics a lot of these guys seem to be. Yes, Musk was a contributor to politics before his rightward turn. And a pretty good case has been made that his now flamboyant and open white nationalism was at least always latent in his worldview, going all the way back to his youth in South Africa. But I’m not talking about ideological predilections. I mean American politics, a system that has certain patterns, longstanding arguments, interest groups, traditions, etc. Again and again over the last year, I’ve seen Musk or Zuckerberg or David Sacks or even Jeff Bezos say something and thought, “You’re really new to politics, aren’t you? Like you’re really hitting all of this cold with very little sense of what happened two years ago let along 10 or 20.”
… So I found myself surprised just how widespread hostility to AI is.
Different segments of American society aren’t necessarily against AI for just the reasons I am. But they have their own different reasons. For a huge cross section of Americans, AI is the thing the bosses are going to use to lay you off. It’s the early 21st century version of offshoring. And quite a few of the Americans who see it through that prism are Trumpers. If it’s not laying you off, it’s jacking up your utility rates so they can run the data crunching plantations that are going to take your job. When I first thought about this I wondered: are the billionaires damaging the brand of AI? Or is AI damaging the brand of the billionaires? But for the centi-billionaires who are staking everything on AI I’m not sure it matters. We’re already seeing signs that 2026 Republicans are going to try to sic an angry public on the tech boys, blaming them for jacking up electricity prices or layoffs tied to AI….
I don’t think the tech boys have much sense that politics shifts both ways, that what happened in the winter of 2024/25 wasn’t permanent. Indeed, it didn’t last through 2025. Do they know what it’s like to be holding the bag for a significant amount of main force political backlash? And not just worrying about Democrats being in power but having Republicans trying to stay in office trying to shift the ire in their direction? ….
Collapse of independent news media
Washington Post readers revolt against Bezos’s editorial board
Dan Froomkin, December 12, 2025 [presswatchers.org]
Climate and environmental crises
[Balanced Weather, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
This Week in Democracy – Week 48: From Swastikas to Sexual Predators
[Zeteo, Dec 20, 2025]
On Twitter, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought announced that the Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which he falsely claimed was “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” He also noted that a “comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”
The country’s biggest magnesium producer went bankrupt. Who’s going to clean up the $100M mess?
[Grist, via Naked Capitalism 12-18-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
Jeffries Undercuts Congressional Stock Trading Ban
David Dayen, December 19, 2025 [The American Prospect]
A bipartisan solution was gaining momentum, but the House Democratic leader just issued his own bill that will prevent consensus.
How to Compete in Ruby-Red America Where the Democratic Party Is Dead
Les Leopold, Dec 15, 2025
Dem Leaders Decide to Bury Damning Report on Why Trump Won in 2024
Greg Sargent, December 18, 2025 [The New Republic]
In a move that should unleash harsh criticism and recriminations, the Democratic National Committee has decided against publicly releasing its long-awaited report on the 2024 election, which could end up protecting key actors inside the party from accountability over the blown but winnable contest….
Noam Chomsky - The Elite's Pet Dissident
Decline and Fall, Dec 19, 2025
In this special edition of ‘Decline & Fall’ we look at the recent revelations regarding the friendship between Noam Chomsky the deceased Mossad asset Jeffrey Epstein. In doing so we look at the role of dissidents and how much the US establishment promoted Chomsky. We ask why Chomsky felt so at home with intelligence agents and perverts (hello Woody Allen) and compare (unfavourably) to the great Michael Parenti.
Resistance
The Undocumented Underground Is Throwing a Wrench in Trump’s Deportation Machine
Allegra Kirkland, Dec 16, 2025 [talkingpointsmemo]
...The Undocumented Underground is at work in the streets, in churches, at safe houses, and at free legal clinics. Volunteers with no legal experience are training themselves on YouTube videos and using Google Translate to assist migrants with their cases. Others accompany those seeking asylum to their court hearings, ushering them by the shoulder through the ICE-haunted hallways. High school students are showing up at welcome centers after school to assist with English lessons. Rapid responders are using encrypted chats to warn their neighbors when federal agents are spotted nearby. Inside the office of Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), a “habeus machine” has been instrumental in freeing detainees.
Amanda Moore, December 19, 2025 [Mother Jones]
America's collapsing consumption is the world's disenshittification opportunity (16 Dec 2025)
Cory Doctorow, 16 Nov 2025 [Pluralistic]
...One of the most urgent questions Trump has forced the world to confront is what we will do about America's control over the internet. By this, I mean both the abstract "governance" control (such as the fact that ICANN is a US corporation, subject to US government coercion), and the material fact that virtually every government, large corporation, small business and household keeps its data (files, email, records) in a US Big Tech silo (also subject to US government control).
When Trump and Microsoft colluded to shut down the International Criminal Court by killing its access to Outlook and Office365 (in retaliation for the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for the génocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu), the world took notice. Trump and Microsoft bricked the ICC, effectively shuttering its operations. If they could do that to the ICC, they could do it to any government agency, any nationally important corporation, any leader – anyone. It was an act of blatant cyberwarfare, no different from Russian hackers bricking Ukrainian power plants (except that Microsoft didn't have to hack Outlook, they own it)….
This ban on modification means that when a US tech giant uses its products to steal money and/or private information from the people in your country (that is, "enshittification"), no one is allowed to give your people the tools to escape these scams. Your domestic investors can't invest in your domestic technologists' startups, which cannot make the disenshittifying products that also cannot be exported globally, to anyone with an internet connection and a payment method.
It's a double whammy: your people are plundered, and your businesses are strangled. The whole world has been made poorer, to the tune of trillions of dollars, by this scam. And the only reason everyone puts up with it is that the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't.
So now we have tariffs, and if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you follow orders, and then they burn it down anyway, you really don't have to keep following their orders.
This is a point I've been making in many forums lately, including, most recently, on a stage in Canada, where I made the case that rather than whacking Americans with retaliatory tariffs, Canada should legalize reverse-engineering and go into business directly attacking the highest margin lines of business of America's most profitable corporations, making everything in Canada cheaper and better, and turning America's trillions in Big Tech ripoffs into Canadian billions by selling these tools to everyone else in the world….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The Americans Who Saw All This Coming—but Were Ignored and Maligned
Toby Buckle, December 17, 2025 [The New Republic]
...The common understanding at the time was that all of that was political theater, or rhetorical excesses—that Trump had no real convictions. But Cassandras didn’t see it like that. “I kinda think people have it reversed,” Joe, a white 30-year-old from upstate New York, who now teaches at a university in the U.K., said. “Lots of people don’t detect that he’s lying about what has transpired, but they think he’s full of hot air about what he wants. But in reality, he’s a total liar about what has happened, and he’s deadly sincere about what it is he wants.” ….
Difficult relations with deeply conservative family was another common theme among those I spoke with. Yona’s family, concerned about their (Yona is nonbinary) progressive views, had staged something of an intervention. Yona told me they “thought I had gone down this demonic path.” Did they use the word “demonic,” I asked. “Oh yeah.” They believe that “the entire machinery of the Democratic Party ... was, in part, designed to traffic children, designed to torture children, to harvest a chemical they call adrenochrome from their brains ... and that, for many of the Democratic elites, it was due in part to demonic beliefs, or membership in satanic societies.”
Pentagon plan calls for major power shifts within U.S. military
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-2025]
The South Rises Again
Civic republicanism
Abominations of Capital — Forcing a price on priceless things.
Hamilton Nolan, Dec 16, 2025 [How Things Work]
...Either we eradicate the billionaires or we will march steadily into dictatorship of capital so strong that everything else means little. Total spending on the last presidential election was about $5 billion, all in, on all sides. Ken Griffin is worth $50 billion, and Bloomberg and Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and the Waltons and the Google guys are each worth more than $100 billion, and Larry Ellison and Bezos and Zuckerberg are each worth more than $200 billion, and Musk is worth more than $300 billion. Of the 330 million people in America, these are the ones who will decide everything. Do you like that? Well, it doesn’t matter. You don’t get to decide. You don’t have $5 billion to buy a presidential election. These people do. For another $10 billion you could pay for every single Congressional election, as well. Ken Griffin could buy all of the above and still have enough to buy all the rest of Basquiat’s paintings, and hang them on his mansion wall, and cock his head like a golden retriever as he stares at them and wonders what they all mean.
People are naturally bad at interpreting very large numbers and therefore we all have a hard time conceptualizing just how insane wealth inequality has become, just how ludicrous the sizes of these people’s fortunes are, just how divorced from any intelligible concept of “work” and “deserve” this kind of opulence represents. There are various ways to try to make these big numbers more understandable—Jeff Bezos, for example, could give each of Amazon’s million American employees a bonus of $100,000 and still be worth more than $100 billion himself. If the absurd math of luxury purchases that these plutocrats could pull off doesn’t drive the point home, another useful method is simply to sit and meditate on the priceless cultural artifacts that these people have, in fact, put a price upon.
Ken Griffin owns a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln. Bought it for $18 million. Ken Griffin also condemned Democratic officials in Illinois for not being tough enough on crime and moved his hedge fund headquarters to Florida and donated millions of dollars to Florida Republicans to help them wage their war against “wokeness” and abortion rights and diversity. From his walled 50,00-square-foot compound on 27 acres in Palm Beach, Griffin has done more than any other individual to create the political conditions that make Florida more hostile to black people, and LBTQ people, and women, and immigrants. Why? What is the reason for this? In order to ensure that political conditions are favorable for the success of Griffin’s hedge fund, and by extension for Griffin’s own net worth, so that he might buy grander estates, more expensive artworks, more exotic luxuries.
In some ways I think that the basic abomination that is Ken Griffin’s ownership a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, or of Basquiat’s art, is even more powerful than the numbers. This man should not be able to own these things. Not for $18 million, or $100 million, or at all. The grotesqueness of billions of dollars, the brute force of that tidal wave of capital, its ability to force a price upon things that are priceless—it is this quality that may be most effective in demonstrating why such fortunes, like biological weapons and killer robots, fall into the category of “Things we are capable of creating, but should not.”….
[Working Class Storytelling, via Naked Capitalism 12-17-2025]
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