Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 06, 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]
Welcome to the Age of Disappearance: America's new era of secret police
Hamilton Nolan, July 02, 2025 [How Things Work]
...an avalanche of new funding for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and anti-immigration measures is, in fact, coming. This is going to spill well past the bounds of what any sane person would consider to be “immigration enforcement.” It is going to create a lavishly funded, unaccountable, quasi-secret police force that will transform our nation for the worse. Very soon.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the terrifying scale of this new funding. This bill contains enough money to build a new system of immigration detention centers far bigger than the entire federal prison system. The American Immigration Council says that it will be enough to facilitate the “daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.” It will let ICE hire more field agents than the FBI. Its $170 billion in funding for Stephen Miller’s rabid campaign to purge America of brown people is comparable to the total annual funding for the United States Army.
Donald Trump envisions himself as an all-powerful leader whose will is equal to law. He is bent on revenge against his political enemies. He has installed extreme loyalists in the Justice Department, the FBI, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and all other security departments. The courts have declined to meaningfully restrain his abuses of these departments. This budget will give him the final piece of the puzzle that he needs to achieve his fever dream: a nationwide army of masked, unaccountable armed agents empowered to snatch anyone they like off the streets, and the physical infrastructure to imprison or deport those people at will. Thousands of men with guns, unrestrained by judges or local police, who do not answer to Congress, who point guns at the press, who arrest whoever they want, for reasons they do not share, and do whatever they wish with those people. The implications of this are going to make America a much darker place….
...ICE has already arrested a number of Democratic elected officials, including mayors and members of Congress and a judge. In this environment, it is a trivial matter for Trump and his loyalists to concoct reasons to arrest almost anyone. People can be arrested if they are immigrants, if they look like they might be immigrants, if they illegally harbored or assisted immigrants, or if they somehow impeded ICE’s quest to arrest immigrants. The mission can and will be scaled up from “deport immigrants” to “punish those who want to stand in the way of our mission.”….
16 Thoughts On The Republican Budget Atrocity
Brian Beutler, July 03, 2025 [Off Message]
- Quite apart from the economics, this secret police force and the prison network that will be built for it, is the most repugnant and frightening aspect of the bill; Medicaid can be funded again, food stamps can be funded again, clean energy can be funded, taxes can be increased progressively. But an immigrant prison network, overseen by Trump-loyal paramilitaries, with no resources for due process, will be very hard to dislodge, and could easily be turned against the citizenry. This is Stephen Miller’s wet dream and it will stain the whole country….
Trump falsely questions Zohran Mamdani’s citizenship, threatens to arrest him over ICE operations
[ABC, via Naked Capitalism 07-02-2025]
Trump’s Threat to Deport Mamdani Isn’t a Joke
Ken Klippensteinm, July 3, 2025
Last month, according to an internal memo, the Justice Department ordered its attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings” — the process by which naturalized Americans can be stripped of their citizenship — not for fraud or criminality, but “against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security.”
Strategic Political Economy
There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 07-02-2025]
Beijing is selling clean energy to the world, Washington is pushing oil and gas. Both are driven by national security….
While China still burns more coal than the rest of the world and emits more climate pollution than the United States and Europe combined, its pivot to cleaner alternatives is happening at breakneck speed. Not only does China already dominate global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, E.V.s and many other clean energy industries, but with each passing month it is widening its technological lead….
China has also begun to dominate nuclear power, a highly technical field once indisputably led by the United States. China not only has 31 reactors under construction, nearly as many as the rest of the world combined, but has announced advances in next-generation nuclear technologies and also in fusion, the long-promised source of all-but-limitless clean energy that has bedeviled science for years.
Global power shift
BRICS Without China? Xi’s No-Show at Summit in Brazil Is No Coincidence
[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 07-05-2025]
[Yves Smith: “This video does not consider the thesis that another well-substantiated video argued: that Xi had not made a single appearance outside his residence after a sudden absence during a major party event. The thesis is he had a health crisis, which kicked off a power struggle, and he is now under house arrest. Even if this is false, BRICS is playing out as we predicted: all hat and no cattle (ex facilitating bilateral trade financial plumbing, which is very important). Even Mohammed Marandi, when Nima brought up BRICS in the past week, almost sighed when Nima mentioned BRICS and said what mattered was not BRICS but the idea of BRICS and organizations like the SCO which were advancing the BRICS philosophy. That correction said to me was Marandi signaling that BRICS has been overhyped and the focus needs to be on the paramount BRICS aim of multipolarity, and not the supposed organization, which as of today, does not even have a budget.”]
U.S. Attorney General calls Mexico a “foreign adversary”
[Guadalajara Post, June 27, 2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel / Iran
Quiet, West Bank Pogrom in Progress
[Haaretz, via Naked Capitalism 07-02-2025]
Israeli army purchases frozen as drones worth millions lost in Iran
[Middle East Monitor, June 30, 2025]
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has suspended new military purchases amid concerns about a potential new round of fighting with Iran, following the loss of dozens of drones worth millions of dollars over Iranian territory.
According to Ynet, the Israeli Ministry of Finance is refusing to approve a 60-billion-shekel ($16.2 billion) increase requested by the Ministry of Defence to cover the costs of the recent conflict with Iran and the ongoing Operation Gideon’s Chariots in Gaza. Both operations were not part of the approved 2025 state budget….
Chilling Maps Show: Iran's Missiles Obliterated Israeli Neighborhoods
Bar Peleg, Ran Shimoni, Adi Hashmonai, Jun 30, 2025 [Haaretz]
From Tamra to Tel Aviv and further south, Israeli engineers' maps show how a shock wave from Iran's ballistic missiles can be as ruinous as a direct hit….
In Tel Aviv, 480 buildings have been damaged, many of them badly, at five separate sites. In Ramat Gan, it's 237 buildings at three sites, about 10 badly. In another Tel Aviv suburb, Bat Yam, 78 buildings were damaged by one hit; 22 will have to be razed.
The Israel Tax Authority has received applications for financial assistance for nearly 33,000 damaged structures. Another 4,450 files have been opened for the loss of belongings and equipment, and another 4,119 for damaged vehicles….
The latest report submitted by Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, lists 48 corporations and institutions, including Palantir Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Caterpillar Inc., Microsoft Corporation and Massachusetts Institue of Technology (MIT), along with banks and financial firms such as Blackrock, insurers, real estate firms and charities, which in violation of international law are making billions from the occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.
Oligarchy
The Oligarchs’ Big Prize in Trump’s Budget-Busting Bill
Timothy Noah, July 3, 2025 [The New Republic]
Avoiding an income-tax increase is nice, but that’s not the bill’s greatest gift to the rich….
The oligarchs’ real prize in the reconciliation bill is the continuation or possible expansion of a 2017 change in the tax code so tedious to explain that most news accounts haven’t bothered. Some people call it the qualified business income deduction, others call it the pass-through deduction, and still others just call it Section 199A. It’s a deduction of 23 percent (House version) or 20 percent (Senate version) on business income that “passes through,” untaxed, to a private individual, who then pays taxes on it as personal rather than corporate income. The rationale for this deduction is that business income shouldn’t be taxed at a maximum 37 percent rate when the corporate income tax is only 21 percent.
Are you bored yet? If so, you’re exactly where the oligarchs want you. Maybe you’ll perk up if I tell you this tax cut will add to the budget deficit either $820 billion (House version) or $736 billion (Senate version). More than half the benefit will go to millionaires.
Pass-through income is a key driver of income inequality. Between 1985 and 2021, the top 1 percent in the income distribution increased its share of the nation’s income from 13 percent to more than 25 percent. The majority of that increase came from pass-through income. Defenders of the pass-through tax break will tell you that most pass-through businesses are small businesses, and that’s true. But the majority of income from pass-through businesses goes to the rich. In 2011, 70 percent of all pass-through income went to the top 1 percent; the 2017 tax break almost certainly pushed that proportion higher….
Chartbook 394 “A City we can afford”: capitalism and democracy in New York
Adam Tooze [via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2025]
...The idea that democracy might enable the majority of Americans to proactively distribute significantly greater resources away from the rich towards public services and those most in need, has come to seem increasingly quaint. At this moment, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, a huge tax giveaway for the upper class, is moving through Congress. It will be profoundly regressive in its impact.
But within the frame of a city like New York, with a tightly packed population of 8.5 million, the distributional struggle takes on a rather different hue. In New York City the trade offs and conflicts feel real. The rich, the middle class and the poor cannot avoid each other, as they often do in the rest of the USA. Through shared infrastructure like schools or overcrowded and dangerous streets, the competition for scarce housing and the cost of everyday necessities, the struggle of competing purchasing power and class differentiation is played out in plain view. Meanwhile, the shocking state of the subway brings home viscerally the many failures of public policy. How can a city of such wealth be reliant on a system of such shabby, stinking decrepitude? It is not by accident that New York City’s upper class fear democracy more than their counterparts in much of the rest of the country. Here there might actually be a majority in favor or redistribution, major market regulation and against privatization. De facto, New York City’s taxing powers are limited. Mamdani is talking about a few percentage points for those earning more than a million dollars a year. Everything requires approval by Albany, the far more conservative state-capital, 140 miles to the North. But, to prevent these questions even being posed, the backlash against Mamdani will be intense and it will be very well funded.
That backlash will be led by big money from New York’s rich upper class. As the voting data suggest, his support dwindled fast amongst those with incomes more than $150,000. At the upper end, there are 28,000, or so, New Yorkers who filed income tax on adjusted gross income (AGI) of more than $1 million, accounted for 0.7% of all tax filers, 35.6% of the AGI, and 42.4% of NYC Personal Income Tax (PIT) liability. Roughly 4400 individuals declared more than $ 5 million or more. And 1600 made $10 million or more. That group, who amounted to 0.04% of the total returns in 2011-2021, accounted for 17.9% of the AGI, and 21.3% of NYC income tax paid. 123 people on the Forbes list of billionaires are registered as living in the city….
The war on America’s radicals: Mamdani is only the latest victim
B. Duncan Moench, July 4, 2025 [Unherd, via Naked Capitalism 07-06-2025]
...Muslims and non-Western religions aren’t the only groups that have been met with prejudice by the country’s Anglo-Protestant majority either. Even the Mormons, arguably the whitest — and most Middle American — of heterodox religious groups had to abandon its practice of polygamy and dismantle their vast communal economic system before the Utah territory could be admitted as a state. Yes, Catholics, Jews, and Mormons were eventually welcomed into the American mainstream during the 20th century. But that only happened after a full century of cultural, and political, Anglo-centric assimilation. Each group had to prove they embraced Republican versions of democracy, Anglo-liberal “free” market economics and, no less important, Anglo-Americans’ unique take on the Protestant work ethic, which equates state support with personal failure….
In American political culture, however, the establishment has eagerly worshipped “wealth creators” while demeaning wage workers as lazy or entitled. This occurs regularly despite the fact that the US has, by far, the weakest labour protections and stingiest welfare state among wealthy industrialised nations. This mentality emerged early in the industrial era, as elites embraced a Robber Baron-style capitalist triumphalism, intertwined with the survival-of-the-fittest ethos promoted by Social Darwinists like William Graham Sumner. The only serious resistance ever mounted against this ideology was the New Deal coalition, built on Franklin Roosevelt’s political genius and relentless popular appeal. The American establishment hysterically condemn Mamdani because they can sense he might have that same potential.Despite Roosevelt’s unparalleled four-term popularity, when the New Deal coalition collapsed in the Seventies, the role of labour unions and the state in building up middle-class stability began to disappear from the national narrative. In its place, identity politics rose up to become the face of American “Leftism”. As the language of identity replaced the language of class, the establishment’s long-standing worship of wealth and material success became stronger still. That ultimately paved the way for Wall Street plunder and modern Silicon Valley hyper-feudalism where, since 1975, approximately $79 trillion has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American workers to the top 1%.This astoundingly regressive wealth redistribution must, of course, be justified by ideology. That’s where the Social Darwinism of thinkers like Sumner come in, offering a uniquely American cauldron of disdain for the needy and indigent….Despite the bemoaning of Mamdani as nothing more than a spoiled woke socialist, his surprising political success derives from his rejection of identity-victimhood fixations and — like FDR before him — his refusal to accept the elite dogma that the state is powerless to improve the economic conditions of everyday people.Mamdani is routinely portrayed as a demonic immigrant antichrist for the same reason the German 48ers were declared an existential threat, despite their small numbers and political irrelevance. These early rebels openly challenged America’s LASP norms and dared to advocate for a different — multicultural and multi-ideological — vision of the country. Mamdani seems set to do the same. Whether or not you support his policies, the intensity of the reaction from the national media and Right-wing influencers toward a mayor’s race, in a place most of them openly hate, reveals something deeper, almost unconscious….
The Common Sense of a Wealth Tax: Thomas Paine & Taxation as Freedom from Aristocracy
Jeremy Bearer-FriendVanessa Williamson, 1 January 2022 [Scholarly Commons]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Don’t blame China — Blame Milton Friedman
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 06-29-2025]
Exhibit Q8: The Empire That Milton Built. Then Gutted.America is in decline. But this wasn’t caused by China, or Russia, or immigration, or wokeism. The culprit is Milton Friedman. And the class that turned his ideas into a wrecking ball. (1/17)Friedman taught that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. From that seed grew a system that stripped America to its studs and sold the drywall to China. (2/17)….This wasn’t some invisible hand. It was conscious policy. The WTO, NAFTA, and permanent MFN status for China all served the same goal. Eliminate borders for capital. Trap labor in place. (6/17)
Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth
[Pluralistic, via The Big Picture July 03, 2025]
What if you show up at the hotel at 9pm and the hotelier can ask a credit bureau how much you can afford to pay for the room? What if they can find out that you’re in chemotherapy, so you don’t have the stamina to shop around for a cheaper room? What if they can tell that you have a 5AM flight and need to get to bed right now?
That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose
Chris Colin, June 29, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Endless wait times and excessive procedural fuss—it’s all part of a tactic called “sludge.” ….
...On the contrary, I told her, I needed to hear every detail. Tentatively at first, she told me about a family trip to Sweden that had been scuttled by COVID. What followed was a protracted war involving denied airline refunds, unusable vouchers, expired vouchers, and more. Other guests from the party began drifting over. One recounted a recent Verizon nightmare. Another had endured Kafkaesque tech support from Sonos. The stories kept coming: gym-quitting labyrinths, Airbnb hijinks, illogical conversations with the permitting office, confounding interactions with the IRS. People spoke of not just the money lost but the hours, the sanity, the basic sense that sense can prevail.
Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years….When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world.But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was “incorrect.”) Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota’s motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, “Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.”
The Business of Betting on Catastrophe
[The MIT Press Reader, via The Big Picture June 30, 2025]
World Bank pandemic bonds paid out only after death tolls passed a threshold. They’re part of a booming market where investors turn calamity into capital.
U.S. Imported Food Reliance Worsens: Food Trade Deficit Alert!
[Rethink Trade, via Naked Capitalism 07-04-2025]
Key findings:
- The United States’ food trade deficit reached $58.7 billion in 2024. The $46 billion increase in the gap since 2015 is driven by a $42.7 billion increase in imports.
- The United States has been in a food trade deficit since 2015 and an agricultural trade deficit—which includes fiber, forestry, and industrial products—since 2017.
- Several goods commonly found on the Fourth of July barbecue table have trade deficits, including beef, potatoes, tomatoes, watermelon, ketchup, and beer.
- The majority of the grain and oilseed milling products, fruits and tree nuts, and seafood consumed in the United States are imports. The import share of consumption for many foods, both manufactured and non-manufactured, is increasing.
- The U.S. food trade deficit likely cannot be addressed by increasing exports. Despite food exports to top trade partners and in top export categories increasing, the deficit continues to widen on growing imports.
Trumpillnomics
Republicans Are Cutting Medicare. Not Only Medicaid, Medicare.
David Dayen, July 3, 2025 [The American Prospect]
... Republicans have created another problem. They didn’t just cut Medicaid; they also have forced nearly half a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare, the health program for the elderly.
Because of a statutory requirement to automatically impose budget cuts when legislation increases the deficit, the Big Beautiful Bill would require automatic sequestration cuts across the board, something that has been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) but has been largely absent from the debate over the bill. Medicare is one of the programs that will face the axe, and the damage sums to $490 billion over the next ten years, starting in the next fiscal year that begins in October. While many of the safety-net cuts in the bill are delayed to help Republicans with their re-election campaigns, the Medicare cuts must begin next year….
A List of Nearly Everything in the G.O.P. Bill, and How Much It Would Cost or Save
Alicia Parlapiano, Margot Sanger-Katz, Aatish Bhatia and Josh Katz [New York Times]
Below is a table that lists how nearly every provision would affect the federal budget over 10 years, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office in an analysis published Sunday. The budget office measured the legislation as it usually does, taking into account the cost of extending expiring tax cuts. This is a different approach than the one embraced by the Senate’s leaders. The C.B.O. analysis does not include a handful of policy provisions that do not have direct effects on the federal deficit.
Trump Gets To Sign His Big Ugly Bill Today Because... CONGRESS ALWAYS CHICKENS OUT
Howie Klein, July 04, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Trump, reports some of the Republicans who met with him in the last few days, doesn’t even know what’s in the bill. According to 3 of the congress members, the increasingly senile Señor TACO told them at one of the meetings that there are 3 things Congress shouldn’t touch if they want to win elections: Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. One member said to Trump that “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill.”
Heather Cox Richardson, June 28, 2025 [Letters from an American]
In Politico today, Meredith Lee Hill reported that “[e]very major health system in Louisiana is warning [House] Speaker Mike Johnson [R-LA] and the rest of the state’s congressional delegation that the Senate [Republicans’] planned Medicaid cuts ‘would be historic in their devastation.’” The Senate’s revised measure will hurt healthcare and undermine the state’s budget, they wrote. But “[t]hese economic consequences pale in comparison to the harm that will be caused to residents across the state, regardless of insurance status, who will no longer be able to get the care that they need.”
Trump and the GOP Will Regret the Day They Passed This Sick Bill
Michael Tomasky, July 3, 2025 [The New Republic]
Here’s the important question to ponder: Why is this happening? What kind of people want to close rural hospitals? What kind of people want veterans to stop being able to buy decent groceries? Answering these questions teaches us a lot about what’s become of the Republican Party over the last three-plus decades.
The seminal moment in this history isn’t Trump coming down that escalator. In fact, it has nothing to do with Trump.
The year was 1990. At an impromptu meeting at Andrews Air Force Base with congressional leaders, President George H.W. Bush agreed to the last tax increase that a critical mass of Republicans backed. The tax increase was responsible fiscal policy— the deficit had jumped significantly since 1989—and in fact the revenue, and other spending caps in the bill, helped stabilize the country’s finances. But all anyone remembers is that Bush broke his “read my lips” campaign pledge not to raise taxes.
Ever since, Republican domestic policy has consisted entirely of two prongs: cutting taxes, overwhelmingly for the rich; cutting spending, overwhelmingly for, or one should say “on,” working-class and poor people. This is who they are.
Within that broad category, there are three camps….
Construction spending continues contraction, amplifying yellow flag caution from manufacturing
[Angry Bear, via Naked Capitalism 07-02-2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Dean Obeidallah, June 30, 2025
The GOP is about to approve the “the biggest rollback in federal support for health care ever,” as Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF told The Washington Post. More than 12 million people (up to 16 million) will lose healthcare due to GOP’s cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to fund a tax cut for their wealthy donors.
Stripping Americans of healthcare will kill people. Literally.
The GOP knows this but doesn’t care. The only question is: Does their actions rise to the level of manslaughter or even murder?!
What’s the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people?
Heather Cox Richardson, June 30, 2025 [Letters from an American]
...Senator King continued: “I don’t understand the obsession and I never have…with taking health insurance away from people. I don’t get it. Trying to take away the Affordable Care Act in 2017 or 2018 and now this. What’s driving this? What’s the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people knowing that it’s going to cost them…up to and including…their lives.”
In fact, the drive to slash health insurance is part of the Republicans’ determination to destroy the modern government.
Grover Norquist, an employee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”
Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross domestic product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States.
The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, and business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.
William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, June 30, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
Michigan Republican Mike Rogers Sells Out To The Same Crypto-Cartel He Once Warned Us About
Howie Klein, July 03, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
...It’s hard to overstate the danger of what’s unfolding here. The “crypto cartel” isn’t just a convenient phrase; it’s a rapidly metastasizing force in American politics, a moneyed clique of deregulation-obsessed financiers, libertarian tech bros, and shadowy offshore interests who are buying influence across party lines, whether Slotkin, Gallego, Kirsten Gillibrand, Adam Schiff, Shontel Brown, Ritchie Torres, Josh Gottheimer, Angie Craig, Donald Davis, Maxwell Frost… on Team Blue or Lummis, Tom Emmer, Ted Budd, Katie Britt, Jim Banks, Young Kim, David Valadao, Byron Donalds, Randy Fine on Team Red. Many of them have no foundational ideology beyond profit, no loyalty beyond their wallets and no concern for the democratic process—unless it can be bent, hacked or just plain purchased outright….
Green Social Housing: Lessons from Vienna
[Climate and Community Institute, June 2025]
Vienna is the global capital of social housing. Over 40 percent of the city’s housing units are social housing, providing homes for the majority of the city’s renters. And, as the city’s population has grown over the past two decades, Vienna has continued to build affordable, beautiful social housing, where doctors live next to janitors and grandparents live down the street from their grandkids. Today, Vienna’s social housing shelters residents from both real estate speculation and climate breakdown.
Ezra Klein Meets Zohran Mamdani
Robert Kuttner, July 3, 2025 [The American Prospect]
...Klein has the germ of a valid argument, but he has been widely criticized, including in these pages, for ignoring the broader issue of corporate power in determining what government actually does. For example, the collapse of housing construction after 2008 was not the result of a sudden increase in zoning obstacles. It was the result of Wall Street’s subprime scam.
U.S. GDP per capita is a robust $89,000. That’s almost $360,000 for a family of four—if it were distributed equally. But of course, the economy becomes more unequal every year. On average, there is plenty of abundance. The problem is maldistribution, financialization, and oligarchy….
Klein has scoffed at Mamdani’s idea of publicly owned supermarkets in food deserts, pointing out that supermarket chains operate on very low margins. But Klein misses the fact that Mamdani is proposing grocery pilots in places where the chains don’t find it profitable to operate at all. Several small towns in red-state America that have lost chain stores already have municipally owned food markets.
Klein also misses the fact that high retail food prices are substantially the result not of excessive markups by chains, but extreme consolidation and price-gouging by producers, for which the remedy is antitrust. In addition, if smaller stores could get the same pricing from food wholesalers as the big-box chains—something that is required by law under the Robinson-Patman Act—they could compete in these food deserts. A city-owned grocery in New York would have the resources to bring Robinson-Patman cases and create a level playing field.
Disrupting mainstream economics
This July 4, Where is America’s Land of Opportunity?
Colin Woodard, July 4, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
The geographies of upward mobility show U.S. regions that emphasize investments in the common good over economic libertarianism do better
Why the Federal Reserve doesn't understand the monetary system that it's supposed to manage [video]
Steve Keen, June 30, 2025 [Building a New Economics]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Ex-CISA Official Warns: We’ve Gutted Cybersecurity—A Gift to Iran, China and Russia
Lynn Parramore, June 30, 2025 [Institute for New Economic Thinking]
Interview by Lynn Parramore featuring Dr. David Mussington, cybersecurity expert with two decades of experience [including with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)], reveals why the clock is ticking on U.S. vulnerabilities under Trump.
Landmark AI ruling is a blow to authors and artists
[Popular Information, via The Big Picture June 29, 2025]
Books are particularly valuable for LLMs precisely because humans have taken such care to produce them. If you want to teach a computer the nuances of many different topics — and how to write clearly — there is no substitute for books. But when it came time to train Claude, Anthropic did not start by buying books. Instead, it “downloaded for free millions of copyrighted books in digital form from pirate sites on the internet,” including books by the three authors who filed the lawsuit.
The End of Publishing as We Know It
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture June 29, 2025]
...Chatbots have proved adept at keeping users locked into conversations. They do so by answering every question, often through summarizing articles from news publishers. Suddenly, fewer people are traveling outside the generative-AI sites—a development that poses an existential threat to the media, and to the livelihood of journalists everywhere.According to one comprehensive study, Google’s AI Overviews—a feature that summarizes web pages above the site’s usual search results—has already reduced traffic to outside websites by more than 34 percent. The CEO of DotDash Meredith, which publishes People, Better Homes & Gardens, and Food & Wine, recently said the company is preparing for a possible “Google Zero” scenario….Book publishers, especially those of nonfiction and textbooks, also told me they anticipate a massive decrease in sales, as chatbots can both summarize their books and give detailed explanations of their contents. Publishers have tried to fight back, but my conversations revealed how much the deck is stacked against them. The world is changing fast, perhaps irrevocably. The institutions that comprise our country’s free press are fighting for their survival….
The Ascendance Of Algorithmic Tyranny
[Nomea, via Naked Capitalism 07-02-2025]
A.I. Is Starting to Wear Down Democracy
[New York Times, via The Big Picture June 29, 2025]
Content generated by artificial intelligence has become a factor in elections around the world. Most of it is bad, misleading voters and discrediting the democratic process. Artificial intelligence has long threatened to transform elections around the world. Now there is evidence from at least 50 countries that it already has.
Ed Zitron [via Naked Capitalism 07-01-2025]
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 07-01-2025]
Henry Farrell, Jun 30, 2025
Gary Marcus, via Naked Capitalism 07-05-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
[Ember Energy, via Naked Capitalism 06-30-2025]
Earth is Trapping Much More Heat Than Climate Models Forecast
[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 07-01-2025]
[Severe Weather, via Naked Capitalism 07-01-2025]
Droughts worldwide pushing tens of millions towards starvation, says report
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 07-05-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
David Austin Walsh, June 26, 2025 [Boston Review]
...Part of the problem for Democrats is that there is little consensus about what exactly the party stands for in concrete policy terms beyond unconditional support for Israel, some attention to climate change, and vaguely defined commitments to racial, gender, and sexuality equity (never mind the establishment’s backing of Cuomo after his resignation following sexual harassment allegations)….
Another key factor behind the implosion of the Democratic establishment is that it once again proved incapable of accommodating major internal reform. Twenty-five-year-old liberal activist David Hogg, elected as one of five vice-chairs of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in February, said he would not run again after a vote to hold new vice-chair elections passed with an overwhelming majority earlier this month on nominally procedural grounds….
...Democrats have long struggled with a gerontocracy problem: even with the recent elevation of younger leaders like Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—fifty-four years old—the average age of Democratic leadership in the House remains seventy-two. (The average for GOP leadership, by contrast, is forty-eight.) ….
what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has called “deference politics.”
Elite deference politics breeds elite political entitlement, often defended by explicit appeals to identity. This was a strong part of the rationale for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid—it was Clinton’s turn after Obama to be president, the line went—and it animated the fury of so many Clinton stalwarts at Sanders’s candidacy. The left’s antipathy for Clinton was dismissed first as the misogyny of the so-called “Bernie Bros” and then as racism, a refusal to listen to Black voters in the primaries. Later, in 2020, concerns about Biden’s age and fitness for the presidency were brushed aside—even by people who raised similar concerns about Sanders—again on the grounds of ageism. The point is that centrist bloviating about “The Groups” misses the most consequential case of elite deference politics. The form practiced by the party establishment itself is vastly more responsible for the party’s plight in 2025 than environmental and racial justice nonprofits….
The Elephant in the Room — Reintermediation is the only path forward for Democrats
[Policy Tensor, via Naked Capitalism 07-01-2025]
...Start with the abundance agenda. Its focus is on improving government’s capacity to solve problems (like building more housing or infrastructure faster). That’s undeniably important – effective governance is a public good. However, ask: Who is advocating the abundance agenda, and to whom is it being pitched? Largely, it’s an elite discourse (journalists, think-tankers, some politicians) trying to convince other politically attentive elites that we should loosen regulations and invest in growth. The people most alienated from the Democratic Party – say, a non-college homeowner in a deindustrialized Midwestern town – are not part of this conversation, except perhaps as skeptical onlookers. In fact, some of those voters might hear “deregulate zoning and environmental rules” and think: that sounds like helping developers, not me. The messaging of abundance could easily be co-opted by the GOP (“Democrats want to sidestep environmental protections to ram through solar farms and apartments in your suburban neighborhood”). Without an underlying trust and relationship with communities, a pro-growth agenda might breed backlash rather than enthusiasm….
Ultimately, all three strategies operate within the existing paradigm of a mostly top-down party trying to persuade voters periodically. They tweak what the party says or does from the top, but not how the party connects with people at the ground level. None of them directly tackles the party’s structural legitimacy problem. Indeed, it’s telling that these debates are largely internal to elite circles – evidence of the very gap we’ve highlighted. As Waleed Shahid observed, Democrats have become “trapped in an increasingly bitter internal fight” between camps (populists vs. abundance advocates) instead of uniting to face outward challenges. And that fight is not purely ideological; it’s powered by insider interests (big donors and party operatives) who find the “abundance” framework a convenient way to dismiss the populist left’s critiques of corporate power….
[TW: does not address the issue of how political economy was reorganized over the past half century to favor capital at the expense of labor. The real elephant in the room is that with the Supreme Court having decriminalized corruption (see The Lever's podcast series The Master Plan), political elites are bought to do what the rich want.
[What must be restored is the historical understanding that the rich have always posed a threat to republican self-government because of their insatiable desire for more wealth and more power. As some scholars of the founding period have observed, one of the great tragedies of USA history is the supplanting of civic republicanism by economic liberalism. No one should be elevated to public office who do not see the rich as competitors for power, to be kept under control. Thomas Paine argued for a wealth tax as a means of ensuring freedom from oligarchy.]
On Zohran Mamdani and Taxi Drivers
Zephyr Teachout [via Naked Capitalism 07-03-2025]
Unable to Reinvent Itself, Dems Can’t Capitalize on Trump’s Missteps.
Jon Jeter’s Black Agenda Report
“The DNC,” he wrote, “owes its stasis to the internecine feud that came to a head with Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in last year’s general election and which spilled over into the New Year. That split pits party stalwarts against younger progressives who want Democrats to break from the conservative tradition established by Bill Clinton in his 1992 presidential campaign in a misguided effort to ‘out-Republican the Republicans.’”
The party’s disunion is the culmination of Bill Clinton’s strategy to compete with Ronald Reagan’s GOP for the votes of white, suburban racists by effectively being more conservative. Covering the tune, “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better,” Clinton razed the Wall Street regulations that Reagan only loosened. When Reagan left the White House, the number of conglomerates controlling the bulk of U.S. media outlets had been whittled from 50 to 29; by the time Clinton left office, the number was six. And while Reagan talked a good game about lifting trade barriers, the U.S. tariff regime was largely intact when he left office; the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed into law by Clinton opened the floodgates for employers to ship the nation’s manufacturing sector offshore.
It was, however, Clinton’s 1994 crime bill that was the focus of intense scrutiny in the 2020 U.S. presidential season, and rightly so. The Reagan and Bush administrations nearly doubled the nation’s federal prison population yet Clinton jailed more inmates in eight years than the Reagan and Bush administrations did in 12.
The Democratic Party is Its Voters And They’re Doing Just Fine
Josh Marshall, June 30, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
As it happens, I hadn’t known this primary was being held last weekend. (No excuses, just so much else going on and it was run as a so-called “firehouse primary” on an expedited basis.) The first I heard about it was from a handful of TPM Readers who wrote in to tell me about the surprising levels of energy and turnout they’d seen when they showed up to vote. This contrast caught my attention because it’s one that keeps showing up, paradoxically unremarked upon in almost all the election coverage we see.
On the one hand, the Democratic Party is “floundering,” “directionless,” “lost.” It’s approval numbers are bleak. And then, often in the same articles, you have all this evidence of voter intensity. Turnout. New activism. Lots of new people running for office. What seems like an apparent contradiction resolves itself if you get your terms right. I don’t think the Democratic Party is in a tailspin or floundering at all. In many cases, the elected leadership of the party is. But the elected leadership is not the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is its voters. Especially it’s primary voters….
Trump’s transactional regime
Trump’s Finances Were Shaky. Then He Began to Capitalize on His Comeback.
Russ Buettner, July 2, 2025 [New York Times]
Contrary to the president’s assertions, records filed in a fraud case against him suggest that his riches were not the product of a steady and strong empire.
Last spring, even as Donald J. Trump’s march back toward the White House dominated public attention, his finances, largely out of view, faced serious threats.His office building in Lower Manhattan generated too little cash to cover its mortgage, with the balance coming due. Many of his golf courses regularly lacked enough players to cover costs. The flow of millions of dollars a year from his stint as a television celebrity had mostly dried up.And a sudden wave of legal judgments threatened to devour all his cash.Then, with his clinching of the Republican nomination, everything began to change….Most glaringly, Mr. Trump is now both a partner in several crypto ventures and, as president, crypto’s chief policy regulator, and he has signaled that he wants his administration to have a hands-off approach to digital currencies.Today, those moves are seen by Mr. Trump’s detractors as a money grab of historic proportions. But an analysis by The New York Times of thousands of pages of internal Trump Organization documents filed in one of the legal actions against him suggests a more urgent motivation for Mr. Trump’s behavior: a need, rather than simply a desire, for easy money to keep his empire intact….
Resistance
Myriam-Fernanda Alcala Delgado July 3, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Betsy Levy Paluck, July 1, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The Know Nothings Never Left— They Just Rebranded as MAGA… The Klansmen In Khakis
Howie Klein, July 03, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Mica Soellner reported that racists and xenophobes like Chip Roy (R-TX), Brandon Gill (R-TX) and Gym Jordan (R-OH) are on the warpath. “In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s stunning win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, Hill Republicans are pondering a new issue— restricting legal immigration. Several conservatives have used Mamdani’s primary victory to argue that mass immigration is causing damaging cultural change, pointing to the 33-year-old’s political rise as an example. Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, was born in Uganda. Mamdani would become the first Muslim and Indian mayor of New York City if he wins the general election in November. ‘We have fifty-one-and-a-half million foreign born people in this country,’ Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) told us. ‘You clamp down on illegal immigration, which is what the president is doing, but you need to limit, slash and refocus legal immigration… legal immigration is part of the problem.’”
“Bipartisanship” Should Be An Epithet
Patrick Toomey, July 05, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
...The GOP, as a party, gleefully threw dirt on the graves of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society. It wasn’t the handiwork of 1 overfed, oversexed, and undereducated front man. It was fathered and nurtured by party stalwarts like Grover Norquist and Mitch McConnell.
Cutting social spending for the poor and middle class, cutting taxes for the top 1%, and running up huge deficits in the process have been essential elements of the GOP playbook since halcyon days of St. Ron the Forgetful. Let’s remember what then-OMB Director David Stockman said of the 1981 Reagan-era upper-bracket tax cutting orgy. Do you realize the greed that came to the forefront? The hogs were really feeding. The greed level, the level of opportunism, just got out of control.Stockman summarized the GOP template for 45 years and counting now….
What started as an effort to promote racial unity in Edenton by reconsidering its most prominent downtown symbol has done the opposite….The tone from the White House gives an extra sense of empowerment to those who have come out to defend the Edenton monument every weekend for the past three years. On a recent sunny Saturday, Ron Toppin, 80, and two helpers set up a canopy over tables neatly lined with trays of Confederate information sheets and hit the sidewalk two hours before their opponents arrived.Trump’s election “made the country a whole lot better,” said Toppin, whose late wife used to organize the informational materials for the group and who said his great-great-grandfather was a rebel soldier captured by the Union in 1863. “We’ve got America back.”Mike Dean, commander of the Edenton Bell Battery of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, roared up on his Harley — dubbed “Traveller” after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s horse — and took command of the outpost. When a few protesters began marching up the sidewalk, Dean gestured to a woman walking by with a sign that read “Remove this statue.”“Understand,” Dean said, “these are Marxists. Marxists want to destroy history.”
John Ganz, July 1, 2025 [Unpopular Front]
The essence of Trump’s movement is an attack on the very concept of American citizenship. It’s the bright, red thread that runs through the entirety of its existence: from its origin in birtherism, the racist idea that there was something questionable or tainted about Barack Obama’s citizenship, to the stolen election myth, which sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans, to the attempt to end birthright citizenship by fiat through executive order, and the newly announced prioritization of denaturalization cases by the Department of Justice. A Republican congressman called for New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s denaturalization and deportation. The White House said it should be “investigated.” This is not to be taken lightly.
I say it is an attack on the concept of citizenship, not a redefinition or even a return to the pre-Reconstruction racial state, because, in the Trumpian universe, there is no agreed-upon, apolitical definition of who is granted citizenship, of who bears inalienable rights under the law. The sovereign decides who is a citizen, as it decides who is an enemy and where and when the law applies. It becomes entirely arbitrary, a prerogative grant….
It’s long been my contention that the attack on citizenship is the most serious and frightful aspect of the Trump phenomenon and the one that makes it most deserving of the epithet fascist or totalitarian. “MAGA,” in its innermost being, means “death to America.” If they successfully destroy American citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution they will have destroyed the country… It will be a chaotic and shambolic existence where more and more people have to scramble to ensure they have the right papers or are in the right zone.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Joshua Kolb, Lily Conway, and Joyce Vance, July 1, 2025
Last week ended with the legal fireworks lawyers wait for every year: the bundle of Supreme Court decisions released at the end of June before the justices take their summer break. A total of nine opinions were released on Thursday and Friday, and while all the rulings were significant, there were four particularly notable decisions that will have significant nationwide repercussions and tell us where the court (and therefore the country) is headed.
The Necessity of Birthright Citizenship for Black People
Margaret Kimberley, Ju[y 2, 2025 [Black Agenda Report]
"I'm just saying if we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat. I don't know if we do or not, we're looking at that right now." - Donald Trump on sending U.S. citizens convicted of crimes out of the country….
...The 14th Amendment did undo the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which deprived all Black people of citizenship. But Black people must always be wary and think ahead, as our enemies may be doing. Once any changes to the understanding of birthright citizenship are made, there is a possibility of persons, particularly from marginalized groups, becoming stateless. There are people who don’t have ready access to birth certificates, or in the case of a Black woman in Texas who has a birth certificate listing her name only as “Girl” and who, as a result, cannot obtain a Social Security card or prove her citizenship. No one knows how many other people find themselves in such situations….
