Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 11, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
“A curtain of darkness is settling over our nation.”
[TW: For a reason I shall explain, there were a number of posts this past week that struck me but I have not included all of them here. What struck me was the impression that the writers are beginning to wrestle with some truly fundamental questions of human nature, and how human nature can be molded — or more accurately, channeled and contained — by how society is organized, according to which principles, and whether the leaders of society embody, to some degree or another, those principles. So, I was greatly encouraged a couple days ago when a reader from this site reached out to me using Facebook messages to initiate a discussion of civic republicanism.]
In Defense of Pretexts — Paying tribute to virtue is better than the alternative…
Brian Beutler, Jan 09, 2026 [Off Message]
...my impression is most people, even many of Trump’s own loyalists, haven’t experienced all this as just another week in Trumpville. They feel more disturbed—or, in MAGA, more titillated—as though a new threshold of wickedness has been crossed.
That’s been my feeling since Sunday morning, for reasons I at first struggled to articulate.…
I would of course prefer to live in a world where policymakers and elected officials were scrupulously honest and above board. If that were our condition, we wouldn’t have pretexts, because we wouldn’t start any wars. We might finish them, but we wouldn’t go looking.
Building a world like that should be our north star. But in the world of today—of mixed and rotten motives, where wars of choice happen whether I want them to or not—I’ll take false justifications for bad acts.
If you care about America’s highest aspirations—freedom, equality, self-governance rule of law—the pretexts matter. We can be clear eyed about the people who lay false claim to these ideals, yet still take some solace in their lies, because the lies confirm that the ideals still have power.
Why pretend that a war of plunder is meant to spread democracy or fight communism or defend the homeland, unless you know that the public values certain higher principles, and may revolt if you traduce them? If your true motives are toxic, you have to conceal them, because the people—we the people—are better than you.
This is the tribute vice pays to virtue in the rawest sense, and it is revealing. These are cynical people, many of whom have no place in their hearts for principle or consistency. But if that is their nature, why would they pay tribute to anything? Vice is vice.
They do it because virtue still controls. It’s still the default. Because they haven’t won the masses over to uncut evil.
By dispensing with the pretexts, Trump suggests he thinks he’s overcome that obstacle, worn the public down, made us as malevolent as he is. He still pays some tribute to virtue. He won’t cop to having launched a war. But the theft and subjugation are right there on the surface, without any tributes to virtue.
I think this is what has people so unsettled. Why he has to be stopped preemptively and forced to reverse, or else be run out of office. If he prevails—not just in acting lawlessly, but in doing so nakedly, and without pushback—then it’s over. We become changed.
That’s why I miss the pretexts. It’s also why I take some solace in the fact that his Venezuela “policy” polls poorly. That his menacing of Greenland polls even worse….
Ryan Enos, Jan 09, 2026
Right now, the Republican Party is enabling the authoritarian leader who is ignoring the law and terrorizing his own citizens. Because of this party’s leader, we no longer live in a full democracy. But, despite this or, perhaps, because of it, the future of democracy in the United States will depend on choices made within the Republican Party.
This must be the path because a liberal democracy requires more than one functioning party, and, at least in the foreseeable future, the Republican Party will be one of them. Our plan for sustaining that liberal society can’t be shutting the GOP out of power, but rather must include shaping the Republican Party, the party that will represent the approximately half of society that inevitably holds right-wing beliefs, into a party that upholds liberalism (small l) and democracy.
The alternative is to hope that Democrats win all elections moving forward. But if this is our plan for sustaining democracy, we are cooked…..
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Rep. Omar Warns Trump Aims to Provoke Enough Agitation in Minnesota So He Can Declare ‘Martial Law’
Jon Queally, Jan 10, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Jim Stewartson, Jan 07, 2026 [MindWar]
Following ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good, Trump officials threaten mass repression
[Countercurrents, via Naked Capitalism 01-10-2025]
… The conscious and deliberate character of Good’s killing is underscored by the open and unapologetic defense of the murder by Trump administration officials. By hailing the killing, Trump and the coterie of fascists in the administration are making clear that it was an expression of official government policy.
Everything coming out of the mouths of administration officials is a lie, and everyone knows it is a lie. On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance held a press conference in which he slandered Good and praised her killer. He called the federal agent’s actions “legitimate” and denounced the media for “talking about this guy as if he’s a murderer,” adding menacingly, “Be a little bit more careful.”
The Trump administration is seizing on the murder of Good as a pretext for a sweeping escalation in the criminalization of political opposition. Vance announced the creation of a new assistant attorney general position that will answer directly to the president. Asked about his message to “far-leftist agitators,” Vance declared: “Now they have an assistant attorney general who is going to prosecute and investigate their fraud and their violence more aggressively than it has ever been investigated.”
Vance accused “a group of left-wing radicals” of using “domestic terror techniques” to oppose the government’s immigration policies.
He never referred to Good by name, instead smearing her as “that woman,” a “deranged leftist” who was “brainwashed.” He insisted the killer was “protected by absolute immunity,” denounced the local investigation into the murder, and declared, “The unprecedented thing is the idea that a local official can actually prosecute a federal official with absolute immunity.” ….
In an extraordinary statement, Trump declared that he operates outside of any legal constraint. Asked whether there were any limits on his ability to strike, invade or coerce other nations, Trump responded: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He dismissed international law outright—“I don’t need international law”—and made clear that he would be the sole arbiter of any legal constraints: “It depends what your definition of international law is.” ….
While leading Democrats have issued insincere statements in response to the killing of Good, their main concern is to contain the explosive growth of opposition within the United States…. At a press conference Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries were asked if they would use their budgetary powers to rein in ICE. They refused to answer….
Letters from an American, January 10, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jan 11, 2026
...Hours after Good’s death, Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem appeared in Manhattan behind a podium emblazoned with the words: “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS.”….
We’re All “Domestic Terrorists” Now
Ross Rosenfeld, January 8, 2026 [The New Republic]
In ICE’s Own Words, It’s “Wartime” in America
Michael Tomasky, January 9, 2026 [The New Republic]
ICE just launched a “wartime recruitment” campaign and seeks agents who want to “defend” their “culture.” There will be more Renee Goods….
Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by ‘My Own Morality
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]
Jim Stewartson, Jan 09, 2026 [MindWar]
A word often used to describe Trump is authoritarian. But this is insufficient. Authority is the recognized right to control outcomes within a set of constraints accepted as binding—familial, religious, cultural, moral or legal.
The U.S. federal government is deliberately destroying the idea of any authority being legitimate except the ability to project coercive violence. We are living in the “might makes right” world of neo-Nazi ideology, a kratocracy.
- William Montague defined kratocracy as: a government by those strong enough to seize control through violence or deceit.
In ‘Unhinged’ Rant, Miller Says US Has Right to Take Over Any Country For Its Resources
Julia Conley, January 06, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trump admin sends tough private message to oil companies on Venezuela
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 01-04-2026]
Administration officials have told oil executives in recent weeks that if they want compensation for their rigs, pipelines and other seized property, then they must be prepared to go back into Venezuela now and invest heavily in reviving its shattered petroleum industry, two people familiar with the administration’s outreach told POLITICO on Saturday….
Monopoly Round-Up: A Gunboat Oligarchy Goes After Venezuelan Oil
Matt Stoller, Jan 04, 2026 [BIG]
[TW: a history lesson that is grandly encouraging. Wright Patman would be a wonderful subject for Ron Chernow’s next book (but so also would be Lincoln economic advisor Henry Carey; Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who delivered one of the most important American explanations of civic republicanism; and Pennsylvania Congressman Thadeous Stevens, whose warnings of the dreadful consequences of failing to seize the wealth of the slave-holders proved to be entirely accurate). Also important is Stoller noting that Trump is really just a continuation of Bush. Implication: getting rid of Trump will not solve the underlying problems of an entrenched oligarchy controlling both major political parties, and the militant conservative and libertarian movements that are nurtured and richly funded by that entrenched oligarchy.]
Trump kicked off 2026 with a military attack on Venezuela and a naked seizure of oil resources. Wall Street is overjoyed. Plus, Mamdani takes office and billionaires rage at a wealth tax….
...U.S. domination of the oil reserves of South America is not new. And neither is the fusion of corporate and state interest.
Ninety five years ago, in 1931, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who owned Gulf Oil (now Chevron), forced the President of Colombia to give his company the Barco oil concession, which borders Venezuela. How? Well Wall Street banks and the U.S. government threatened to withhold vitally needed bank loans if Colombia did not cede the franchise….
At the time, Democrats were incompetent and split, as it was an era of deep reverence for the wealthy and bitter culture warring over race and alcohol. For instance, the head of the DNC in the late 1920s, a Dupont executive named John J. Raskob, published a pamphlet titled “Everybody Ought to Be Rich” encouraging Americans to borrow money to invest in the stock market.
Just as there is increasing support for cynical and nihilistic figures today, many in the 1920s felt warmly towards Mellon, Mussolini, and authoritarianism in general….
But then came the 1929 crash, and a period of “debunking” of myths, as Louis Brandeis put it. The old order was discredited. And a political realignment occurred. The Democrats turned to liberalism, and former party elites like Raskob became bitter foes of FDR in the 1930s. But more importantly, Patman’s impeachment campaign succeeded. Mellon was fired, because then-President Herbert Hoover was under political pressure over the widespread revulsion towards economic elites. You get a sense of this dynamic by going through Patman’s Congressional correspondence. “We have just got Al Capone,” wrote one Texan. “Now let’s get some of the others.”
...Ultimately, what the attack on Venezuela shows is that Donald Trump decided to use his 2024 mandate for change to revert back to a traditional gunboat diplomacy framework, both domestically and abroad. Like Mellon, Harding, Hoover, and George W. Bush, Trump is operating on behalf of financial capital. Indeed, Trump more reflects Bush than anyone else; his administration is staffed with former Bush Republicans, and the GOP Congress is full of Bush adherents.
The Narco-Trafficking Elite Set to Run Venezuela (w/ Maureen Tkacik)
[The Chris Hedges Report, Jan 07, 2026
Donald Trump Issues Greenland Deadline
[Newsweek, via Naked Capitalism 01-06-2026]
Stephen Miller Asserts U.S. Has Right to Take Greenland
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-06-2026]
Jim Stewartson, Jan 04, 2026 [MindWar]
Just after the Trump regime invaded Venezuela and captured its president, Stephen Miller’s wife Katie—who works for Elon Musk—tweeted a threat to Greenland, which is the territory of Denmark, a NATO nation.
A few hours later, Musk and Trump had dinner together for the first time since Musk said Trump was in the Epstein files. I believe the timing of this reunion is no coincidence.
While there are numerous toxic winds flowing through this regime, the “foreign policy” all fits into a plan from the 1930s by Technocracy, Inc.—a fascistic movement calling for the elimination of democracy in favor of rule by technocrats. Technocracy’s charter included the creation of a super-state called the “Technate of America” spanning from Greenland to Venezuela.
Technocracy was led in Canada by Joshua Haldeman—Elon Musk’s grandfather, a vicious racist who moved his family to apartheid South Africa in 1950. Many of Musk’s beliefs are simply passed down directly through his family—including, it appears, the idea of creating a “Technate.”
[Map of Technate of America]
.
Trump withdraws US from 66 international organizations and treaties
[USA Today, via Naked Capitalism 01-07-2025]
Is Trump Building a Massive Data Center Beneath the East Wing? If So, Why?
Thomas Neuburger, Jan 07, 2026 [God's Spies]
What do our new-minted masters, those Thiel-driven souls, have in mind for us next?
The Drey Dossier is an investigative reporting project run by Audrey Henson (Audrey → “Drey”)…. For the full information she provides, watch the video below, or better, read the accompanying article at her Substack site.…
- Okay, so what does any of this actually mean? Well, I think we should go back to the underground data centers in Jerusalem because understanding why Israel built those might tell us why Trump is building one here. Allegedly. Supposedly. In my opinion.
- So, Israel built those facilities for something called Project Nimbus, which is their government cloud infrastructure. And we’ve seen what this looks like in practice, right? I mean, the AI system that Israel is using in Gaza, the targeting systems, the surveillance infrastructure, the operational decision-making, and that all runs on this underground data center network.
- I mean, we’re talking full AI takeover, military operations, intelligence gathering, government AI, information systems like banking, critical infrastructure controls, everything that keeps the country running. And they put it nine stories underground because they needed it to survive. Not just survive a power outage or a cyber attack, but to survive a war. I mean, they needed it to survive missile strikes and keep running no matter what happens above the ground.
- Because when you have your entire government running on AI systems, that is now the brain of your country. and you have to protect the brain of your country with a thick, thick skull.
- That’s what data sovereignty looks like. That’s continuity of government. And that’s what AI warfare infrastructure actually looks like.
- And then I’m looking at Project Stargate announced on January 21st, 2025, Trump’s first full day in office. And Larry Ellison is going on and on about this $500 billion AI infrastructure that’s going to save the government and cure cancer. But all of these grandiose ideas surrounding AI, all of that needs a home.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-07-2025]
Strategic Political Economy
Why politicians won’t fix affordability
Richard Murphy, January, 7 2026 [Funding the Future]
Across the UK and beyond, politicians talk endlessly about affordability — yet nothing improves.
Why?
Because they are blaming inflation when the real issue is structural income extraction. Rent, mortgage interest, utilities, subscriptions, fees, and financial add-ons are permanently draining household income, leaving people with no real choice over how they live.
In this video, I explain how weakened regulation, captured competition policy, and financialisation created a system designed to extract income, and why mainstream politics refuses to confront it….
Craig Tindale, Jan 06, 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 01-07-2025]
What follows is an autopsy of a systemic breakdown in the conversion of financial power into physical capacity.
This essay maps the permanent divergence between the monetary economy and the physical world.
I rely on a set of precise terms, such as Hard Bifurcation and Silent Calculus. I coined them out of necessity. The existing economic vocabulary failed to describe the present condition. Terms like inflation, recession, or supply shock imply deviation within a functioning system. They assume the machine still works.
It does not.
The language of Wall Street cannot describe a burning rolling mill or the strategic cost of a chemical spill. It treats the physical world as an externality. This essay uses a different vocabulary, one that treats physics, time, and material constraint as primary.
These terms exist to bridge the gap between the ledger and the factory floor. They provide a framework for discussing a reality that current policy refuses to name….
The global economy is experiencing a structural breakdown in the conversion of financial claims into physical output. I define this failure as the Hard Bifurcation: the separation of the monetary economy from the physical economy. For forty years, the two systems moved together. Money flowed into markets, and goods flowed out. That linkage has broken….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]
.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-07-2025]
The Great Unraveling Has Begun
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-07-2025]
Grim numbers: “…from 1989 to 2014, battle-related deaths from cross-border conflicts averaged less than 15,000 a year. Beginning in 2014, the average has risen to over 100,000 a year.”
Chris Hedges, Jan 05, 2026
Global power shift
China’s Laser Leap: Beijing Is Quietly Winning the Next Arms Race
[The National Interest, via Naked Capitalism 01-04-2026]
Revolutionary generator transforms Chinese factories into power plants
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 01-06-2026]
A Tale of Two Ecosystems: Why China Has Not Yet Surpassed the US in Original Innovation
[Sinification, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]
Oligarchy
Israeli Billionaire’s Call to Limit Free Speech Sparks Conservative Fury
[Newsweek, via Naked Capitalism 01-04-2026]
[Where’s Your Ed At?, via The Big Picture, January 03, 2026]
We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when “being good at stuff” matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where “what’s useful” is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
The Plot to Steal the World: Crypto-Fascists and Trump's World War Crime Spree
Dougald Lamont, January 06, 2026
If you want to Defund the Criminals, Drug Cartels, Human Traffickers, Terrorists and Rogue Nuclear states, Criminalize Crypto….
Here are three more signs of the sheer, brazen criminality that is happening in plain sight. In order to evade sanctions on the sale of its oil, Maduro-Run Venezuela bought cryptocurrency, from a company called Tether, whose banker is Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick….
If it seems that Trump has been trying to deliberately crash the economy, with the assistance of these individuals, it has to be said that Musk, Thiel, and other cryptomaniacs want a future where they get to run cities and countries as private corporations, for themselves. They have no issue with a global economic crash or the end of the U.S. as the global reserve currency, which every single policy Trump has announced has been hastening.
They want the global economy to crash, because they want to replace the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency with crypto - which they own….
The chilling indifference of the maniacal tech oligarchs who favour a crash - including Ron Paul, Elon Musk, Thiel and Bannon - is that they are, not to put too fine a point upon it, crackpots. They are often working from the theories of other crazy people, like Curtis Yarvin. The thing about their ideas, is not just that they are morally repellent: they are so alarming is that they get so much wrong and if implemented, people will die and be subjugated even more horribly than at present.
Everything that is happening right now was described, over and over, in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It’s been doubted that the tulipomania, where people paid a king’s ransom for a single bulb, could happen. A memecoin is a computer file. It’s the only money that needs electricity to work.
Someone once said of Trump: the scandal distracts from the crime. The problem is being driven by criminals and bad actors. The solution is enforcing the law - while we still can.
Felonomics
Millions with debt brace for smaller paychecks as government crackdown begins from January 7
[Economic Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-06-2026]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-06-2026]
I’ve been in this game for 20 years, and there’s one setup that makes me worried. You’re looking at it. This isn't just a rally, this is our warning.
Here’s what’s happening & why I’m worried: In a normal market, this screen is impossible. Copper rallies when the economy is BOOMING, and gold rallies when the economy is BREAKING. They are supposed to fight each other. We are witnessing the breakdown of the risk-parity model. The inverse correlation between real yields and gold has snapped.
US oil groups warn they will need guarantees to invest in Venezuela
[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]
[Conor Gallagher: “The money quote: ‘“No one wants to go in there when a random fucking tweet can change the entire foreign policy of the country,” said one private equity investor who specialises in energy.’ “]
The latest government inflation and GDP figures are worthless, and will be for months to come
[Los Angeles Times, via The Big Picture, December 28, 2025]
The federal government’s monthly releases of economic statistics — especially the inflation rate and growth as tracked by gross domestic product — have long occasioned partisan preening (or denunciation) and for a general public stock-taking of the health of the economy. Not this month. This time, they’re the occasion for doubt and confusion….
The economists whose jobs involve scrutinizing those statistics to glean what they really mean don’t view them as unalloyed support for Trumponomics. Quite the contrary. Many see them as artifacts of the long government shutdown, which halted the collection of data that go into those reports, severely distorting the results. Furthermore, they expect the flaws in those reports to persist well into 2026, undermining their usefulness as true economic indicators.“You’ve got to take it with a grain of salt,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, of the inflation report. “It’s confusing and it doesn’t quite square with prices that we’ve observed.”A close examination of the GDP figures also underscores the narrow basis driving economic growth in recent months — it’s essentially the product of robust spending by wealthy consumers and massive corporate investments in AI technology. For middle- and lower-income Americans, the economic present and future don’t look anywhere as sunny as the numbers would suggest.“The numbers give you meaningful information about the system, but not about how people experience their actual lives,” says financial analyst and economic commentator Zachary Karabell, whose 2014 book “The Leading Indicators” injected some perspective on how we interpret economic statistics and explained why our faith in them is often misplaced….Indeed, consumer confidence has been sinking for months, according to the Conference Board. That points to an enduring question about the U.S. economy: Whose economy is it? More than ever, it belongs to the rich, producing a “K-shaped” economy, which has been playing out in shopping patterns this holiday season, as my colleague Caroline Petrow-Cohen recently wrote….The divergence between the gross economic statistics and the lived experience of Americans is nothing new. It was remarked on by Robert F. Kennedy Sr. in a speech in March 1968, less than three months before his nascent presidential campaign was ended by an assassin’s bullet.
- “Gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage,” he observed. “It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. ... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. ... It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
Here’s how Trump gets away with using dubious numbers
[Los Angeles Times, via The Big Picture, December 28, 2025]
Trump doesn’t use numbers the way most of us do, as “things that can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided,” as Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman put it. Rather, he uses them as rhetorical objects.
Trump Tells Fannie, Freddie to Buy $200 Billion of Mortgage Debt
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]
[TW: It is hard to describe how infuriating and frustrating it is that Trump is addressing this issue by injecting the government back into the economy, while Democratic Party elites remain silent in obeisance to the divine right of property.]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
The gap between farm costs and prices received hits a decade high
[Investigate Midwest, via Naked Capitalism 01-05-2026]
The One Simple Thing That Makes the U.S. Economy Unmanageable
Matt Stoller, Jan 09, 2026 [BIG]
We used to be able to answer the question "How much does that cost?" But prices in America are not only high, but increasingly hidden. Fortunately, there's pushback.
Health care crisis
The Other Health Care Cliff Americans Are About to Fall Off
[HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 01-07-2025]
...those joining the surge of patients switching their ACA health coverage from the common Silver plan to the lower-premium Bronze coverage could pay thousands more as a result.
An analysis by KFF, the health care think tank, found that the average deductible in 2026 for patients who sign up for a Silver plan, assuming no reductions for cost sharing, will rise to $5,304, but for those who opt into a Bronze plan, the average deductible will spike to $7,576 – meaning a more than $2,000 higher outlay for sicker patients who max out on their covered expenses.
Katie Keith, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Health Policy and the Law and a former Biden administration aide, said the skyrocketing cost of insurance means “people are so premium sensitive that they might still go with Bronze and kind of leave money on the table – then they’re facing at least a $9,000 deductible, or whatever out-of-pocket max is, and just huge burdens.”….
Predatory finance
Locals wanted to rebuild Pacific Palisades, Altadena. Then the big investors moved in
[Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]
Restoring balance to the economy
YouTube video overview of my online course
Steve Keen, Jan 04, 2026 [Building a New Economics]
I’ve just posted a video which gives an overview of my critiques of Neoclassical economics and my alternative approach to economics:
It is long—about 80 minutes, versus the 20 minute length of my standard videos. I cover seven topics, each of which gets its own roughly 90 minute lecture in my online course:
1: Lessons for Economics from Astronomy
2: The Fallacies of Supply and Demand
3: How the Macroeconomy really works
4: Understanding Money using Ravel, “the monetary telescope”
5: Why economists are wrong about government and private debt
6: Financial Instability: why (most) economists missed “the GFC”
7: Energy, Ecology, and Economics….
[Economic Policy Institute, December 16, 2025]
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
Anti-Aging Injection Regrows Knee Cartilage and Prevents Arthritis
[SciTech Daily, via Naked Capitalism 01-04-2026]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Disrupting mainstream politics
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
The data center rebellion is here, and it’s reshaping the political landscape
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 01-06-2026]
[Going Deep with Russ Baker, Jan 04, 2026]
...A related point: It’s actually in the interests of Big Tech to promote the idea that AI will soon be self-conscious. Why? Because — together with the human tendency to attribute self-consciousness to a machine that has been programmed to sound like a person — the assumption that large language models (LLMs) are, or may soon become, self-conscious obscures the even more immediate threat they pose: The people running the LLMs — people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman — are right now inserting their desires and assumptions into the AI’s responses.
It has been repeatedly demonstrated that these AI masters can tweak the algorithms to foreground, or suppress, certain responses in the AI’s repertoire, such that AIs — which are increasingly monopolizing the news and information “universe” that underpins modern civilization — are being directed, in mostly invisible ways, by private interests with their own agendas.
In other words, we are subject to the control of a new generation of “press lords,” more powerful than the Hearsts and Pulitzers and TV network czars of the past. And this level of control over our information is rarely acknowledged….
[TW: Information in a republic is essential to the entire structure of self-government. There must be free flows of truthful information to citizens for the franchise to direct the mechanisms of governance effectively. But right now, these fundamental considerations of the philosophy of civic republicanism information are entirely neglected because our society is now dominated by the philosophy of liberalism and its veneration of the right to accumulate property without limits. But as Stoller noted in his article linked to above, “the public is finally cottoning on to the real power structure they inhabit, after a 50-year episode of amnesia. There is now deep and broad popular anger at the makers of war, and oligarchs.” And see the link to Trump: The Anti-Lincoln, below.]
The State of Anti-Surveillance Design
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 01-06-2026]
You Must Stare Into the Heart of the $400 Million Machine
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 01-05-2026]
A new 55-minute YouTube video is the most in-depth and lucid explanation I’ve ever consumed about the $400 million machine—ASML’s colossal EUV lithography system—how and why this technology was conceived, and roughly how it works.
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 01-05-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
How Project 2025 kneecapped the US press.
[Columbia Journalism Review, via The Big Picture, January 04, 2025]
The Heritage Foundation’s road map for a conservative presidency proposed sweeping media reforms. Trump carried out most of them—and he has three years left.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Owners Couldn’t Bust the Union, so They Shut Down the Paper
[Communication Workers of America, via Naked Capitalism 01-07-2025]
The Public Good, Not Patriotism — Journalists don't work for the United States of America.
Hamilton Nolan, Jan 05, 2026 [How Things Work]
Who does a journalist work for? You work for your editor, sure, and you work for your employer, but more importantly, you work for your readers. Even more than that, you work for the public. You work in service of the belief that everyone deserves to know about the things that affect their life. You work for the good of humanity….
Climate and environmental crises
Category 6 hurricanes? Deep ocean heat is fueling stronger storms
[Earth, via Naked Capitalism 01-06-2025]
[The Independent, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]
Where The Prairie Still Remains
[Noema, via Naked Capitalism 01-09-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
The Democratic Base Is Social Democratic
Harold Meyerson, January 7, 2026 [The American Prospect]
...I recently noted that in attendance at a D.C. fundraiser for Luke Bronin, who is mounting a primary challenge to longtime liberal Democrat Rep. John Larson for his central Connecticut House seat, was Jamie Gorelick, who’d been the deputy attorney general in Bill Clinton’s Justice Department. Gorelick has been a board member of Amazon for the past 14 years, where her legal expertise has doubtless come in handy. During those years, Amazon has gone to court to argue that the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Labor Relations Board are unconstitutional, refused to bargain with the Staten Island warehouse workers who voted to go union in 2022, and shuttered all seven of its warehouses in Quebec after workers in one of those warehouses had voted to unionize.
Even as the base of the Democratic Party is an increasingly visible force for social democracy, the least we should expect of Democratic candidates is that they don’t owe their careers to dismantlers of the New Deal. Nor do they have to be socialists themselves, but they at least should understand that their fellow Democrats seek a decidedly more social democratic America, and act accordingly.
[[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-05-2025]
The Venezuelan investment junket will be led by major Dem Party donor Charles Myers, whose hobbies include maximizing the profitability of illegal foreign wars and “resisting what he sees as the party’s socialist tilt.” The tent is too big! Excommunicate the vultures!
Hamilton Nolan, Jan 08, 2026 [How Things Work]
A paranoid and fearful man gets a bunch of loaded guns and leaves them in every room of his house. Eventually, his curious toddler, or his boastful teenager, or the man himself on a drunken bender picks one up, and something awful happens. When it does, we say to the man: “You shouldn’t have had all those loaded guns laying around.”
In our country, the loaded guns are referred to as “law enforcement.” But rather than listening to those who say that constantly increasing the number of armed men with badges is unwise, we mock and scorn them. We accuse them of being unrealistic, dreamy, overly radical, not tough on crime. Then, always, something awful happens. After a brief pause for collective head-shaking, we do it all over again.
In 2020, millions of Americans marched in the streets to protest police violence. Millions of people called for defunding the police. What did they mean by that? They meant that it is unwise to continually buy more and more loaded guns and leave them around our house in the name of safety. They meant, concretely, that our government at every level should spend less money on armed local police and armed state police and armed federal police, and spend more money on addressing the social and economic issues that are the underlying causes of what we call “crime.”
For this eminently wise and sensible suggestion, they were made fun of by the entire political establishment. They were dismissed by blow-dried pundits on television and in print. And they saw the Democratic Party politicians who had, only months before, been marching with them in the popular protests run away from their actual policy demands as fast and as loudly as possible. “The answer is not to defund our police departments, it’s to fund our police,” said Joe Biden, echoing all of his mainstream Democratic peers. You could almost hear the crunching of tires over the bones of Black Lives Matter as the Democrats threw them under the bus….
The cult of law enforcement is bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans differ only in degree, and the degree is minor, and often, Democrats decide to try to outdo Republicans on this issue in order to score political points, so the net effect is that there is very little real counterpoint to this cult in the entire political establishment. This cult worships the idea that spending more money on armed men is the path to safety, and to justice, and to peace. This cult is why we have so many local police, and so many of them are absurdly armed with weapons of war. And it is also why we have the largest military budget on earth, and a sprawling security state that reaches into every corner of the world with spies and drones and satellites. All of this is of a piece….
...Second, when you create large pools of armed, empowered men, sooner or later someone whose ideas you dislike will be in charge of them.
When people warned Barack Obama and Joe Biden about the worrying persistence of the huge armed global apparatus that America has built up since the “War on Terror” began, this is what they were warning about. Now, a bad man has it, and he is doing bad things with it. This was the easiest thing in history to see coming. This is what happens when you have an endless cycle of increasing the guns in your house, and you never get rid of any. You cannot just add police and soldiers and spies and weapons forever and expect that nobody will ever do anything bad with them....
Abolish ICE? DHS Too. It’s Time
Josh Marshall, Jan 9, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
The Dep, artment of Homeland Security is one of those changes of government, a reaction to 9/11 interwoven with the militarization of American society caused by the Iraq War, that got us to this bad point. We should undo it, take the different agencies and distribute them back to where they were back in 2002. The origins of the whole thing are complicated and strange. It’s a concept that was first pushed by Democrats in late 2001 and 2002 as a sort of managerial and technocratic streamlining of government that had the fringe benefit of giving beleaguered Democrats something to say on the subject of combating terrorism. The language of “homeland” security, an imported word which was mostly unknown in American civic discourse before the late 1990s, was always a grim sign of what was to come. It was a bad idea. Time to undo it.
Resistance
Jordan Zakarin, Jan 09, 2026 [Progress Report]
Living in the Lie, And How Not To
John Ganz, Jan 08, 2026 [Unpopular Front]
...one of the things I read was a blog post called “Exploration of Wojtyła’s ‘The Acting Person’ and Kołakowski’s ‘Theses on Hope and Hopelessness’ as possible philosophical foundations of the Solidarity Movement in Poland.” Wojtyła’s is Karol Józef Wojtyła, future Pope John Paul II; Kołakowski, of course, is the philosopher and intellectual historian Leszek Kołakowski; and the Solidarity Movement was a trade union whose non-violent civil resistance helped bring down the regime in Poland.
The paper describes resistance in a situation where there is no political sphere, no civil society, and where it is impossible to organize or speak publicly without incurring the weight of state oppression. In other words, it is a situation unlike our own. However distorted or damaged they may be, we retain our political freedoms. But one line at the end stuck with me, “Kołakowski wrote in The Eclipse of Ideology, ‘It is perhaps the most oppressive part of life under communism. Not terror, not exploitation, but the all-pervading lie, felt by everybody, known to everybody. It is something which makes life intolerable.’”
I don’t know about you, but I find the endless lies and lying often to be the most infuriating and demoralizing part of the present situation….
Eric Blanc and Bhaskar Sunkara, Jan 05, 2026 [Labor Politics]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Dean Obeidallah, Jan 05, 2026
...Stephen Miller appeared on Fox News on October 24, 2025, to tell ICE to keep doing what they are doing. And even more dangerously, he told them they were above the law and immune from any accountability by state officials. In that interview, Miller was asked about the Illinois Gov JB Pritzker’s threat to arrest ICE agents if they violate state law. In response Miller stated: “To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” Miller continued, “And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony.” (See clip below)
This very position was repeated by Trump’s own DOJ in a letter on Oct 23, 2025 from Deputy AG Todd Blanche to officials in California who were contemplating holding ICE agents accountable for state law violations. Blanche wrote in that letter which was publicly released, “The Department of Justice views any arrests of federal agents and officers in the performance of their official duties as both illegal and futile.”
There is no subtlety here. Miller and Trump’s DOJ told ICE agents that they are above the law….
The Week Ahead, January 4, 2026
Joyce Vance [Civil Discourse]
The constitutional prescription for fixing this problem of presidential overreach is Congress. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker had something to say about that over the weekend, in light of the Trump administration’s strike on Venezuela.
But then, Senator Booker put the blame precisely where it is due. He continued, “just as glaring, and far more damning, is Congress’ ongoing abdication of its constitutional duty. For almost a year now, the legislative branch has failed to check a president who repeatedly violates his oath, disregards the law, and endangers American interests at home and abroad.”
He called out the Republican-led Congress for choosing “spineless complicity over its sworn responsibilities.” He condemned its inaction in the face of Signalgate, with Trump’s “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth escaping any censure for “the reckless leaking of classified information that put American troops at risk.” The senator also pointed to the “stunning absence of accountability” for the administration’s “illegal use of military force destroying vessels and killing people in the Caribbean and the Pacific without congressional authorization.”Booker cited a litany of Congressional failures:
No hearings.
No serious investigations.
No enforcement of checks and balances.
No accountability.
He called Congress cowardly and submissive.We are long past due for someone to speak so plainly to the country about the Republican-led Congress’ failure to do its constitutional duty. The question is, who is listening, and will it lead to action this week? ….
Letters from an American, January 5, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jan 06, 2026
Since the 1980s, Republicans pushed the idea that a popular government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends. As cuts to regulation, taxation, and the nation’s social safety net began to hollow out the middle class, Republicans pushed the idea that the country’s problems came from greedy minorities and women who wanted to work outside the home. More and more, they insisted that the federal government was stealing tax dollars and destroying society, and they encouraged individual men to take charge of the country.
After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, more commonly known as the motor voter law, enabling people to register to vote at motor vehicle departments, Republicans increasingly insisted Democrats were cheating the system by relying on the votes of noncitizens, although there was never any evidence for this charge.
As wealth continued to move upward, the idea that individuals and paramilitary groups must “reclaim” America from undeserving Americans who were taking tax dollars and cheating to win elections became embedded in the Republican Party. By 2014, Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) called Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his supporters “patriots” when they showed up armed to meet officials from the Bureau of Land Management who tried to impound Bundy’s cattle because he owed more than $1 million in grazing fees for running cattle on public land.
The idea of reclaiming the country for white men by destroying the federal government grew, along with the idea that Democrats could win elections only by cheating. In 2016, Trump insisted that his female Democratic opponent belonged in jail and that he alone could save the country from the Washington, D.C., “swamp.” Other Republican leaders who had initially shunned him began to support him when it became clear that he could mobilize a new crop of disaffected voters who could put Republicans into office.
Letters from an American, January 6, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jan 07, 2026
“They say that when you win the presidency you lose the midterm,” President Donald J. Trump said today to House Republicans. “I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy. They don’t. They have a horrible policy. They do stick together. They’re violent, they’re vicious, you know. They’re vicious people.”
“They had the worst policy. How we have to even run against these people—I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator. Nobody is worse than Obama. And the people that surrounded Biden.”
And there you have it: in a rambling speech in which he jumped from topic to topic, danced, and appeared to mimic someone doing something either stupid or obscene, Trump explained the ideology behind his actions. He and MAGA Republicans have absorbed the last 40 years of Republican rhetoric to believe that Democratic policies are “horrible” and that only Republicans “have the right policy.” If that’s the case, why should Republicans even have to “run against these people?” Why even have elections? When voters choose Democrats, there’s something wrong with them, so why let them have a say? Their choice is bad by definition. Anything that they do, or have done, must be erased….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
How Bribery Became Legal – US Code 666 and the Roberts Court
Christopher Armitage [The Existentialist Republic, via Naked Capitalism 01-07-2025]
...Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting, had a different view. “Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love,” she wrote. The law explicitly targets officials who accept payments “intending to be influenced or rewarded.” Everyone knows what a reward is. Congress meant to criminalize it. “Officials who use their public positions for private gain threaten the integrity of our most important institutions,” Jackson continued. “Greed makes governments, at every level, less responsive, less efficient, and less trustworthy from the perspective of the communities they serve.”⁴
The majority was unmoved. The distinction between bribes and gratuities now governs federal corruption law. Pay before, go to prison. Pay after, go on vacation.
This used to be illegal. For decades, Section 666 was the workhorse federal anti-corruption statute. Courts understood that corruption did not require an explicit exchange. In 2003, the Supreme Court itself said so. In McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, Justices Stevens and O’Connor wrote that Congress’s legitimate interest “extends beyond preventing simple cash-for-votes corruption to curbing undue influence on an officeholder’s judgment, and the appearance of such influence.”⁵ Corruption was not confined to bribery. It included the subtler rot that occurs when money purchases access and access purchases outcomes.
That understanding is now dead and the Roberts Court killed it….
Ruling for the Rich: the Supreme Court over Time
[National Bureau of Economic Research, via The Big Picture, January 06, 2025]
Civic republicanism
Mike Brock, Jan 04, 2026 [Notes From The Circus]
...This is the anti-Lincoln moment. Not because Trump expanded executive power—Lincoln did that too. But because Lincoln used emergency authority to preserve the constitutional framework, while Trump uses it to declare himself outside constitutional constraint entirely….
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Expanded executive war powers. Asserted federal authority over states claiming sovereignty. This is historical fact.
But watch what else he did.
He submitted the habeas suspension to Congress for ratification—which they gave. He accepted that courts could review his actions. He ran for re-election during war and accepted he might lose. He yielded power when constitutional process demanded it.
Lincoln’s logic was always this: the constitutional framework faces existential threat from secession, and extraordinary measures to preserve it are justified—within constitutional bounds and subject to eventual constitutional accountability.
The key word is preserve. Lincoln expanded executive power to save the framework that makes constitutional government possible. Secession would have destroyed the Union. No Union, no Constitution. No Constitution, no self-government. The emergency power served constitutional continuation.
And crucially, Lincoln submitted to the framework even while defending it. Congress could check him. Courts could review him. Elections could remove him. His question wasn’t “How do I escape accountability?” It was “How do I preserve the system that holds me accountable?”
That’s emergency power in a constitutional republic. Extraordinary measures, constitutional purpose, ultimate accountability….
Lincoln used emergency power within constitutional framework to preserve that framework from destruction. Trump uses emergency claims to declare himself outside constitutional framework—to wage war, seize governments, and extract resources without Congressional authorization, without declaration of war, without even the pretense that constitutional constraints apply to him….
This is regime crisis. One side claims constitutional constraints don’t apply when emergency or good outcomes justify exception. The other side keeps pretending we’re having normal policy debate.
When the President wages war without Congress, that’s not “foreign policy I disagree with.” That’s constitutional violation requiring constitutional response.
When the President announces from his private club that his cabinet will “run” a foreign nation of thirty million people indefinitely, that’s not “aggressive foreign policy.” That’s declaration that constitutional war powers don’t constrain him.
When his defenders argue the violation doesn’t matter because Maduro is evil and outcomes are good, that’s not “different political philosophy.” That’s rejection of constitutional constraint as governing principle….
I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well.
Alexandra Petri, January 8, 2026
My five-month quest to monitor the weather, track inflation, and inspect milk for harmful microorganisms….
FDA inspections at foreign food manufacturers are at historic lows because of staffing cuts, according to ProPublica. My Geiger counter cost $22.79. I thought it would give me a sense of agency and reassurance in this era of dismantlement. Instead, buying the Geiger counter was the first step toward losing my mind.While the Trump administration conducted a sweeping experiment in government erosion, I started an experiment of my own. As each government function was targeted for cuts—or an official suggested that it was standing between me and my freedom—I put it on my to-do list, as a way to feel like I was doing something other than fretting about what was not being done….
This got me thinking about why every single national leader is unpopular. It could be that there are heroic eras that produce heroic leaders, and ones that generate leaders who are mediocre at best and scoundrels at worst….The last such heroic and widely esteemed leaders were Nelson Mandela of South Africa and the charming playwright/protester/president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel. But both Mandela and Havel left office more than 25 years ago. So what’s the matter with today’s leaders?The matter, I think, is global capitalism.
Voters everywhere are frustrated by their worsening economic prospects. Thanks to the rules of hyper-globalization that have been imposed universally on democracies during the past three decades, it’s almost impossible for an individual nation to pursue a different path.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, austerity was the universal rule. Policy is reduced to ineffectual, marginal tweaks that transform no one’s life prospects.
The only people who prosper from this regime are the very rich. No wonder every national leader seems like a failure. And no wonder potentially transformative leaders are not attracted to politics.
Meanwhile, a nationalist backlash everywhere leads to parliamentary fragmentation and weak coalition governments, and makes it even harder for politics to make a constructive difference. So leaders are deemed failures, because they fail….
Does rising income inequality threaten democracy?
Anne Kim, January 7, 2026 [Washington Monthly]
Author Chuck Collins argues that billionaires are a uniquely destructive force to the economy, democracy, and the planet.
Economic Inequality Threatens Democracy
Eli G. Rau, Susan Stokes, Fall 2025 [American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO]
Economic inequality leads to democratic erosion, study finds
University of Chicago News, Jan 17, 2025 · Published in PNAS, this large cross-national statistical study shows economic inequality is one of the strongest predictors of where and when democracy
How income inequality threatens democracy
The Loop, EUROPEAN CONSORTIUM FOR POLITICAL RESEARCH
[And, the oligarchs’ side of the argument:]
Does Rising Income Inequality Threaten Democracy? (pdf)
John W. York, June 30, 2017 [Backgrounder No. 3227, Heritage Foundation]
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