Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 01, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
The Crisis, No. 8 — The empire of exit and the conspiracy against America
Mike Brock, Jan 29, 2026 [Notes From The Circus]
The Director of National Intelligence stood in the parking lot of the Fulton County Elections Hub while FBI agents loaded boxes onto trucks.
Tulsi Gabbard, in a dark blazer, watching men in windbreakers carry cardboard boxes out of a building where American citizens cast their votes five years ago. Hundreds of boxes. Computers. Tabulator tapes. Voter rolls. Seized and loaded.
The Director of National Intelligence has no legitimate role at a domestic law enforcement action. The intelligence community’s remit is foreign threats—the enemies beyond our borders, the spies and saboteurs. An FBI raid on a county election office is a domestic matter, whatever pretext is offered. And yet there she stood.
Senator Mark Warner named the only two possibilities: either Gabbard believes there is a foreign intelligence angle and failed to brief the intelligence committees as required by law, or she is turning the intelligence community into a partisan instrument. There is no third option….
The same week that agents loaded Georgia’s votes onto trucks, the Financial Times reported that Trump administration officials have been holding covert meetings with separatists from Alberta.
Alberta. The province that sits atop the Athabasca oil sands—the third-largest oil reserve on Earth. The province whose eastern border is a thousand miles of prairie, whose western edge rises into the Canadian Rockies, whose people have chafed for decades at Ottawa’s carbon taxes and equalization formulas. Alberta, which has never loved confederation the way Ontario loves it, which has always felt more kinship with Texas than with Quebec.
The Alberta Prosperity Project—a fringe group seeking independence from Canada—has met with State Department officials three times since April. They are now seeking a meeting with Treasury. Their ask: a $500 billion credit facility to bankroll the province if an independence referendum passes.
Five hundred billion dollars. To break apart a NATO ally.
The State Department’s response: “The department regularly meets with civil society types.”
Civil society types. That is what they call people seeking foreign backing to dismember a neighboring democracy….
Tulsi Gabbard Drags U.S. Intelligence into Trump’s Election Fraud Campaign
[Spy Talk, via Naked Capitalism 01-30-2025]
Today Fulton County, Tomorrow???
Joyce Vance, Jan 30, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
[TW: Provides a screen shot of a social media post Trump reposted, promoting the conspiracy belief that Italy was paid by Obama to use military satellites to hack US voting machines in 2020 and literally switch votes from Trump to Biden — all under the direction of the Chinese government.]
GOP Opens Up Its Midterm Elections Playbook in Minnesota
Gabrielle Gurley, January 29, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Last October, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson announced that the Justice Department wanted state registration data and that federal officials refused to explain why. “Other secretaries of state—both Democrats and Republicans—have asked them that. They won’t tell us,” she said.
Trump officials met group pushing Alberta independence from Canada
Ilya Gridneff and Myles McCormick, Jan 28 2026 [Financial Times]
Monopoly Round-Up: Why ICE Polices in Minnesota, and Not the Corporate Board Room
Matt Stoller January 26, 2026 [BIG]
Law enforcement budgets show we defunded those who police corporate America, while ramping up coercion on working people….
...I want to focus on the raids of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minnesota, where the Trump administration sent ICE officers as part of a crackdown. The net effect was controversial killings of several U.S. citizens by ICE in the last month, including one yesterday, along with broad anger among locals.
At almost the same time, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where global elites meet, billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin remarked on the oppression he felt during the Biden administration during its “regulatory onslaught.” Griffin, worth $50 billion, and bailed out during the great financial crisis, cites the challenge to the Spirit-JetBlue merger as particularly galling.
I was going to write about weird economic statistics, but I think the way we use policing resources is a much more appropriate topic based on this explicit power of state coercion that we’re seeing, contrasted with Griffin’s anger at extremely mild attempts to check corporate power….
This moment is a good one to think about how we allocate law enforcement resources. The immigration raids we see are dramatic, but do not seem to me to be the best way to achieve their stated goal of mass deportations. If the administration truly wanted to deport undocumented workers, they would crack down on the companies, like meatpackers and large farms, who hire them. But doing so would require policing of corporations and employers, which the GOP generally seeks to avoid. These large made-for-TV cracking of heads strike me as a brutal communications strategy.
And that’s true for a lot of the choices we’ve been making in policing for decades. Indeed, the era of rising corporate power from the 1980s onward was characterized by a broad defunding of the police who investigate and regulate the behavior of political and economic elites. At the same time, we have increased policing resources to impose order, if not actual policing of bad behavior, on working people. In essence, there is now a zone of elite impunity for the Jeff Epstein class, but poorer Americans are increasingly subject to a host of restrictions and state violence….
Let’s contrast the $175 billion pot of money with that of the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division, the ‘white collar policing’ of the entire corporate world in our $30 trillion economy for monopolization and consumer abuse. In 2026, the FTC will get $383 million, and the Antitrust Division budget will receive $250 million. There are about as many people at the FTC as there are guards for the Smithsonian museum complex. We have a few dozen, at most, looking at health care, a $5 trillion sector. In other words, the Federal agencies looking at all of corporate America have just 0.5% of the resources that DHS got in additional money solely to deport people. And this puny under-funded group is what Griffin was complaining about as tyranny….
The Staircase of Oppression — Watch the boot ascend.
Hamilton Nolan, Jan 28, 2026 [How Things Work]
...The first step is the scapegoating and persecution of the most vulnerable. We are already there…..
The determination to crush this resistance fuels the next step up the staircase. In America, the government has not fully taken this next step, but it is clear that many in the administration would like to. Opposition has been formally classified as domestic terrorism. Government databases of protesters are being built. The FBI has opened an investigation into the Signal chats that activists use to follow ICE agents. All of these things are flirtations with criminalizing activism.
If this step is taken in earnest, you can expect to see arrests and prosecutions of protest organizers and activist leaders; aggressive mass arrests of street protesters; and even more outright violence used by police to crush protest actions. Activists will be treated as criminals and targeted and sent to jail. The circle of government oppression, which started out by including immigrants and minorities, will be expanded to include regular people who take action to stop that oppression. The criminalization of protest—justified by the argument that impeding law enforcement is itself a serious crime—gets us much closer to real authoritarianism….
Now, imagine peeking down at all of this chaos from the next step up the staircase. That is the step where the powerful people and institutions reside: Elected officials, businesses, very wealthy people, established legal and cultural organizations, and so on. This is the group that collectively held much of the political, economic, and social power before Trump’s race to authoritarianism began. As they watch the brutal oppression of immigrants and minorities play out, and they watch the subsequent protests play out, and they watch the government deciding if it can disregard the Constitution in order to crush that dissent, this already-powerful group must make a choice. Their choice is to either use their power to stop what the government is doing, or try to keep their heads down and protect their own little kingdoms and hope that all of this madness won’t affect them too much.
I expect little courage from the already-powerful, and, in aggregate, they have so far justified this expectation….
...The final step up the staircase is almost trivial. The government need only say: Have you funded the opposition? Then you too are a criminal. Have you used your media outlet to support the opposition? Then you too are a criminal. Has your business made statements in support of the opposition? Then you too are a criminal. Have you made a movie sympathetic to the opposition, or spoken out in an interview? Then you too are a criminal.
Have you, a politician of the opposing party, taken actions that can be interpreted by us as impeding the ability of the government to carry out its vital law enforcement actions? Then you too are a criminal….
What I am saying is that the collective instinct of the powerful to protect themselves ends up having the opposite effect. They refuse to throw their own power behind the opposition to government oppression, and thereby prevent the opposition from being as powerful as it could be, and thereby allow the boot of authoritarianism to step smoothly up the staircase, right to where they are. It would have been wiser for them to do everything in their considerable power to hold the line, to fight back, to fund the activists on the front line, to speak out firmly, to take strong legal and political action against the oppression, to refuse to do anything at all to help the government do its work….
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Malcolm Nance, Jan 26, 2026 [Black Man Spy]
...It is a period where many Americans are indifferent to the rise of a Gestapo in America, but that time is coming to an end.
The murder of Alex Pretti and Renee Good now reveals America is running death squads by a secret police. Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, announced that filming during a protest, while legally carrying a firearm, is punishable by death.
Alex Peretti went to the assistance of two women who were pepper-sprayed. When he bent over, and a policeman saw his weapon, the execution order was effected. They shot him to death with ten bullets from two guns. Then they insisted that no medical treatment be provided….
What Actions can you take?
Film all ICE actions. Share the videos widely. This is not doxxing, its self defense.
MAKE SURE YOU LIVE STREAM TO A CLOUD so evidence is preserved even if the camera is seized.
My FAFOPac.org is running Operation: Overpass Take Over. Put up your message to the non-voting Americans to get rid of ICE. As many as 10,000 people per day may drive past your message. For example, ICE=GESTAPO is a nice, easy message to post over the highways. We must inform the public to think about things they’d rather avoid.
Be prepared to march! We must be ready to march in the biggest numbers in American history….
Shaun King, Jan 26, 2026
Sworn declarations describe officers crushing detainees’ testicles, slamming heads into walls, and laughing while teens lose consciousness.
ICE Is Scanning Civilians’ Faces, Telling Them They’re Being Entered Into a Terrorism Database
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 01-25-2025]
The powerful tools in ICE’s arsenal to track suspects — and protesters
Eva Dou, Artur Galocha and Kevin Schaul, Jan 29, 2026 [Washington Post]
It Is Much Worse On The Ground Than We Know, And People There Are Seeing NO ONE Coming To Their Aid
Paul C, January 25, 2026 [Daily Kos]
ICE Masks, Billionaires and the Politics of Anti-Accountability
Josh Marshall, January 29, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
...It was treated as a given for more than half a century that, over token amounts, political giving must be disclosed. The post-Citizens United argument for mega-donors went something like this: If I give $5,000 I can disclose my donation. No problem. Lots of people do that. But if I give $5,000,000 people are going to notice that and focus on that and some of them are going to be mad. So I don’t feel like I can disclose that. I need to be able to do that privately because I should be able to exercise my court-given rights to give unlimited amounts without getting blowback from people who might be upset that I wield so much power or unhappy with just how I wield it. So in other words, that person needs not only a crazy amount of power but additional rights to shield them from the repercussions of having that much power. It’s one of those arguments you can momentarily be lulled into the logic of before you step back and think, WTF? That’s absurd. You don’t get special rights because you have all the power in the first place.
ICE masking and the need for billionaire anonymity certainly aren’t the same argument. But I don’t think I’m far out on a limb in thinking that they share a common DNA. The people with all the power need to be insulated from the effects of wielding that kind of power. It’s a whole framework of anti-accountability that has infiltrated our civic discourse. The people with all the power need to have even more power to protect them from the effects of being so powerful in the first place….
I got to thinking about this this morning when I noticed this comments from journalist Radley Balko, who has focused on police abuses and abuses of state power since long before it was so central to the mainstream political conversation. He flagged the horrifying case of Marimar Martinez, whose case we’ve written about at TPM and I’ve discussed on the podcast. ICE agents cornered her, shot her five times and then cooked up a series of lies about how she’d led an ambush against them. They then charged her with assault before the whole case fell apart. She somehow managed not only to survive five close-range gunshot wounds but, at least outwardly, recover pretty quickly. Now the government is pressing to keep some of the bodycam evidence of this travesty secret to protect the “privacy interests” of one of the guys responsible for what happened.
Leaked DHS Memo Reveals ICE Claiming Expansive New Warrantless Arrest Powers
Brad Reed, January 31, 2026 [CommonDreams]
ICE warrantless entries, meet Stand Your Ground laws
sabrina haake, January 28, 2026 [Daily Kos]
... Last week, a whistleblower disclosed an internal Department of Homeland Security memo advising federal ICE agents that they have unlimited power to enter people’s homes— by force—without a judge’s signed warrant.
On January 21, 2026, Senator Richard Blumenthal sent an internal ICE memo and whistleblower complaint to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. The memo authorizes ICE agents to rely only on administrative warrants, rather than judges’ warrants, to bust into peoples’ homes.
The whistleblower complaint does more than allege- it attaches a written memo dated May 12, 2025, signed by Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons authorizing ICE agents to forcibly enter into people’s homes without a judicial warrant, consent, or an emergency….
The complaint also details the steps ICE has taken to hide the directive. Because it is blatantly illegal, DHS allows the memo to be read only in person; it was disseminated to select DHS officials who were directed to read it and return it to their supervisors. Newly hired ICE agents are also instructed to “disregard any written training material” concerning the use of administrative warrants that contradicts instructors’ verbal directives….
The Trump regime will kill you and then smear you as a terrorist
Dean Obeidallah, Jan 25, 2026
‘She’s Lying’: Journalist Exposes Secret Watch Lists That Trump Official Says Don’t Exist
Brett Wilkins, January 28, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Despite denials from a senior Trump administration official, secret watchlists of Americans are being used by federal agencies to track and categorize US citizens—especially protesters, activists, and critics of law enforcement—as “domestic terrorists,” investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Wednesday.
Klippenstein said that two senior national security officials speaking on condition of anonymity told him that there are over a dozen “secret and obscure” watchlists that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI are using to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and pro-Palestine protesters, antifa-affiliated individuals, and “others who are promiscuously labeled ‘domestic terrorists.’”
“I can reveal for the first time,” he wrote, “that some of the secret lists and applications go by codenames like Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta (including the ominous sounding HEL-A and HEL-C reports generated by Sparta).”
Letters from an American, January 24, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jan 25, 2026
When the Democratic Party’s social media account posted: “ICE agents shot and killed another person in Minneapolis this morning. Get ICE out of Minnesota NOW,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller replied: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” The Democrats’ social media account responded: “You’re a f*cking liar with blood on your hands.”
Miller continued to bang that drum. When Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said that “ICE must leave Minneapolis” and that “Congress should not fund this version of ICE—this is seeking confirmation, chaos, and dystopia,” Miller responded: “An assassin tried to murder federal agents and this is your response.” When Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar similarly decried the killing, Miller responded: “A domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement and this is your response? You and the state’s entire Democrat leadership team have been flaming the flames of insurrection for the singular purpose of stopping the deportation of illegals who invaded the country.”
Letters from an American, January 25, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jan 26, 2026
Yesterday President Donald J. Trump blamed Democratic officials for the killing of VA intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minnesota Saturday morning. Since then, administration officials and their supporters seem to be coalescing around the idea that the reason there have been violent clashes in Minneapolis is not the violence of federal agents there, but that city officials aren’t cooperating with federal officials.
As Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote notes, this language comes straight from the Insurrection Act, and indeed, MAGA leader and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon told the Wall Street Journal yesterday that he thinks Trump should invoke that act. Bannon said Pretti “knew exactly what he was doing and he knew the consequences. The violent domestic terrorist mob in the streets of Minneapolis needs to stand down now.”….
Then, this afternoon, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez reported that Bovino and some of his agents are leaving Minneapolis and returning to the sectors from which they came. Before hitting the road, though, on Friday federal agents took into custody Juan Espinoza Martinez, whom a jury acquitted this week after the Department of Justice accused him of participating in a plot to hire someone to kill Bovino. While CBP appears to be leaving, the operation itself will continue.
Feds Create Drone No Fly Zone That Would Stop People Filming ICE
[404, via The Big Picture, January 27 2026]
The FAA has altered a no-fly zone designation that was originally created for US military bases to apply to DHS units.
I’ve Covered Police Abuse for 20 Years. What ICE Is Doing Is Different
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, January 25 2026]
There were no promises of an impartial investigation. There was no regret or remorse. There was little empathy for her family — for her parents, her partner or the children she left behind. From the moment the world learned about her death, the administration pronounced the shooting not only justified but an act of heroism worthy of praise and celebration.
How Donald Trump Has Transformed ICE
[New Yorker, via The Big Picture, January 25 2026]
A former D.H.S. oversight official on what, legally, the agency can and can’t do—and the accountability mechanisms that have been “gutted beyond recognition.”
The Nazi Political Theory Behind ICE Lawlessness
Bill Blum, Jan 21, 2026 [LA Progressive]
jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, will not be brought to justice. Let that sink in. Ross is going to skate, because in Donald Trump’s America, his agency operates above the law. As Vice President JD Vance put it at a White House press conference the day after the shooting, Ross has “absolute immunity for doing his job.”
Vance’s comments shed light upon the larger legal design behind ICE’s newfound power. In Trump’s second term, the United States is rapidly devolving into what the late German émigré legal and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel called a “dual state,” in which acts of violence perpetrated against designated enemies of the regime are not only tolerated, but often celebrated as acts of valor and redemption.
A socialist attorney who practiced labor law in Berlin, Fraenkel fled Nazi Germany in 1938, eventually settling in Chicago. There he would write his most famous work, “The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship,” a study of the legal system implemented by the Third Reich in the 1930s.
Fraenkel’s central thesis is that the Nazis did not dismantle the legal structure of the Weimar Republic all at once or entirely, but replaced it with a bifurcated system in which state functions were divided between a “normative” sphere — which operated according to set rules and regulations — and a “prerogative” sphere, where violence was permitted and traditional legal restraints did not apply.
To keep capitalism up and running, Hitler’s government had to maintain the façade of a stable “normative” legal system that permitted businesses and Christian Germans to engage in commerce and settle contract cases, employment disputes, landlord-tenant matters and other civil issues in court. As University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq noted in a March 2025 Atlantic magazine essay, this duality allowed capitalism to “jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.”
ICE 101″ — How Trump changed ICE and CBP into a fascist secret police
[Doomsday Scenario, via The Big Picture, January 25 2026]
ICE and CBP are fatally flawed products of the post-9/11 War on Terror — now Trump has weaponized those very flaws to occupy America.
Katrina Pross, [Sahan Journal]
...Health care workers in Minnesota have been speaking out against ICE, arguing that their presence in hospitals is deterring people from seeking care. Dozens of health care workers spoke at the Capitol on Tuesday. They said that agents are refusing to leave hospitals, and that people with serious health conditions are too scared to see a doctor
Last week, after health care workers at HCMC spoke out against ICE, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed employment records of the more than 7,000 workers at Hennepin Healthcare. An immigration attorney told me DHS is probably looking for undocumented workers and it’s likely in retaliation for health workers standing up….
A Running Count of How Many People ICE Has Killed and Injured
Whitney Curry Wimbish, January 29, 2026 [The American Prospect]
DOGE staffer signed deal to share Social Security data with election deniers
[Popular Information, via The Big Picture, January 25 2026]
In an extraordinary court filing, “NOTICE OF CORRECTIONS TO THE RECORD,” government lawyers representing the SSA revealed that in March 2025, a DOGE staffer signed an agreement to share the private data of Americans with a “political advocacy group” seeking to “overturn election results in certain States.” WTF?
Jordan Zakarin, Jan 26, 2026 [Progress Report]
...In a letter to Gov. Tim Walz, Bondi suggested that state and local officials should take several steps to “bring back law and order” to Minnesota. More than anything else, Bondi’s letter demanded access to the sensitive personal information of the state’s residents, including Medicaid and SNAP recipients. She also asked that Minnesota provide the Department of Justice access to the state’s voter registration records.
Bondi linked the demand for Medicaid and SNAP information to the welfare fraud investigation that inspired ICE’s takeover of Minneapolis; her request for access to state voter rolls was justified by a need to “confirm” that the voter registration process complied with the Civil Rights Act of 1960. But there’s been no indication that Minnesota’s election system violates any federal statute, so why would Bondi want access to that information?
“They want to kick eligible voters off of the rolls,” Rebekah Caruthers, the executive director of the Fair Elections Center, told me earlier this month.
At the time, Caruthers was commenting on the administration’s attempt to force states to hand over its voter roll information to the DOJ, which she said was part of a concerted effort to take a haphazard hatchet to Americans’ voting rights.
“They’re using databases that have pieces and partial pieces of information — it’s not complete information — and want to use it as the basis to say someone doesn’t have the right to vote,” she explained. “We’re seeing that they’re going after certain surnames that might signal certain ethnic identities.”
While the states all maintain public voter rolls, the administration is seeking the private, unredacted lists of voters, which contain personal information like Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers. The White House wants to build a massive national voter database, and not because it’s worried about data security….
7 Times Conservatives Praised Gun-Toting Protesters
Team Zeteo, Jan 26, 2026
They're attacking Alex Pretti for having a gun. But here are some famous moments when Trump and the right treated armed protesters like heroes.
The incredible story of Alex, forced to flee to China for documenting poverty in the U.S.
Arnaud Bertrand, Jan 29, 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 01-30-2025]
Joyce Vance, Jan 31, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
...It isn’t about convicting him. It’s unlikely that will happen. It’s about intimidating journalists & attempting to make them censure themselves out of fear of consequences, which can be very expensive, especially for an independent journalist who lacks the backing of a major company. It’s about eroding the free press because the administration can’t afford the criticism….
Strategic Political Economy
The Boomcession: Why Americans Hate What Looks Like an Economic Boom
Matt Stoller, Jan 31, 2026 [BIG
The models used by policymakers to understand wages, economic growth, and consumer spending are misleading. That's why corporate America is having a party, and everyone else is mad….
I think Warsh has a rough task, because the models underpinning how policymakers think about the economy just don’t reflect the realities of modern commerce. The fundamental dynamic is that those models were constructed in an era where America was one discrete economy, with Wall Street and the public tied together by the housing finance system. But today, Americans increasingly live in tiered bubbles that have less and less to do with one another. Warsh will essentially be looking at the wrong indicators, pushing buttons that are mislabeled….
(1) Consumer Spending Doesn’t Tell You Much About Consumers Anymore….
(2) Spending Inequality Is Real….
(3) Monopoly Driven Inflation Matters….
Why GDP Doesn’t Measure Welfare Anymore….
...the people in charge still use models which presume one economy and one relatively uniform set of prices, where “consumer spending” means stuff consumers want.
I once noted a speech in 2016 by then-Fed Chair Janet Yellen in which she expressed surprise that powerful rich firms and small weak ones had different borrowing rates, which affected the “monetary transmission channel” the Fed relied on. Sure it was obvious in the real world, but she preferred theory.
Or they don’t use models at all; Kevin Warsh is not an economist, he’s a lawyer and political operative, and is uninterested in academic theory. He cares about corporate profits and capital formation. That probably won’t work out well either.
At any rate, we have to start measuring what matters again. If we don’t, then we’ll continue to be baffled that normal people hate the economy that looks fine on our charts.
[TW: A very important article touching on the utter failure of mainstream academic economics to reflect economic reality. And it’s important to bear in mind that this is a problem that affects the leadership of both the Democratic and (anti)Republican Parties. Biden and his supporters made the same mistake Trump is now making — insisting that the national economy is doing swell, while a great majority of citizens are directly experiencing increasing economic precarity and hardship. And this, without even getting into the massive AI bubble, which will be another financial catatrophe when it blows. Not to mention the AI bubble has sucked dry all the finance and thus starved actually productive investments. And another example of how broken and dysfunctional the economic information system is:]
The S&P 500 at 7,000: the insanity of stock markets continues
Richard Murphy, January 29, 2026 [Funding the Future]
The rich are powering spending, with the U.S. economy in a danger zone
[Axios, via The Big Picture, January 25 2026]
The health of the economy increasingly depends on rich people spending money, a new analysis of government data finds. That puts the U.S. in a fragile place because consumer spending drives growth — so the entire economy is now relying on a smaller number of people to keep things afloat.
Global power shift
We Are Witnessing the Self-Immolation of a Superpower
Garrett M. Graff [Wired, via The Big Picture, January 25 2026]
Oligarchy
When Laura Wittmann decided this week to submit her resignation from Uline, the giant office supply company owned by two of the biggest donors to Donald Trump’s 2024 election and other Maga Republicans, she did not hold back.
“As America descends rapidly into fascism,” Wittmann wrote in a two-page company-wide email sent on Wednesday, “I can no longer work to grow the personal fortunes of people who helped make it so.” ….
The political activities of the Uihleins, who recently hosted a speech by Vice-President JD Vance in their Allentown, Pennsylvania, facility, are well known.
The couple are ranked as the fourth largest donors in the 2024 election cycle, having donated $139m to Maga Republicans and their political action committees, according to Opensecrets, which tracks money in politics….
[Democracy for Sale
And it isn’t just the Tories. As we reported before Christmas, three-quarters of all the money Reform has ever raised comes from just three extremely wealthy white men. Labour, too, has become increasingly reliant on a small number of super-rich donors.
Felonomics
Cory Doctorow, 26 Jan 2026 [Pluralistic]
The best summary of Trump's trade "philosophy" comes from Trashfuture's November Kelly, who said that Trump is flipping over the table in a poker game that's rigged in his favor because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all.
After all, the global system of trade was designed and enforced by American officials, especially the US Trade Representative. The US created a world whose most important commodities (food, oil, etc) were priced in dollars, meaning that anyone who wanted to buy these things from any country would first have to get US dollars, which they could only get by shipping their valuable stuff to the US, which sends them dollars in return.
Think about this trade for a minute: to get US dollars, people outside of the US would have to dig up or chop down or manufacture real things that were in finite supply. Meanwhile, to get the US dollars to pay for these real, finite things, the US just had to type zeros into a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve….
Two of my favorite political scientists are Henry Farrell and Dan Davies, whose new paper, "The US dollar system as a source of international disorder," was just published by The British Academy as part of its "Global (Dis)Order international policy programme":
Farrell and Davies explore the history of the weaponization of "dollar centrality" (their term for the arrangement where the whole world agreed to treat the dollar as a neutral trade instrument), and show how Trump's incontinent belligerence fits into it, and lay out some shrewd possibilities for where this could all end up….
[TW: Trump has selected Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve Chairman. I quickly scanned the Wikipedia biography of Warsh and started laughing — Warsh is exactly the kind of swamp creature Trump’s MAGA base professes to hate. Will they revolt? Will they protest? Will they even realize the monstrous con they’ve been suckered into? First, he’s married into the plutocratic Lauder fortune. Recall that last week’s wrap included the tidbit it is Robert Lauder who planted the Greenland idea in Trump’s addled brain. Next, there this: ”During and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Warsh acted as the central bank's primary liaison to Wall Street...” So Warsh is not only Wall Street swamp creature through and through, he was one of the primary shakers and movers in diverting the pain and suffering of 2008 from Wall Street and the banksters, to the American people. Finally, Warsh is a “former steering committee member of the Bilderberg Group.” To MAGA, Bilderberg is just as bad as the Trilatarel Commission. Of so I thought.]
Is Kevin Warsh Really the Fed Chair of Trump’s Dreams?
Timothy Noah, January 30, 2026 [The New Republic]
Warsh would be the Fed’s first billionaire Fed chair. He has achieved that status not through his own efforts but through his wife, Jane Lauder, the daughter of Ronald and granddaughter of Estée. According to Forbes, she’s worth $2.7 billion, which means as long as they’re married Kevin is worth that much too. Jay Powell’s net worth is a not-inconsiderable $20 to $55 million, but Warsh would be easily the richest Fed chair in history.
What Does Kevin Warsh’s Nomination Mean for the Fed?
Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 01-31-2025]
Kevin Warsh: a disaster in the making
Richard Murphy, January 31, 2026 [Funding the Future]
US quietly passes new rule to track millions on Social Security – will your trips be watched?
[Daily Observer, via Naked Capitalism 01-28-2025]
US consumer confidence plunges to 12-year low
[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-28-2025]
After Donations, Trump Administration Revoked Rule Requiring More Nursing Home Staff
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 01-29-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Neoliberalism was not an accident
Richard Murphy, January 28, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Neoliberalism did not just “happen”. It was planned, funded, and carefully rolled out over decades.
In this conversation with John Christensen, co-founder of the Tax Justice Network, we trace how the post-war economic settlement worked, why it delivered rising living standards and falling inequality, and how it was deliberately dismantled.
Is neoliberalism dying: the debate
Richard Murphy, January 30, 2026 [Funding the Future]
2) Neoliberalism as political project: extraction, rentierism, and “subscription life”
One long comment sets the tone for a deeper analysis: neoliberalism is framed less as an economic theory and more as a political weapon designed to:
- De-legitimise the state as a vehicle for collective good.
- Re-legitimise concentrated wealth as “merit.”
- Transform citizenship into a consumer relationship—“rent your life.”….
3) Thatcher/Reagan era as the origin story and cultural turning point
A major narrative anchor is the 1980s—often personalised through lived memory:
- Thatcher is described as doing “more damage” than wartime bombing (hyperbolic but expressive).
- Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney are named as a trio (UK/US/Canada) who mainstreamed the model.
Several commenters describe watching the “deification of the market” and the elevation of the rich to quasi-priestly status….
6) State power: necessary tool or inevitable threat?
A major fault line emerges around the role of the state:
- One camp argues the state is essential and already active: neoliberalism depends on state enforcement and policy design.
- Another camp fears state power itself as the core danger, citing historical atrocities and modern examples of repression.
This creates a recurring tension:
- Anti-neoliberal critique often calls for rebuilding public capacity (“politics of care,” Nordic model, protecting middle/working classes by law).
- Anti-state critique warns that expanding state capacity risks surveillance, censorship, arbitrary power, and the erosion of rights…..
When Chicago pawned its parking meters
[NPR, via The Big Picture, January 25 2026]
The deal Chicago made would go down as one of the most notorious miscalculations in the history of city government. It would call into question what the government is even supposed to do, and become a textbook case on the potential pitfalls of privatization.
Health care crisis
A $1.2 Trillion ‘Rip Off’: Report Spotlights Massive Scale of Medicare Advantage Fraud
Jake Johnson, January 28, 2026 [CommonDreams]
A report released earlier this month to little fanfare estimated that federal overpayments to privately run Medicare Advantage plans could total $76 billion this year—or potentially a staggering $1.2 trillion over the next decade if current trends persist.
Predatory finance
“What Ever Happened to Usury?” The Banks are Wrong About Credit Card Caps
Brian Shearer and Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, Jan 29, 2026
Recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump announced that he was asking Congress to cap interest for one year at 10 percent. “What ever happened to usury?” mused Trump to a room of bankers and CEOs.
Realizing that the usury rates banks thought they had defeated for good in the 1980s are at risk of coming back, bank lobbyists have been scrambling to defend their cash cow with any argument they can find….
The net return on assets (ROA) is 6.24 percent, and that’s using only the interest revenue that exceeds the Federal Funds Rate, which is currently 3.64 percent. That is far in excess of what banks normally earn on everything else, which is 1.11 percent. I’m not recommending this, and this isn’t how it would work in the real world, but if we got rid of rewards and capped interest at zero, banks would make enough off interchange and fees to cover all borrower defaults and operating expenses, and still generate a return. That is how much margin and rewards spending is built into the credit card business right now….
[TW: It is painful that Trump is asking the question, instead of Democratic Party and progressive leaders.]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Stunning Epstein twist as Ghislaine Maxwell claims 29 friends cut ‘secret deals’ with DOJ
[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism 01-31-2025]
Jim Stewartson, Jan 31, 2026 [MIndWar]
By all appearances, the “BlueAnon conspiracy theorists” were right about everything. There is a cabal of elite pedophiles—and they’re running the U.S. federal government.
Forty days after the statutory deadline for the release of all the Epstein files, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Todd Blanche, now occupying the office of Deputy Attorney General, announced the release of approximately half of the six million files in the government’s possession—and declared that the “DOJ‘s obligation is complete.”
Blanche also, troublingly, said that he would not release material showing “death, physical abuse, or injury.” He did not specify how many images of death, injury or abuse there are, or why they would be in Epstein’s files….
Heather Cox Richardson, Jan 31, 2026 [Letters from an American]
For all the talk of protecting the personal information about Epstein’s victims, the new files released the names and identifying information of a number of survivors, including some who have not previously been associated with the Epstein operation. Twenty Epstein survivors released a statement saying: “This latest release of Jeffrey Epstein files is being sold as transparency, but what it actually does is expose survivors. As survivors, we should never be the ones named, scrutinized, and retraumatized while Epstein’s enablers continue to benefit from secrecy. This is a betrayal of the very people this process is supposed to serve.”
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-27-2025]
Restoring balance to the economy
The Wealth Concentration Engine: Rethinking America’s Financial Plumbing
[Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 01-29-2025]
A Jan. 17 article on Quartz Markets by Catherine Baab reports that JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America returned nearly all of their 2025 profits to shareholders. Goldman Sachs returned $16.78 billion on $17.18 billion in earnings, meaning 97.7% of its earnings went to shareholders. Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan, and Bank of America collectively returned tens of billions more. Across the six largest banks, roughly $100 billion flowed to shareholders in a single year….
While critics accuse the Administration of indulging corporate interests, Reuters reports that the White House is preparing an executive order to restrict dividends, buybacks, and executive compensation for defense contractors whose projects are over budget or behind schedule. This is a direct challenge to one of the most entrenched, bipartisan power centers in Washington.
Meanwhile, at the local end of the financial spectrum, Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent has been making the case for reviving America’s community banks — the institutions that actually lend to small businesses, farmers, first‑time homebuyers and local governments….
If the law requires corporations to serve shareholders, then the simplest way to align banking with public needs is to make the public the shareholder. The best working model in the United States today is the Bank of North Dakota (BND) — a century‑old publicly-owned bank in a conservative state that partners with community banks to support local lending.
The BND finances infrastructure, keeps capital circulating in-state, and returns profits to the public treasury. It does not replace local private banks but strengthens them. And it proves that banks can do productive things with their money if the institutional design rewards it….
Disrupting mainstream economics
Video showing that equilibrium is for dummies
Steve Keen, Jan 29, 2026 [Building a New Economics]
Several Neoclassical economists have recently derided heterodox economics, and touted the importance of equilibrium modelling in economics. This video shows that equilibrium modelling is utterly misleading about the nature of capitalism.
They also assert that macroeconomics must be derived from microeconomics. I show that macroeconomics can in fact be derived directly from macroeconomic definitions, and that the models which result are not Neoclassical, but are Post-Keynesian in nature….
Disrupting mainstream politics
I Built a Robot — Introducing ‘Polybius‘
John Ganz, Jan 29, 2026 [Unpopular Front]
...For the past few weeks, I’ve been developing a tool by “vibecoding,” that is, using Claude AI to code for me, which would measure the degree of authoritarian consolidation in the US. It would generate a number—1 out of 100—called the Authoritarian Consolidation Index. If the number is high, that’s bad: it shows a fully or almost fully consolidated regime. If the number is low, it’s good: it shows a healthy, functioning liberal democracy. If you enter Russia, Turkey, or Hungary into the tool, you get scores in the 90s, 80s, or 70s; if you enter, say, Norway or Denmark, you’ll get scores in single digits. Then it gives a summary of what the score means.
How does it generate a number, you ask? ….
If you click here, you can see what Polybius says about the United States this A.M.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI does not care – and it is hard-coding neoliberalism
Richard Murphy, January 29, 2026 [Funding the Future]
We are told that artificial intelligence can replace human judgment. It cannot.
In this video, I explain why AI does not care, why it cannot exercise judgment, and why deploying it at scale embeds neoliberal values into decision-making by design.
Algorithms prioritise efficiency, cost reduction and rule-following. Judgment requires care, context, responsibility and democratic accountability.
This is not a technical debate. It is a political choice about the kind of economy and society we want to live in.
TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 01-28-2025]
App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users’ Masturbation Habits
[404 Media[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-29-2025]
Read the manual for a Palantir-ICE app
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 01-31-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
Why won’t corporate media use the term “MAGA Terrorism”?!
Dean Obeidallah, Jan 29, 2026
On Tuesday night, we saw the second MAGA attack targeting a Democratic member of Congress in just the past week. This most recent event occurred when a very vocal supporter of Donald Trump sought to terrorize one of Trump’s favorite targets, Rep. Ilhan Omar. It was just days before that on Friday that Rep. Maxwell Frost—who identifies as Afro-Latino—was assaulted at an event by a man who declared Trump was going to deport him.
These were both politically motivated attacks carried out by Trump supporters that fulfill the elements of “domestic terrorism” under federal law. But what we didn’t hear is the corporate media call these incidents what they are: MAGA terrorist attacks. That is not only wrong from a journalistic point of view—more importantly, this also makes our nation less from future MAGA attacks ranging from assaults on elected officials to even another Jan. 6 attack.
On Gutting the Washington Post's International Desk
Claire Parker, Jan 28, 2026 [Backbencher]
Climate and environmental crises
Global clean energy investment hits record US$2.3 trillion in 2025
JP Casey, January 26, 2026 [PV Tech, via Clean Power Roundup]
Democrats' political malpractice
Joseph O’Neill, interviewed by Daniel Drake [The New York Review, January 24, 2026]
There are two kinds of politics going on. The first is technical politics—electoral politics centered on the economy, jobs, health care, immigration, crime, and “affordability.” On this front, the GOP is in trouble. Even as Trump retains the devotion of almost all Republicans, independents and demographic groups that were essential to his 2024 win—Latino voters, young voters—have swung hard away from the Republican Party. If the midterms proceed normally, Democrats can look forward to capturing the House and maybe even the Senate—an almost unthinkable prospect when you and I last met.
The second kind of politics is the politics of raw power. This is where things become difficult. The Republican Party, animated by fantasies of crushing liberals and minorities once and for all, is fundamentally devoted to achieving one-party rule. This is the intention of its base, its D.C. and state politicians, its Supreme Court judges, its propagandists and ideologists, and of course its would-be Supreme Leader. This intention can be seen everywhere from the evil fervor of certain administration apparatchiks to the decorous enablement by elder statesmen in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roberts, for example, may not actively dream of a Republican dictatorship, but he has purposefully used his power to advance that scenario.
The leading Democrats in Washington wield raw power only if absolutely forced to by grassroots uproar. Last year’s shutdown is an example. The minority leaders, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, simply lack the temperament and strategic ability to counter Republican power moves with power moves of their own. Moreover, they appear to believe that doing the second kind of politics is bad for the first kind of politics. Jeffries this week refused to whip Democratic members to oppose funding ICE, with the result that, as part of the 2026 government funding bill (which now proceeds to the Senate, where it can only pass with ten Democratic votes), ICE was funded to the tune of $10 billion with the decisive support of seven Democrats. Schumer, for his part, continues to collaborate in “bipartisan” talks to fund the government even as the Republican administration has announced a “review” of federal funding for fourteen blue states. There is no guarantee that he will do everything in his power to stop funding ICE, even after today’s apparent murder….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-27-2025]
How Democrats Are Enabling ICE
David Sirota, January 24, 2026 [The Lever]
- ...the Searchlight Institute — bankrolled by real estate moguls and run by former John Fetterman staffers — pumped out a memo criticizing those calling for abolishing ICE. The memo declares that the past “furor over ‘defund’ diverted attention from other reforms… sucked all the oxygen out of efforts at reform” and then concludes that “Democrats should embrace an aggressive plan to rebuild ICE.” As polling data show a plurality of Americans now want ICE abolished, Searchlight insists that cause is “at odds with the American public.”
- Days later, congressional Democrats provided enough votes to continue funding ICE. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries refused to whip votes against the measure….
...a powerful Democratic faction is still working hard to prevent a unified opposition. Take a look at this Politico story detailing what Democratic U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and Michigan Rep. Mallory McMorrow (D-Royal Oak) are throwing at Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed after he called to abolish ICE...
Resistance
[Labor Politics, January, 26 2026]
ARU SHINEY-AJAY: I feel more from Minnesota than I’ve ever felt. And I’ve grown up here. But now I know as I’m walking down the street that I have hundreds of people who will swarm to help me if needed, and that I will swarm to help them.
There are these intense protest moments — like the number of times you pick someone up after they’ve been tear-gassed and use snow to wipe the tear gas from their face. But there’s also this everyday feeling of solidarity, because everyone is walking around with whistles. If you hear a whistle, suddenly people start swarming toward you. I’ve never felt so backed up. It feels like we’re all on a giant team together as a city. It’s incredible….
ARU SHINEY-AJAY: Part of it is that getting involved starts really small, and then the small things become more risky, and you don’t want to give them up. Standing and recording with a phone was what we were first training everyone to do. Monarca Unidos, an immigrant group here, trained something like 24,000 people on legal observer roles: standing and recording with a phone.
Everyone was prepared to do that, and then that became risky. But it was an identity people had taken up — “I can stand here and record with a phone” — and people didn’t want to back away from that….
Shaun King, Jan 28, 2026
According to reporting by Ellie Rushing at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Larry is forming a coalition of progressive prosecutors committed to charging federal agents who violate state laws. The coalition is expected to include prosecutors from multiple cities—reportedly including Minneapolis DA Mary Moriarty—and is being announced as the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach. The reported acronym is FAFO, a nod to a phrase Larry has used often: “F— around and find out.”
Your Leaders Were Lying. Now The People Are Driving
Spencer Ackerman, 26 Jan 2026 [FOREVER WARS]
...Then he described something else that has been visible and inspiring in all the reporting coming out of Minnesota: Networks of parents, often using schools as donation hubs, have assembled resource pools. They deliver these resources to their immigrant and nonwhite neighbors who are at risk of being snatched or worse. They ensure their neighbors are fed. They accompany the vulnerable when the vulnerable need to leave their homes. Many people are unable to work but rent will still be due when the month turns over. Minnesotans are helping one another with all of this….
Richard Murphy, January 27, 2026 [Funding the Future]
People keep asking me what they can do to help change the conversation about economics, politics, and power. The answer is simpler, and more important, than most people expect.
Social media now decides what people see, hear, and believe. If our ideas are not present there, they effectively do not exist. Silence is not neutral; it cedes the space to those who already dominate it.
In this video, I explain why liking, sharing, commenting, and eventually creating your own posts are now forms of civic action. I also explain how algorithms really work, why perfection is not required, how AI can help without replacing judgement, and why consistency matters more than scale.
This is a practical guide to becoming part of the conversation and shaping it….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Is the ‘Influencer Right’ at Odds With Trump Over Minnesota?
Nathan Taylor Pemberton, Jan. 30, 2026 [New York Times]
A vocal group of Trump supporters broke with the president when he appeared to backpedal on his immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Is it a rift, or just a passing mood?
It was an apparent decision by Mr. Trump to play nice, hours before a shake-up that included reassigning Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official who was leading the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. As the president seemed to soften his position, MAGA’s talking heads gathered online to offer a few rueful words of their own.“He blinked,” Stephen K. Bannon said of the president on his podcast “War Room” a day later.“He just sucks,” said Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old Holocaust denier whose feelings about the president change often, but have lately soured.“Trump is just an old, tired man who doesn’t really care — he’s just not the guy,” Mr. Fuentes added, during a segment of his podcast, “America First with Nick Fuentes.”“This is a major blunder,” Matt Walsh, a conservative commentator who is not known for breaking with the president, said on his podcast, “The Matt Walsh Show.” …Within the online right, a highly vocal subset of young conservatives have advocated loudly for immigration restrictions, mass deportations and even the end of legal immigration approaches, like the H-1B visa. This week, several college Republican groups posted open letters to Mr. Trump in support of mass deportation. “Our message to you Mr. President: Do not back down.” read a letter published by the Young Republicans of Texas.During a recent podcast appearance, Andrew Kolvet, the spokesman for Turning Point USA, said that younger Republicans in his organization were “way more radical” than older Republicans on the subject of immigration. “It’s not even negotiable, these issues,” he said….“Have we learned nothing in 60 years?” wrote Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, a social media platform for right-wing users. “You must force Walz to cooperate or jail him.”Much of this rhetoric appeared to be animated by a fear that the Minneapolis killings by ICE officers could set off a nationwide unrest like the kind the country faced in 2020, during Mr. Trump’s first term. The Black Lives Matter protests of the time, coupled with the right’s response to the protests, helped shift public opinion away from Mr. Trump, who went on to lose the presidential election that year.Many on the right view this current moment as existential test for the president, as well as the MAGA movement: Force, unambiguous and swift, against the “chaos,” as the podcast host Tucker Carlson put it on his show this week, appears to be the only answer that will satisfy them.“If we lose in Minneapolis, it proves the American government on a federal level is effectively defunct,” Andrew Beck, the vice president of communications for the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that is closely aligned with the administration, wrote on X on Saturday.
‘Most Dangerous Attack on Voting Rights Ever’? New GOP Election Bill Sparks Dire Warnings
Jake Johnson, January 30, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The Republican chairman of the House committee that oversees federal elections introduced legislation on Thursday that one analyst characterized as possibly “the most dangerous attack on voting rights ever” put forth in the US Congress.
Led by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), chair of the House Administration Committee, the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act would ban ranked-choice voting and universal mail-in ballots in federal elections, prohibit states from accepting mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day, enable large-scale voter purges, and institute photo ID requirements.
The bill was endorsed by right-wing organizations including the Election Integrity Network, an organization that—in the words of the New York Times—“has done more than any other group to take [President Donald Trump’s] falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action.” The Election Integrity Network has received funding from Citizens for Renewing America, a group founded by White House budget director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought.
Civic republicanism
The Crisis, No. 3 — On the institution of the Citizen
Mike Brock, Jan 26, 2026 [Notes From The Circus]
When we take power—and we will take power—we are going to have to do some uncomfortable things.
I say this plainly because I am tired of pretending otherwise. The republic is in crisis. The people who brought us to this crisis must be held accountable. And the conditions that allowed this crisis to occur must be changed, fundamentally and permanently, so that it never happens again.
This will not be comfortable. It will not be polite. It will not satisfy those who believe that politics is a matter of splitting differences and finding common ground with people who have demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that they do not share our commitment to constitutional democracy....
The institution of the Citizen is the largest institution in the Republic.
I want you to sit with that sentence. I want you to understand what it means.
We speak of institutions constantly. The presidency. The Congress. The courts. The military. The press. We analyze their health, their dysfunction, their capture by hostile forces. We write articles about institutional decay and institutional reform. We understand, at least in the abstract, that a republic is only as strong as its institutions.
But we have forgotten the largest institution of all. The one that encompasses all the others. The one without which none of the others can function.
The Citizen.
Citizenship is not a status. It is not a passport. It is not a set of rights you passively enjoy while going about your private business. Citizenship is an institution—the foundational institution of republican government—and like all institutions, it must be built, maintained, renewed, and defended.
An institution has structure. It has norms. It has practices. It has privileges, and it has responsibilities. The institution of the Citizen is no different. To be a citizen is to occupy a role in the political order, a role that carries obligations as well as rights, duties as well as freedoms.
We have forgotten this. We have allowed citizenship to decay into a consumer identity, a tribal marker, a thing you perform on social media rather than practice in your community. We have produced generations of Americans who do not understand what the Constitution requires, what self-governance demands, what they owe to each other and to the republic that protects them all.
And now we are paying the price….
We let civic education decay into an afterthought. We let citizenship become a brand. We convinced ourselves that democracy was self-sustaining, that the institutions would hold on their own, that we did not need to do the hard work of forming each generation in the practices and responsibilities of self-governance.
The enemies of democracy did not make the same mistake. They built their own educational infrastructure—their think tanks, their media networks, their podcasts and YouTube channels and bootcamps. They taught their children that government was the enemy, that taxation was theft, that the collective good was a fiction, that the only loyalty was to oneself and one’s capital.
And now their children are in power, and our children do not know how to stop them….
We tried neutrality. We tried stepping back, letting the marketplace of ideas sort it out, trusting that democracy would defend itself. The result is a generation that cannot distinguish between news and propaganda, that thinks freedom means the absence of all obligation, that has been taught by algorithm to hate their neighbors and worship their exploiters.
The marketplace of ideas has been cornered by people with more money than conscience. The neutral approach has produced a citizenry that does not know what citizenship means.
We are done with neutrality. We are going to teach our children what democracy requires….
The Crisis, No. 2 — On the cynical and the craven
Mike Brock, Jan 26, 2026 [Notes From The Circus]
[The ideology of Trump and his plutocrat friends who believe they have the "right to exit" from obligations to society and democratic constraints.]
I want to tell you about the people who built this….
I want to tell you about the architects. The theorists. The men who decided, decades ago, that democracy was an obstacle to be overcome, and who have spent the intervening years building the infrastructure to overcome it.
This is a story about ideology. About money. About the deliberate construction of a parallel power structure designed to compete with—and ultimately replace—constitutional government. It is a story about people you may have heard of, and others you have not, and what they have been doing while the rest of us were distracted….
In 1997, William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson published The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. The thesis was simple: the internet would dissolve the power of nation-states. Digital technology would allow the wealthy to escape the constraints of geography, taxation, and democratic accountability. A new era was dawning—an era in which capital would be sovereign, and those who possessed it would owe nothing to the societies that had made their wealth possible….
The logic of technology would produce a world of “cognitive elites” who operated beyond the reach of governments, while the masses—whom the authors regarded with undisguised contempt—would be left to fight over the scraps of the old order.
This was not presented as a dystopia. It was presented as liberation. Liberation for the strong. For the smart. For those who understood where history was going and positioned themselves accordingly.
The Sovereign Individual became a founding text of what would later call itself the “technology elite.” Peter Thiel has cited it as one of the most important books he has ever read. It circulates in Silicon Valley like scripture. It told a generation of wealthy men that their wealth entitled them to exit—to leave behind the obligations of citizenship and build something new. Something better. Something for themselves….
Exit. That is the key word. That is what they want.
Not exit as in emigration. Not exit as in leaving one country for another. Exit as in departure from the very concept of democratic constraint. Exit from the principle that the people have any right to govern themselves. Exit from the idea that wealth carries obligations. Exit from the social contract itself.
They have built an entire ideology around this word. They call it “the right of exit.” They mean the right of capital to escape accountability. The right of the powerful to refuse the claims of their fellow citizens. The right to take the wealth that was generated within a society and remove it from that society’s reach….
Because here is where it ends: with Alex Pretti dying in the street.
You may think these things are unconnected. The network state ideology, the bootcamps in Singapore, the arcane theories of Rothbard and Hoppe and Schmitt—what do any of these have to do with a VA nurse being shot ten times in the back in Minneapolis?
Everything. They have everything to do with it.
The men who shot Alex Pretti were instruments of a federal government that has been captured by this ideology. The administration they serve was funded by these people, staffed by these people, advised by these people. The cruelty is not incidental. The cruelty is the point. The cruelty is what happens when you build a movement around the idea that democratic constraints are illegitimate and the strong should dominate the weak.
[TW: What concerns me is that so many leaders of the (anti)Republican Party fully support the plutocrats’ agenda, even while they are completely ignorant of the plutocrats’ anti-republican ideology: ]
North Carolina State Board of Elections Eliminates Early Voting Site at Nation’s Largest HBCU
[Democracy NC, January, 13, 2026]
Following a tense meeting to review early voting plans for the 2026 primary elections, the North Carolina State Board of Elections approved a Guilford County plan that will systematically disenfranchise historic Black communities and eliminate voting access for students at North Carolina A&T State University, the nation’s largest public HBCU.
The approved plan strips away early voting sites that have served Black voters in Guilford County for over a decade, including Washington Terrace Park in High Point, Barber Park in southeast Greensboro, and the polling location at North Carolina A&T.
“This plan is an attack on Black voting rights and an attempt to silence an entire generation of young voters,” said Adrienne Kelly, Executive Director of Democracy North Carolina. “When you deliberately strip away polling sites Black communities have depended on for years, including at the largest HBCU in America, you’re erecting barriers designed to suppress Black student voices and deny young people their fundamental freedom to vote.”
Without nearby early voting sites, residents in southwestern and southeastern Guilford County must travel outside their neighborhoods to vote, a burden compounded by limited public transportation. The eliminated sites also provided critical access to same-day voter registration, allowing new voters to register and vote simultaneously. Without this proximity, young and first-time voters face a greater risk of ballot rejection due to registration errors.
The Crisis, No. 10 — The People, sovereign
Mike Brock, Jan 31, 2026 [Notes From The Circus]
What is under attack in America right now is not a party. Not a set of policies. Not even a set of norms.
What is under attack is popular sovereignty itself.
They have seized the ballots in Georgia. The physical record of how the People voted. The Director of National Intelligence stood in a parking lot. Watched the boxes loaded onto trucks. Five years after the election. The evidence of the People’s will is gone. They seek to rewrite history, so that they may steal the future.
In Minneapolis, a city in occupation by an illegitimate elite. Three thousand federal agents. Loyal to a man. Not the people. The Fourth Amendment ignored. Citizens killed in the street. The People of Minneapolis elected officials who set certain policies. The federal government sent an army to override those choices. And a bullet in the face or in the back is what’s in store if you don’t kneel.
In Los Angeles, the journalist is in custody. Two judges said no crime had been committed. Not one. Two. The executive arrested him anyway. Because the president wanted it. Because the president said so on social media and his Department of Justice obliged. The People’s right to witness what is done in their name has been criminalized. You cannot see. You cannot know. You cannot govern.
The record seized. The governance overridden. The witnesses blinded.
Every action negating the same principle: the People rule here.
One ideology says the People are obsolete. Sovereignty for sale. Democracy a problem to be optimized. Citizens are users now. Build your enclave. Buy your exit. Route around the People like they’re dead technology.
Another says the People can only act through the Leader. He embodies them. He is the movement. They do not need to speak. He speaks for them. He knows what they want. He is what they want.
Both arrive at the same place: the People do not rule….
Reality Distortion in the Age of Trump and the Corrupt Court
Josh Marshall, January 30, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
Birthright citizenship is clearly, explicitly and incontestably written into the U.S. Constitution. It’s the country’s fundamental law and more than 150 years of American history have been lived on that basis. There’s a reason why no one has doubted this over all those years even if many have opposed it.
A huge amount of the conservative legal movement, especially but not solely in its post-2012 and increasingly Trumpy variant, has been based on changing legal analysis and interpretation, turning it into a choose-your-own-adventure exercise in which you say, What could this law or constitutional passage require if we start from the premise that words and phrases have no established meaning? If the Supreme Court decides that the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t exist or doesn’t count, that won’t change its established meaning. It will have vast real-world implications in the short term — and what counts as the short term isn’t entirely clear. But the actual law and Constitution will not have changed; what it says will not have changed.
This may be a subtle point and more importantly the relevance of this point may not be immediately clear. But it’s actually quite important. Constitutional government in the United States is largely in abeyance and has been for roughly a year. Whether it returns is not yet clear. In the old times, we accepted Supreme Court decisions because there was a broadly held view that the Court was operating on good-faith jurisprudence even if it was a jurisprudence we ourselves didn’t agree with. That’s no longer the case. What we have is a corrupt Court making war on the constitutional order. Its decisions have no legitimacy. We may choose, as a pragmatic decision, to operate within them. But that doesn’t mean they’re legitimate or have any claim on us. It’s the same as the role of the states and state sovereignty in a time of constitutional crisis. Small-d democratic legitimacy now exists in the free states. And it’s the responsibility of the free states to resist the power of a renegade presidency making war on the Constitution as well as they can while the forces of civic democracy regroup and prepare to reassert their power.
Along these lines, I’ve been I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how states — now only with small steps — are moving forward into this role. TPM alum Brian Beutler published his conversation today with California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has set up a portal for citizens, state officials and law enforcement to report and save evidence of ICE crimes. Later I learned that New Jersey Governor Sherrill is doing the same thing.
Administrative Warfare & The End of the Political
[Landmarks: A Journal of International Dialogue, via Naked Capitalism 01-29-2025]
We are witnessing a fundamental shift in how the state is functioning, and how it is functioning vis-à-vis its citizens. This shift is, of course, accompanied by many more developments (such as infrastructural ones, financial ones, the importance of dual-use technology, monopolization, rhetoric, etc.), yet, let’s just look at this particular example of the attempt to remove dissent in Western states.
In the classical Liberal State (Modernity), the citizen was a “Subject” who had an interior life, private opinions, and rights that pre-existed the state. The state’s job was to protect that private sphere.
In the current, let’s call it Bunker State, the citizen is re-defined, as is their relationship to the state itself: The citizen is an object, a node in the cognitive infrastructure. They are just one part of the security / conflict-preparation infrastructure. Just as the state must secure its energy grid (pipelines) and its transport grid (trains), it must secure its human grid (minds).
Consequently, a “glitch” in the human grid (dissent, “disinformation”) is no longer a valid exercise of freedom but a security vulnerability. It is a crack in the Bunker wall….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-29-2025]
Was Alex Pretti the subject of a targeted assassination?
Joseph Kishore, Jan 28, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]
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