Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 15, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Why The Epstein Scandal Is Really A Billionaire Scandal - Barry's Economics (YouTube)
Barry Ferns, Feb 8, 2026 [YouTube]
Everyone thinks Jeffrey Epstein was an aberration. The science says he was inevitable. This video breaks down the neuroscience, psychology, and economics that explain how extreme wealth concentration doesn't just create inequality. but manufactures monsters.
00:00 - Introduction: The Elephant in the Room
02:04 - Part One: Power Rewires the Brain
03:30 - Part Two: The Empathy Gap and Isolation
05:19 - Part Three: Moral Licensing
08:13 - Part Four: Structural Impunity
10:50 - Part Five: Manufacturing Vulnerability
12.54 - Part Six: The Epstein Economy
15:53 - Stand-up Comedy Relief
The Epstein class and collapse porn
Cory Doctorow, 09 Feb 2026 [Pluralistic]
… The latest batch of Epstein emails includes a particularly ghoulish exchange between Epstein and his business partner, the anti-democracy activist and billionaire Peter Thiel:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00824843.pdf
The email is dated 26 Jun 2016, right after Brexit, and in it, Epstein writes:
- “… return to tribalism . counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain….”
This is a perfect example of what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism." It's been the norm since the crash of 2008, when bankers were made whole through public bailouts and mortgage holders were evicted by the millions to "foam the runway" for the banks:
The crash of 2008 turned a lot of people's homes – their only substantial possessions – into "distressed assets" that were purchased at fire-sale prices by Wall Street investors, who turned around and rented those homes out to people who were now priced out of the housing market at rents that kept them too poor to ever afford a home, under slum conditions that crawled with insects and black mold:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/
Note here that economic collapse helps the Epstein class only if society has no social safety net. If Obama had supported homeowners instead of banks, there wouldn't have been a foreclosure crisis and thus there wouldn't have been any "distressed assets" flooding the market.
So it's no surprise that the Epstein class are also obsessed with austerity. Peter Mandelson (British Labour's "Prince of Darkness") is a close ally of Epstein's, and also a key figure in the crushing austerity agenda of Blair, Brown and Starmer. He's a machine for turning Parliamentary majorities into distressed assets at scale….
The thousand-plus children that Epstein lured to his island rape-camp were often "distressed assets" in their own right: Julie K Brown's groundbreaking reporting on Epstein for the Miami Herald described how he sought out children whose parents were poor, or neglectful, or both, on the grounds that those children would be "on their way to collapse," too.
The Epstein class's commitment to destroying "The Economy" makes sense when you understand that trashing civilization is "much easier than finding the next bargain." They want to buy the dip, so they're creating the dip.
They don't need the whole number to go up, just theirs. They know that inclusive economies are more prosperous for society as a whole, but it makes criminals and predators worse off. The New Deal kicked off a period of American economic growth never seen before or since, but the rich despised it, because a prosperous economy is one in which it gets harder and harder to find "things on their way to collapse," and thus nearly impossible to "find[] the next bargain."
[TW: On October 30, 2025 Patriotic Millionaires posted a summary of modern studies which prove the corrupting power of wealth. But the problem of the psycho-pathology of the rich has been known for centuries:
[“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” is repeated three times in the New Testament, in Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25.
[In The Spirit of Laws, Book 5. Chapter 5, ”In what Manner the Laws establish Equality in a Democracy,” Montesquieu warned for “men of overgrown estates, everything which does not contribute to advance their power and honor is considered by them as an injury.…” ]
Why Do the Epstein Files Matter? An Expert on the Elites Explains Why
Mehdi Hasan and Team Zeteo, Feb 05, 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2025]
In this can’t-miss ‘Mehdi Unfiltered’ interview, the Financial Times’ US editor and veteran columnist Edward Luce takes Mehdi on a deep dive into what it all means, and the who’s-who of those that appeared in the files, from Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Howard Lutnick, to Elon Musk, Noam Chomsky, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak….During the wide-ranging interview, the Mehdi and Luce also discuss:“It’s an MRI of how things work in a culture where shame has vanished,” Luce tells Mehdi.
- The world leader that could be brought down by the latest release of the Epstein files (hint: it’s not Trump!)
- Epstein’s deep involvement with Israeli and Russian intelligence services
- Why Joe Biden and then-Attorney General Merrick Garland didn’t do anything with these incriminating Epstein files when they were in office….
The slow Epstein earthquake: The rupture between the people and the élites
Alastair Crooke, February 9, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]
Americans Want Accountability With the Epstein Files. Elites Couldn’t Care Less.
Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, February 10 2026 [The Intercept]
The list of elites who maintained close relationships with Epstein is long and includes prominent politicians, media figures, academics, and business leaders. In contrast, the list of people who have faced any meaningful consequences, at least in the United States, is so far quite short. Recently, Brad Karp, a top Democratic Party fundraising “bundler,” was removed as chair of the white-shoe law firm Paul Weiss after his extensive ties to Epstein were revealed. Peter Attia, the celebrity doctor and a new hire at Bari Weiss’ CBS News, resigned from a protein bar company after emails showed him making dirty jokes with Epstein. The economist Larry Summers was deemed toxic after a previous DOJ disclosure, went on leave from teaching at Harvard, and was unceremoniously dropped by numerous institutions. So far, that’s about the extent of it.
To be very explicit, this lack of serious consequences is a choice that powerful people in the United States are making. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, Prince Andrew is prince no more, reduced to merely Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor after King Charles removed all of his remaining royal titles; the former CEO of Barclays has been barred from the finance industry; the British ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, has been forced out; Morgan McSweeney, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and a Mandelson protege, was forced to resign under pressure; and Starmer risks losing his post over the Mandelson appointment. In Slovakia, the national security adviser to the prime minister has resigned. Accountability, if you care to enforce it, is in fact possible.
But on this side of the pond, elites have moved to protect powerful people with Epstein connections (themselves included). Donald Trump is the most obvious example; for any other president, the relationship between the two men would have been a fast track to impeachment. The documents also reveal how many powerful people maintained relationships with Epstein years after he was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008: Among them are former presidential adviser and current podcast bro Steve Bannon, Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Tesla et al. CEO and “MechaHitler” progenitor Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Extensive redactions to the documents by the Justice Department have slow-walked matters even further, but on Tuesday, Rep. Ro Khanna took aim by reading off the names of “six wealthy, powerful men that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason” on the floor of Congress.
[TW: I want to break this out, as snark:
It is worth being quite clear here: This does not mean everyone who makes any appearance at all in the files needs to be excised from public life. For instance, the political commentators Megan McArdle, Josh Barro, Ben Dreyfuss, and Ross Douthat recently recorded a podcast episode titled “We’re All in the Epstein Files,” which notes that they all are there because of tweets that a third party shared with Epstein, mostly via a newsletter sent out by Gregory Brown. That sort of thing is not the point. In order to actually clean house, we need to be clear where the dirt is.
[A poster on Facebook argued that instead, we should use the same approach that ICE is using against undocumented aliens — round up, arrest and detain in some unknown place, everyone who appears to have had some connection to Epstein and Maxwell. Without due process, of course. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.]
[Going Deep with Russ Baker, Feb 08, 2026]
Why Is Canadian Media Silent on Conrad Black Being in the Epstein Files?
Dougald Lamont, Feb 09, 2026
[TW: In the 1990s I was writing about Conrad Black’s shady business dealings at his Hollinger media cartel empire — half a billion dollars “lost” in two years in the late 90s — and helping trace his links to the British establishment that included former high level managers from MI-5 and MI-6. Black was a financial backer of one of the most destructive US neocons, Richard Perle. In the 1980s, Black gained control of the London Telegraph media group, and directed it to support Margaret Thatcher and Benjamin Netanyahu. Black’s holding also included the Chicago Sun-Times and The Jerusalem Post. Hollinger had an International Advisory Board which included Perle, Thatcher, Lord Peter Carrington, and Henry Kissinger. On the board of directors was Leslie Wexner, the man who appears to have provided the first big tranches of funds to Epstein. Black was convicted of financial crimes in July 2007, and sentenced to over six years in prison. In the past few years, he has been writing opinion pieces for the extremist conservative Epoch Times. Conrad Black is not related to Leon Black.]
Former police chief says Trump knew of Epstein abuse in 2006
[Drop Site Daily: February 10, 2026]
Former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter told the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a 2019 interview that President Donald Trump called him in July 2006, saying Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teenage girls was widely known in New York and Palm Beach, according to a new report from The Miami Herald. Reiter’s account directly contradicts Trump’s public denials.
Bondi’s Binders: Failed State Ragebait — Why was the Attorney General screaming at Congress?
Jim Stewartson, Feb 12, 2026 [MindWar]
...Bondi’s motivations for signing up to Trump’s organized crime government are numerous. Her conflicts of interest are extraordinarily clear.
First, she was the Attorney General in Florida from 2011 to 2019, leaving office just a few months before Epstein was arrested by Bill Barr. For eight years, Epstein operated in her state without interference from law enforcement. In 2013, Donald Trump infamously donated $25,000 to her campaign, after which she declined to prosecute Trump University on fraud charges.
Either she knew what Epstein was doing and chose not to do anything about it, or she was too incompetent to know the most infamous pedophile in the world was still behaving like a pedophile in her state. Either way, she is personally invested in Epstein just going away.
Second, Bondi’s lobbying work is precisely aligned with the Trump regime. She was a lobbyist for private prison contractor GEO Group, whose main customer is ICE. And she was paid $115,000 per month to lobby Congress on behalf of Qatar.
Another recipient of Qatar’s largesse is Kash Patel….
Pam Bondi should be in jail for covering up for Jeffrey Epstein’s heinous crimes!
Dean Obeidallah, Feb 12, 2026
The consensus by the corporate media was that she was doing all this in the defense of her beloved Donald Trump. But what those media outlets are missing is that Bondi’s unhinged level of defensives was because she is guilty—and she knows it. Bondi has long protected Epstein and the powerful men who raped children and were trafficked women. She must be criminally investigated to determine if she broke the law doing this!
Before becoming US Attorney General, Bondi served for eight years as Florida’s AG from 2011 to 2019. That is the very state and time that Jeffrey Epstein was running his sprawling child rape and sex trafficking ring. As Trump’s own first term DOJ told us in a 2020 report, after Epstein was released from prison in 2009, he returned to his lavish lifestyle and was able to “continue his abuse of minors.”….
Attorney for Epstein Survivors Warns That Justice Is Impossible With Bondi as AG
When the Oligarchs Don’t Need You Anymore — Epstein, Dark Enlightenment and the Unholy Marriage with MAGA
Kathleen Wallace, Feb 09, 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2025]
I’m not sure what else will be required as evidence that our government and society is being run by men who view the rest of us as poor quality commodities. They say as much in their “Dark Enlightenment” nonsense, in the Project 2025 Temu Ayn Rand papers, and of course, by their own actions. That is the best indicator of all. The use of children as pawns to abuse in order to compromise individuals of wealth and power is clear to anyone not firmly with scales on their eyes. There is no need at this point for a point of “disclosure”. It is grossly evident and to continue to ignore it will most certainly lead to more deaths and misery for the vast majority of people.
We have a group of men who are actively preparing themselves for a societal collapse. In fact, by their own writings, they invite it. They build bunkers to hurriedly protect themselves from the fallout of their own actions. They seem to only want enough humans around to serve them in ways that AI cannot and even that looks to be an infinitesimally small number. Perhaps they need enough to breed children to abuse? There are no plans coming forth to replace income with a UBI when jobs are lost to AI, and of course that is already occurring. In a nation flush with cash, but not for you, millions are cast off on Medicaid, in what can only be considered a premeditated murder of the masses.
But you see, they don’t care. It’s not an unfortunate side effect or a required austerity measure in a time of crisis. It is a class of individuals who do not see themselves as one of us. The concept of empathy, solidarity and working for a beautiful future is not a consideration for individuals wounded so profoundly at the core….
The propaganda is relentless, but of course it must be. If these derangements of society came easily then of course such a firm hold on the narrative would not be necessary. I once saw it mentioned that if women were truly to be subservient and this was indeed the natural order of things, it wouldn’t be so imperative to keep reminding them of it via religious dogmatism. These hierarchies are unnatural and to keep them from toppling, massive amounts of glue, tape and violence are needed. Every step of the way, whether it was taking away the commons or strong-arming labor into factories, it’s always been the same. It takes violence and unnatural coercion to plunge the vast majority of the populace into lives that don’t make sense, to lives less free than animals in nature.
There is no reason for technology to have been used to further subjugate us. In a just society these advances would be used for things like mitigating natural disasters and allowing the lives of citizens to be meaningful and connected. Can you even imagine what would be possible if most of the populace wasn’t scared of ruin via one misstep? What grand inventions have we missed? What works of art? ….
Is it any wonder there might be a need for massive anti-depressants, stimulants and whatever else can numb the pain? None of this is necessary; it’s simply to prop up a class of individuals who got there via a profound ability to step on others in a manner most of us would find repellent and impossible.
These tech bro nightmare freaks also have sickening fantasies of AI immortality. They see a future without biologic humans at all, save their own uploaded consciousness. They have aligned with simple sick malignant narcissists of the political class who serve as their accomplices on this dystopian road….
One important aspect of this is to realize that in the same manner as the Palestinians have been treated, you and yours will be treated likewise. This is the case with the “disposable” girls in the Epstein class. Our lives mean nothing to them. It is intersectional in all the terrible ways. An older man without a job any longer due to AI will not be treated with any more deference than the Palestinian woman, the trafficked child. This is our great difficulty, because most Americans certainly donot realize this, but they are getting a hint at it when they see white moms shot in the face after saying “I’m not mad at you”….
Crisis of Credibility Edition — The Disorienting Impact of Massive Document Dumps
Nat Wilson Turner, February 11, 2026 [Naked Capitalism]
Lawyer here. The method with which the Epstein files are being released is deliberately designed to put you in a psychological trance. This is their strategy. Here's how I know this:In trial practice, when there are exhibits involving violence, children, or extreme harm, we do not simply dump information into the room. We go back and forth extensively about how and when something is shown. The Judge guides the process. Experts contextualize it. It is a container equipped to hold this content.
Courts understand that when the brain is flooded with horror, your system gets hijacked by the primal brain. You go into hypervigilance, rage, obsession, and collapse. We have a name for this: reptile theory.
Reptile theory is a trial strategy built on this premise: if you can bypass the cognitive brain and activate the primitive survival brain (the oldest/reptile part of the brain), you can control outcomes without ever persuading on facts or law. This strategy is not allowed at trial….
Arms (Nuclear) and the Man (Epstein)
[Fair Observer, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2025]
One of the more spectacular morsels that has emerged is the video of a two-hour interview conducted by Steve Bannon. Most people remember him as Donald Trump’s evil genius back in his first US presidential term in 2017. The two-hour conversation was just a starter. It appears that Bannon recorded a full 15 hours of video with Epstein. These sessions were recorded shortly before the sexual predator and all-purpose spy was arrested in 2019. And therefore shortly before Epstein met a fate similar to that of his former mentor Robert Maxwell. According to one of Epstein’s own emails, though it was officially declared a suicide, Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad “was passed away” by his friends at Mossad.
The major passage from the interview that interests this Devil’s Advocate appeared at the very end, when Bannon confronts Epstein with the question: “Do you think you’re the devil himself?” Epstein blinks twice nervously before trying to dodge the challenge by making a joke about possessing a mirror. He then asks Bannon, “Why would you say that?” Some might perversely interpret that as meaning: “How did you find me out?” ….
The serious question many wish to see answered is this: What are the systemic forces in politics and the economy that enabled Epstein to bring all these people together, who thus appear to form a secret, self-protective geopolitical oligarchy motivated by greed, power and manipulative pleasure? Yes, Trump appears as a major player, as does Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and even Britain’s Labour Party political Svengali Peter Mandelson. His patent complicity with Epstein may well bring down the United Kingdom’s current prime minister, Keir Starmer. Epstein’s links with Israeli intelligence are now undeniable, but the influence and surreptitious activity he engaged in stretched across continents.
The public is finally becoming aware of how a class of visible and invisible power players have crafted and are running a system designed for their comfort, pleasure, greed and narcissism. We now need to look beyond the anecdotal and seek to discover and describe how their power articulates with what we still believe to be the legitimate political authority of our liberal democratic institutions. Democracy, like beauty, may well be in the eyes of the beholder, but we can see more clearly today that it’s also in the tight grasp of an invisible oligarchy….
Alan Macleod, February 7th, 2026 [mintpressnews.com]
Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Epstein and the Politics of Betrayal
Chris Hedges, Feb 08, 2026
...I know and have long admired Noam. He is, arguably, our greatest and most principled intellectual. I can assure you he is not as passive or gullible as his wife claims. He knew about Epstein’s abuse of children. They all knew. And like others in the Epstein orbit, he did not care. From the email correspondence between Epstein and Valéria it appears she particularly enjoyed the privileges that came with being in Epstein’s circle, but this does not absolve Noam’s acquiescence. Noam, of all people, knows the predatory nature of the ruling class and the cruelty of capitalists, where the vulnerable, especially girls and women, are commodified as objects to be used and exploited. He was not fooled by Epstein. He was seduced. His association with Epstein is a terrible and, to many, unforgivable stain. It irreparably tarnishes his legacy. If there is a lesson here, it is this. The ruling class offers nothing without expecting something in return. The closer you get to these vampires the more you become enslaved. Our role is not to socialize with them. It is to destroy them.
Drug Cartels Are Shifting Their Money Laundering to Crypto. Cops Can’t Keep Up
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture, February 12, 2026]
A vast ecosystem supported by the gig economy has sprung up to clean all that cash. Cartels are moving their dirty money through crypto and the gig economy, and law enforcement is struggling to keep pace with the evolving playbook.
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Pam Bondi Admits DOJ Has a Secret Domestic Terrorist List
Nick Turse, February 12 2026 [The Intercept]
After the DOJ dodged questions for months, Bondi acknowledged in a House Judiciary Committee hearing that she had a list of targets under NSPM-7.
Dan Feidt, February 6, 2026 [Unicorn Riot, via Pluralistic]
Courts Have Ruled That ICE Illegally Jailed People More Than 4,400 Times in Less Than Five Months
Stephen Prager, Feb 14, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Inside the Classified Whistleblower Complaint Against America’s Spy Chief
[The After-Action Report, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2025]
The Upcoming American Holocaust: Connecting Billionaires, AI, ICE & Trump’s Concentration Camps
[Egberto Off The Record, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
IRS improperly disclosed confidential immigrant tax data to DHS
[WaPo, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
Google is censoring anti-ICE speech in the workplace as 1,200 employees call on the company to cut ties Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
Trump supporters: ICE will come for you, too. The Holler, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
The Mark Kelly Case Is Bigger Than It Seems
Missy Ryan, February 9, 2026 [The Atlantic]
...As someone who’s covered 10 secretaries of defense, I’ve never seen anything like what Hegseth is doing—not even close. If Hegseth gets his way, he won’t just be punishing Kelly; he will succeed in dramatically curbing the First Amendment rights of all military retirees, some of the very people who have fought to defend such freedoms.
At the heart of the case is a November video in which Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers—all veterans of the military or intelligence agencies—address U.S. troops, reminding them that they “can and must refuse illegal orders.” ….
The Trump administration’s response was swift. Adviser Stephen Miller called the video an attempted “insurrection.” Donald Trump declared that the “traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL,” and reposted suggestions that they be hanged. Hegseth ordered the Navy to look into Kelly’s “potentially unlawful” comments, something he was able to do because Kelly is the only one in the video who receives benefits as a military retiree.
(Although some 18 million military veterans are living in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center, a much smaller share of those people reach retirement status.) Kelly now receives lifelong retirement pay and is subject to rules, including the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In early January, Hegseth issued Kelly a letter of censure over his “seditious statements and his pattern of reckless misconduct,” which, Hegseth said, had harmed military discipline and undermined the chain of command. He also asked Navy Secretary John Phelan (a Republican donor and billionaire art collector with no naval experience) to begin a review of Kelly’s retirement rank and pay.The Trump administration’s attempts to go after Kelly are, several legal experts told me, straightforwardly outrageous and without merit. But even if the judge rules in Kelly’s favor, it’s worth paying attention to this fight, because it underscores the degree to which the Trump administration is seeking to expand executive power in novel ways….Even before the Kelly episode, I had heard from numerous veterans about the chilling effect that Hegseth has had. The defense secretary—who insists on being called the “war secretary”—has used social media and speeches to vilify opponents, including former service members. Those who have worn the uniform are now less likely to criticize the administration’s policy or personnel moves, because they fear for their benefits or worry about getting in hot water with current employers skittish about backlash from the administration….Dan Maurer, a former Army lawyer and combat engineer, told me that Hegseth’s decision to pursue administrative disciplinary steps against Kelly—rather than an attempt to court-martial him—was likely because a trial would leave Kelly’s fate to a military jury. When I asked whether such a jury would convict Kelly, he laughed dismissively. “Absolutely not,” he said. Maurer, who teaches law at Ohio Northern University, said he believes that the administration’s objective is more about demonstrating punitive action and appealing to the base than winning in court. “They don’t care what the courts say, because they’re going to depict them as liberal, woke courts,” he said.
Leakers Helped Destroy Deportation Case Against Tufts Student
Seth Stern, February 13 2026 [The Intercept]
The disclosures revealed the case was built entirely on an op-ed Rümeysa Öztürk co-wrote, a chilling attack on free speech.
Fulton County: What's In The Warrant? Hint: Everything but probable cause
Joyce Vance, Feb 10, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
Today, the affidavit submitted when the Trump administration got its warrant to seize ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, was unsealed. I was expecting, well, probable cause. Because that’s what it takes to get a search warrant. But I didn’t find it in the 19-page affidavit the agent submitted along with the application for a search warrant.
The government says it’s investigating two crimes: Title 52 USC 20701, a misdemeanor records retention violation, and Title 52 USC 20511, which criminalizes “knowingly and willfully” depriving a state’s residents of a fair election by miscounting the vote. We discussed them in some detail following the search here.
At the outset, there appears to be a statute of limitations issue. The government has five years from the time they were committed to prosecute these crimes. The election was in 2020. It’s now 2026. Math was never my strong suit, but I don’t see how that can work. There is no explanation of this apparent deficiency in the affidavit. With a marker down for that legal issue, we move on to probable cause….
What Meetings Among Trump Lawyers Reveal About the FBI’s Seizure of Election Records in Georgia
Doug Bock Clark and Jeremy Kohler, February 13, 2026 [propublica.org]
The Missouri prosecutor overseeing an investigation into the 2020 vote in Fulton County, Georgia, has taken part in meetings since last fall with lawyers tasked by President Donald Trump to reinvestigate his loss to Joe Biden.
Thomas Albus, whom Trump appointed last year as U.S. attorney for Missouri’s Eastern District, has had multiple meetings set up with top administration lawyers to discuss election integrity.
At those meetings was Ed Martin, a Justice Department lawyer who until recently led a group investigating what the president has described as the department’s “weaponization” against him and his allies, according to a source familiar with the meetings who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
White House lawyer Kurt Olsen, who has been tasked with reinvestigating the 2020 election, also was directed to join at least one of the meetings, according to the source. Both Martin and Olsen worked on behalf of Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election results, and a federal court sanctioned Olsen for making false claims about the reliability of voting machines in Arizona….
“Not Ready for Prime Time.” A Federal Tool to Check Voter Citizenship Keeps Making Mistakes.
by Jen Fifield, ProPublica, and Zach Despart, February 13, 2026 [ProPublica and The Texas Tribune]
Lennon, who’d run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the tool might not be accurate.
The flagged voters’ registration paperwork confirmed Lennon’s suspicions. The form for the second person on the list bore the initials of a member of her staff, who’d helped the man register — at his naturalization ceremony. It later turned out more than half the Boone County voters identified as noncitizens were actually citizens.
The source of the bad data was a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.
Once used mostly to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, SAVE has undergone a dramatic expansion over the last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who has long falsely claimed that millions of noncitizens lurk on state voter rolls, tainting American elections.
Strategic Political Economy
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-12-2025]
F-35 faces a significant REE supply chain vulnerability, largely stemming from its reliance on Chinese-produced, high-strength permanent magnets for its radar, electric motors, and electronic warfare systems. With over 900 lbs of REE used in each jet—particularly in the AN/APG-81
Extreme Inequality Presages The Revolt Against It
[Noema, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2025]
...As we have written in Noema, one idea for pursuing this aim recently emerged during a brainstorming session with some of Silicon Valley’s more socially aware Big Tech titans. In this plan, all publicly traded companies with a market valuation above a certain threshold could be required to pay 2% of their value in shares each year as a “productivity and wealth-sharing levy” to a sovereign wealth fund that supplements Social Security.
From those holdings, every adult American — on the condition that they actively vote in elections — would receive a synthetic security, essentially an account indexed across the stock market, that must be vested for at least 20 years to allow the compounded returns to grow. Capital gains would be tax-exempt upon withdrawal….
Global power shift
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Pentagon Makes Largest Known Arms Purchase from Israel — For Banned Cluster Weapons The Intercept
Russia / Ukraine
Oligarchy
Netanyahu BLACKMAILING Trump Over Iran Using Epstein Files- Ex-Israeli Intel Officer Ari Ben-Menashe
Afshin Rattansi Going Underground, YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 02-10-2025]
Important. If Trump is so self-destructive as to attack Iran despite his strong preference for short and decisive-looking interventions, IMHO it will be due to the combination of the unwarranted Israeli overconfidence we discussed yesterday and Israel holding and threatening to expose some serious kompromat.
Who is America’s Largest Landowner?
[The Land Report, via The Big Picture, February 09, 2026]
The Kleptocracy Timeline — Tracking Patterns of Democratic Degradation
Open Source Intelligence for Democratic Defense
[Here are two of the events on the Kleptocracy Timeline:]
Fletcher v. Peck Establishes Judicial Protection for Fraudulent Contracts and Corrupt Land Deals
March 16, 1810
1810-03-16—fletcher-v-peck-protects-corrupt-land-deals.mdThe U.S. Supreme Court rules in Fletcher v. Peck that Georgia's attempt to rescind the fraudulent 1795 Yazoo land sale violates the Constitution's contract clause, marking the first time the Court strikes down a state law. Chief Justice John Marshall writes that while the bribery of Georgia legislators was "deplorable," subsequent purchaser Robert Fletcher was an "innocent third party" whose contract must be honored despite the corruption underlying the original transaction. The decision prioritizes property rights and contract sanctity over democratic efforts to remedy systematic legislative corruption, establishing that fraudulent deals become legally protected once resold to third parties.Marshall's opinion holds that Georgia's 1796 Rescinding Act, passed by a reform legislature to nullify the corrupt Yazoo land sale, unconstitutionally impairs the obligation of contracts. This ruling effectively rewards corruption by making it impossible to retroactively invalidate transactions tainted by bribery and fraud once they enter commercial circulation. The Court acknowledges that all but one Georgia legislator accepted bribes to pass the original Yazoo Act, yet prioritizes contractual stability for speculators over accountability for wholesale government corruption. The decision forces federal taxpayers to establish a $5 million reimbursement fund in 1814 to compensate investors, socializing the costs of private fraud while corrupt legislators and initial conspirators escape consequences. Fletcher v. Peck establishes dangerous precedents for elite impunity and institutional capture through judicial protection of corrupt transactions. The ruling creates a framework where systematic bribery of legislatures can produce legally enforceable contracts that courts will defend, incentivizing corruption by guaranteeing profits even when fraud is exposed. Marshall's contract clause interpretation hints that Native Americans lack complete title to their lands (fully realized in Johnson v. McIntosh), combining elite economic protection with dispossession of indigenous peoples. The decision demonstrates how courts serve property and commercial interests over democratic accountability, establishing patterns where judicial intervention protects corrupt elites while constraining popular efforts at reform—a dynamic recurring throughout American history from Gilded Age court protection of monopolies to modern immunity for financial fraud when losses are transferred to "innocent" investors and taxpayers bear remediation costs.October 25, 1886
1886-10-25—wabash-v-illinois-limits-state-railroad-regulation.mdOn October 25, 1886, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Co. v. Illinois (118 U.S. 557) in a 6-3 ruling that severely limited states' power to regulate interstate commerce, effectively shielding railroad monopolies from state-level oversight. The case arose from an Illinois law prohibiting railroads from charging higher rates for shorter hauls than for longer ones—a discriminatory practice railroads used to exploit small towns lacking competing rail service. The Court ruled that such state regulations constituted "direct" burdens on interstate commerce and therefore exceeded state authority under the Commerce Clause.The decision fundamentally modified the standard from Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852), introducing a new distinction between "direct" and "indirect" burdens on interstate commerce. While states could still impose "indirect" regulations like safety standards, they could no longer regulate railroad rates for interstate shipments—precisely the area where monopolistic abuse was most severe. This created an enormous regulatory void: the federal government had left railroad regulation almost entirely to states, while the Court now declared states powerless to regulate the most important aspect of railroad operations.Wabash effectively nullified the Granger Laws and reversed the democratic victory of Munn v. Illinois (1877), which had affirmed state regulatory power. The three dissenting justices—Bradley, Waite, and Gray—recognized the decision's dangerous implications: it left railroad monopolies free to exploit farmers, small businesses, and isolated communities without accountability to any government authority. However, the regulatory vacuum created by Wabash proved so economically and politically untenable that it precipitated federal action. Within months, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, creating the Interstate Commerce Commission as the first modern federal regulatory agency. While Wabash initiated the shift of regulatory responsibility from states to the federal government, it also established legal frameworks that corporations would use for decades to evade democratic accountability, playing state and federal jurisdictions against each other.
Felonomics
What Happened in El Paso? The MAGA clown show takes to the skies. In a dangerous way.
James Fallows, Feb 12, 2026 [Breaking the News, via DailyKos]
[TW: Worth reading to understand the technical issues involved, which were apparently entirely ignored by Trump regime officials. Which is to be expected, because these are showmen and carnival barkers with no patience for technical details and experts.]
5) So why should we care?
I care—as a long-time aviation practitioner, and as an even longer-time American—because the Administration’s handling of this event appears to have displayed its contempt for the two cardinal rules of aviation safety.
Letters from an American, February 13, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Feb 14, 2026
But Lyons’s claim that federal agents are adequately trained was belied on Wednesday when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) abruptly closed the airspace over El Paso, Texas, for what it initially said would be ten days. Such a closure would shut down all flights below 18,000 feet, including medical helicopters, and is rare enough that the comparison media used was to the closure of airspace after 9/11. Confusion reigned, since no one had notified even the mayor of El Paso, a city of 700,000 people. Shortly afterward, the FAA reopened the airspace.
Administration officials immediately said the problem was drones flown into the area by drug cartels, though such drone flights are common. Then the media reported that the Defense Department had been testing out a new antidrone defense system without signoff from the FAA on danger to civilian planes. Then it turned out that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had permitted U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of Border Patrol, to use an antidrone laser near Fort Bliss, where detainees are housed at Camp East Montana. Someone then used the laser without informing the FAA. And then it turned out that the “drones” agents used the laser to shoot down were actually party balloons.
That the Defense Department is loaning a military weapon to CBP is itself concerning, but that a weapon powerful enough to cause the closure of El Paso’s airspace was in the hands of someone who mistook balloons for cartel drones is also a problem. So, too, of course, is that the administration’s initial impulse was to lie about what happened….
Last night, in a deep expose of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisor Corey Lewandowski, Wall Street Journal reporters Michelle Hackman, Josh Dawsey, and Tarini Parti described a department in chaos. Noem and Lewandowski—who the authors say are having an affair and essentially run the department together—are using DHS for their own aggrandizement with an eye to elevating Noem to the presidency. The reporters detailed the focus on image, the decimation of ICE by firing or demoting 80% of the career field leadership that was in place when they arrived, the apparent steering of contracts to allies, and Noem and Lewandowski's excessive demands, including “a luxury 737 MAX jet, with a private cabin in back, for their travel around the country.” DHS is currently leasing the $70 million plane but is in the process of buying it….
And so Trump clearly thinks he must take matters into his own hands. Although the Constitution is quite clear that it is Congress, and Congress alone, that can make laws, today his social media account announced he intends to change the nation’s voting laws all by himself. The account posted: “The Democrats refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple—They want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired. I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
Trump Appoints Gambling CEOs to CTFC After Ousting Enforcement Lawyers
[Demand Progress, February, 13 2026, via [CommonDreams]
Coinbase, Polymarket, Kalshi, DraftKings, Robinhood CEOs Appointed to CFTC Committee After Flagship Enforcement Office is Gutted
Empty Warehouses, Secret Deals: Insiders Poised To Profit From Trump’s Deportation Boom
The Lever
Monopoly Round-Up: The $2 Trillion Collapse of Bitcoin and Terrible Software Companies
Matt Stoller, Feb 09, 2026 [BIG]
AI is going to displace business software because so much of it is terrible quality crap peddled by monopolists. Policy can help. Plus, bitcoin falls, & enforcers may drop the Ticketmaster suit.
Cory Doctorow, 13 Feb 2026 [Pluralistic]
...Trump's antitrust boss Gail Slater talked a big game about "Trump Antitrust" but was thwarted at every turn by giant corporations who figured out that if they gave a million bucks to a MAGA podcaster, they could go over Slater's head and kill her enforcement actions. When Slater's deputy, Roger Alford, went public to denounce the sleazy backroom dealings that led to the approval of the HPE/Juniper merger, he was forced out of the agency altogether and replaced with a Pam Bondi loyalist who served as a kind of politburo political officer in Slater's agency...
The problem with conservative populism, then, is that its movement was propelled by the idea that Big Tech was soy and cucked and mean to conservatives. That meant that Big Tech bosses had an easy path out of its crosshairs: climb into the tank for MAGA.
That's just what they did: Musk bought Twitter; Zuck ordered his content moderators to censor the left and push MAGA influencers; Bezos neutered his newspaper in the run up to the 2024 elections; Tim Cook hand-assembled a gold participation trophy for Trump live on camera. These CEOs paid a million dollars each for seats on Trump's inauguration dais and their companies donated millions for Trump's Epstein Memorial Ballroom.
Slater's political assassination merely formalizes something that's been obvious for a year now: you can rip off the American people with impunity so long as you flatter and bribe Trump….
Big Business Has Pam Bondi Fire Trump's Antitrust Chief
Matt Stoller, Feb 12, 2026 [BIG]
...For months now, Bondi and Blanche have been overruling Slater’s decisions, both big and small, often at the behest of a corporate lobbyist and MAGA influencer named Mike Davis, one of whose clients is Ticketmaster/Live Nation….
It’s been an ugly fall from grace for Slater, who worked as an advisor to J.D. Vance in the Senate and was considered a flag-bearer for the populists on the right. It’s also instructive, because it reflects the final victory of corporate power and the Epstein class within the Trump coalition….
In April, Slater faced her first big test, over whether to allow a multi-billion dollar Discover/Capital One merger that would enable the combined firm to dominate low end credit cards. Staff thought there was a reasonable case to challenge it, but Slater overruled them to put the deal through. Another gruesome moment was when she allowed KKR to buy out a series of nursing homes, allowing UnitedHealth Group to buy home health and hospice care provider Amedisys.
That was just bad policy, then the corruption started. In July, Davis, as well as a different lobbyist close to Trump, Arthur Schwartz, sought to have the Division approve a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard and Juniper it had first sought to block. Slater said no. So the lobbyists went to Bondi’s office, and Slater was overruled. Another merger challenge, between American Express Global Business Travel and CWT Holdings, was also dropped, with Davis rumored to be involved as well.
Something similar happened more recently with a merger between real estate firm Compass and Anywhere Real Estate, where Davis represented Compass and got Slater overruled once again….
Basically, all of Slater’s loyal deputies were fired, her chief of staff was a disloyal plant, she had lost all her allies, and Vance got tired of her causing friction with Bondi. So she lost her job. It’s an ugly set of twists and turns, but it goes beyond just a personnel matter. A lot of people invested a lot of energy into Slater, she carried a movement with her. So it’s not overstating the matter to suggest the populist right has been utterly vanquished. The Trump approach to political economy is overtly based on using the threat of legal action to extract lobbying payouts or other political concessions, with no resistance to this method of governance anywhere on the right.
This sordid situation leads to a bigger question. Why did the populist right fail? It’s not because the courts didn’t let their cases go forward, or for some other logistical reason, but because they couldn’t actually wield power with their own ideas. And I want to explain why I think that is.
Let’s start with why the Brandeis populist movement did have some significant achievements, and is continuing to build power. Starting as a rebellion against the Geithner wing of the Democrats during the financial crisis, anti-monopolists on the left built their intellectual foundations through journalism. They spoke with business people and workers about what was wrong with American society. And what they found, in everything from candy to chicken to airlines, was that a consolidation of private power was fostering a host of severe social harms and the rise of a dangerous form of authoritarian governance.
[TW: Note Jim Cramer’s screeching tweet. I often wonder if the public — and even progressives — understand, and are prepared to resist the massive campaign of slurs, half-truths, and lies that America’s business criminals will throw at any policy that has a chance of reversing the past half-century of neoliberal excess. ]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
The People Scamming Welfare Are Not Who You Think
Donald Shaw and David Moore, Feb 12, 2026 [More Perfect Union]
Public records obtained from state agencies show that some of the most profitable and powerful companies in the U.S. are also among the largest employers of workers who rely on food assistance.
In state after state, data received by More Perfect Union through open records requests list giant retailers and gig-economy companies among those with the most workers enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), giving a window into how taxpayer-funded public assistance is being used as de facto wage subsidies for some of the wealthiest American corporations.
US Consumer Delinquencies Jump to Highest in Almost a Decade
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 02-11-2025]
Health care crisis
Simple Airflow Shift Cuts Indoor Infection Risk by Up to 90%
[SciTech Daily, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2025]
Predatory finance
Restoring balance to the economy
The Beginning of the End for Big Corporate Medicine
Emma Freer, Feb 10, 2026 [BIG]
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley introduced legislation to break up seven out of the Fortune 20, all of which are vertically integrated health care monsters. It's about time.
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
Disrupting mainstream economics
The Real Reason Europe is Dying (It’s Not Just War) — James Galbraith
[Global Money Talk, Jan 17, 2026, via defenddemocracy.press]
We have been led to believe that money, interest rates, and GDP drive the world. But Professor James Galbraith argues that we have it backwards.
The real engine of the economy is ENERGY, not money. In this exclusive interview, James Galbraith (UT Austin) breaks down his revolutionary framework of “Entropy Economics.” He explains why the US economy has become a hollow shell of services, why Germany’s industrial collapse was inevitable after losing cheap Russian gas, and how China survived the financial crises that crushed the West.
00:00 What is “Entropy Economics”?
04:35 Why GDP is a Flawed Metric
10:02 The Shift of Manufacturing to Asia 1
1:01 Why Economies Need Regulation (Guardrails)
15:00 Comparing Regulations: US vs. China vs. Europe
19:19 Why Europe is Failing: Politics vs. Engineering
22:43 The Crisis of Resources & Population Collapse
27:33 The Right Way to Measure Inequality
31:39 Capital Controls: How to Protect Sovereignty
37:39 The “Poisoned Chalice”: The Greek Crisis Explained
40:07 Germany’s Role in the Euro Crisis
43:17 Looking Back: Could Greece Have Left the EU?45:03 What the West Can Learn from China
The finance curse is killing Britain
Richard Murphy, February 11, 2026 [Funding the Future]
In this Funding the Future podcast, I speak with John Christensen, co-founder of the Tax Justice Network, about the finance curse, which occurs when banking and financial services grow beyond any socially useful scale.
Drawing on John's work in Jersey and decades of UK experience, we explain how finance crowds out real economic activity, drives up housing costs, drains talent, captures politics and ultimately undermines democracy. We also discuss new research showing the staggering cost of this failure to every household in Britain, and what can be done to reverse it.
New glossary entry: balanced budgets
Richard Murphy, February 14, 2026 [Funding the Future]
...First, a balanced budget is not an economic goal; it is an accounting outcome. Whether a government runs a deficit or surplus depends on the behaviour of the rest of the economy. If households and firms want to save more than they invest, the government must run a deficit to sustain demand. This is the logic of sectoral balances that I have written about many times on Funding the Future: one sector's surplus is another's deficit. Trying to force balance ignores this reality….
Fourth, the fetish for balanced budgets hides political choices. It is used to justify austerity, underinvestment, and attacks on public services. When Rachel Reeves or her predecessors claim that fiscal rules require cuts, they are choosing to prioritise a financial metric over public well-being. The result is deteriorating infrastructure, weakened health and education systems, and stagnant living standards….
Richard Murphy, February 13, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Modern economics behaves as if some people simply do not matter. In this video, I reject that idea outright.
Neoliberal economic policy treats people as costs, blames them for failures they did not create, and deliberately excludes those who do not contribute to its narrow definition of “productivity”. Disabled people, carers, the long-term sick, the elderly, migrants, and those in insecure work are all made disposable by design.
I explain why this is not an economic law but a political choice, how institutions like central banks enforce it, and why the result is an economy that fails by choice.
I also set out the alternative: a politics for people and a political economy of care, built on inclusion, dignity, and justice.
The Deliberate Deception in Ricardo’s Defence of Comparative Advantage
Steve Keen and Vox Day, Feb 08, 2026 [Building a New Economics]
Ricardo’s arithmetical example of the gains from trade considers only the transfer of labour between industries, and ignores the need to transfer physical capital as well. He discusses the transfer of capital in the subsequent paragraph in Principles, but uses a textual amphiboly: whereas exploiting comparative advantage involves transferring resources from one industry to another in the same country, Ricardo speaks instead of the transfer of resources “from one province to another”. The fact that this verbal deception has escaped attention for over two centuries is in itself notable. When considered in the light of subsequent discussions of capital immobility by Ricardo, this implies that the person whose model led to the allocation of existing resources becoming the foundation of economic analysis, was aware that this foundation was fallacious….
However, there is an obvious flaw in the logic: while labor can hypothetically be moved between industries at will, fixed capital cannot. Ricardo’s own text contains evidence that he knew that this reality invalidated his theory, since his defense of comparative advantage relied on an amphiboly that conflates two categorically different forms of capital mobility.
Equilibrium analysis is bad for economics
Steve Keen, Feb 8, 2026 [Building a New Economics]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Joseph Politano, Feb 10, 2026 [Apricitas Economics]
US AI-Related Investment Keeps Breaking Records, With Total Software, Computer, & Data Center Spending Now Exceeding $1T Per Year….
Real US fixed investment in those computers and related peripheral equipment has surged to a record high of more than $270B annualized, up nearly 50% over the last year and up 77% since ChatGPT’s launch.
Likewise, spending on computers is dwarfed by investment in software development, which now exceeds $750B annualized, with an increasingly large share focused on training, deploying, and integrating AI systems. Combined, spending on data center, computer, & software investment now exceeds $1T annualized and is roughly equivalent to 3.5% of US GDP, another record high. This is also likely an undercount of the true value of AI-related fixed investment, as official statistics have a difficult time accounting for spending on computer parts or properly capturing all software development. Still, spending on data center facilities now rivals total office construction, spending on computers now exceeds all factory building, and spending on software investment now dwarfs new home construction. Across nearly all dimensions, investment in AI systems continues breaking records….
Jeffrey Epstein and the Secret Program That Built Modern AI
Off Air with Attorney Ron Chapman, Feb 10, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press/]
Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t just a financier moving through elite social circles. He was deeply connected to the origins of modern artificial intelligence, through government-backed programs designed to collect, store, and analyze human data at scale.
In this episode of Off Air, Attorney Ron Chapman traces the real origins of AI surveillance, from DARPA’s abandoned LifeLog program to the rise of platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Spotify. What the public rejected outright in the early 2000s didn’t disappear, it was rebranded and privatized.
This episode breaks down how: •DARPA’s LifeLog program was designed to track the lives of entire populations •The program was shut down just as private tech platforms emerged to do the same thing voluntarily •Key figures in Silicon Valley were tied to intelligence-backed funding pipelines •Data collection, not social connection, became the real product •Jeffrey Epstein positioned himself at the center of early AI research and elite tech networks Ron explains why this wasn’t coincidence, why the government didn’t abandon total information awareness, and how Americans were ultimately convinced to hand over their data willingly. If you want to understand the true origins of AI, mass data collection, and Epstein’s role in shaping the digital world, this episode connects the dots the media never fully explained.
Israeli spyware firm accidentally exposes spyware control panel
[Al Mayadeen, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist’s Bank and Credit Card Numbers
Jessica Washington, February 10 2026 [The Intercept]
Google fulfilled an Immigration and Customs Enforcement subpoena that demanded a wide array of personal data on a student activist and journalist, including his credit card and bank account numbers, according to a copy of an ICE subpoena obtained by The Intercept.
Amandla Thomas-Johnson had attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair in 2024 for all of five minutes, but the action got him banned from campus. When President Donald Trump assumed office and issued a series of executive orders targeting students who protested in support of Palestinians, Thomas-Johnson and his friend Momodou Taal went into hiding.
Google informed Thomas-Johnson via a brief email in April that it had already shared his metadata with the Department of Homeland Security, as The Intercept previously reported. But the full extent of the information the agency sought — including usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers — was not previously known….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
My wife calls me, panicked. The call is from her number, and her voice is unmistakable- that’s my wife. ‘Babe, our son is hurt. He got in a bike wreck. I’m at the emergency room but they won’t take our insurance and I need cash to get him help. Please send me 3000 dollars as soon as you can, he’s really not doing well.’ Me- ‘Wow, that’s scary. Tell me our passphrase and then I’ll send the money.’ Her (it) - ‘What? What passphrase? This is your wife, our son is hurt. Send the money now!!’ Me- ‘I’ll call you back. I don’t believe that this is my wife. If it is, I’m sorry, but we discussed this.’ The number? Spoofed. Easy to do and there’s no way to tell if a phone number is being spoofed aside from hanging up and calling back to confirm. The voice? AI generated. Easily done. A few seconds of audio is all it takes to create a realistic audio deepfake.What can you do? 1) Create a family safe word or passphrase.
Jim Stewartson, Feb 13, 2026 [MindWar]
...The big “progress” you hear from these companies about “agents” is just putting a chatbot in a loop and throwing more and more energy at trying to get a chatbot to do something it will never be able to do—think.
What we’re seeing increasingly in AI is what we’ve already seen in cryptocurrency—not a movement to find a useful technology, but a cult devoted to finding God in the metaverse. The alternating doomerism and ecstatic performances of AI influencers promote something more akin to religious apocalyptic eschatology than sober takes on technology.
Moreover, the technology itself feeds on people’s psychological vulnerabilities, amplifying the kind of revelatory illusion that adds to a paid doomerist’s arsenal….
Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users
Ken Klippenstein, Feb 07, 2026
[TW: Includes a screenshot of the Border Patrol “intelligence bulletin” on someone who called for a protests against ICE.]
Climate and environmental crises
Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened.
John Muyskens and Shannon Osaka, February 11, 2026 [Washington Post]
“We’re not continuing on the same path we had before,” said Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth. “Something has changed.” ….
For about 40 years — from 1970 to 2010 — global warming proceeded at a fairly steady rate. As humans continued to pump massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world warmed at about 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade, or around 0.34 degrees Fahrenheit.
Then, that rate began to shift. The warming rate ticked up a notch. Temperatures over the past decade have increased by close to 0.27 degrees C per decade — about a 42 percent increase.Those data — combined with the last few years of record heat — have convinced many researchers that the world is seeing a decisive shift in how temperatures are rising. The last 11 years have been the warmest years on record; according to an analysis by Berkeley Earth, if we assume a constant rate of warming since the 1970s, the last three years have a less than 1-in-100 chance of occurring solely due to natural variability.
Has the Rate of Global Warming More Than Doubled?
Thomas Neuburger, Feb 11, 2026 [God's Spies]
Democrats' political malpractice
Is the tide finally turning on the ‘abundance agenda?’
[48 Hills, via Naked Capitalism 02-13-2025]
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco is not a radical leftist institution, and its research economists are not Nimbys, or socialists, or anything other than classically trained academics who look at data.
So it’s interesting that two Federal Reserve researchers have just published a paper that adds to the clear evidence that “constraints” on the supply of private-market housing have little to do with the lack of affordability in cities like San Francisco.
That comes on the heels of another new report, from Georgetown Law School’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, which says in essence the same thing.
Both are part of the emerging academic research and media reports questioning the impacts of the so-called Abundance agenda.
The Federal Reserve paper, which you can read here, directly contradicts the entire premise of housing legislation pushed by state Sen. Scott Wiener, Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Mayor Daniel Lurie….
The Crisis, No. 12 — On moral seriousness
Mike Brock, Feb 11, 2026 [Notes From The Circus]
...I said in my Substack Live last month that there is a strain on the American left that dismisses sacrifice. That treats the history of the republic as nothing but a record of powerful men being terrible. That cannot say the word “soldier” without flinching, that cannot honor the dead without appending a disclaimer, that treats patriotism as a costume worn by fools and fascists.
I understand where this comes from. The history is bloody. The founders were slaveholders. The wars were imperial. The flag has been used to bludgeon. Every critique has a foundation in truth.
But there is a difference between holding complexity and refusing to hold anything at all. Jefferson was a slaveholder who wrote the words that made abolition possible. The soldiers at Normandy fought under a segregated military for a nation that denied its own principles—and they died so that those principles could survive to be fulfilled. The moral tradition of this republic is not pure. It was never going to be pure. Moral progress comes through flawed people or it does not come at all.
The left’s refusal to hold this complexity is its own form of moral unseriousness. Not because the critiques are wrong—they are not wrong. Because the critiques become a mechanism for avoiding the debt. If the founders were nothing but villains, you owe them nothing. If the soldiers were nothing but instruments of empire, their sacrifice places no claim on you. If the whole tradition is rotten, you are free to stand outside it, commenting on its failures, bearing no responsibility for its repair.
This is comfortable. It is also how you lose a republic.
I wrote in Crisis No. 11 that memory is what the universe is. I meant it literally—it is the argument of my philosophical work—but I also meant it politically.
A republic is its memory. The principles encoded in its founding documents. The precedents established by its courts. The sacrifices made by its citizens. The stories it tells itself about who it is and what it owes to those who came before. All of this is memory. All of it is the accumulated record of choices made by people who are no longer here but whose choices shaped the world we inhabit.
When the regime seizes ballots in Georgia, it is attacking memory. When it occupies Minneapolis, it is overriding the memory of democratic choice. When it arrests journalists, it is criminalizing the creation of new memory. I have documented this across eleven pamphlets.
But the regime’s assault on memory was made possible by a prior failure. A failure on our side. A decade of teaching people that American memory was nothing but a record of oppression. That the founding was a fraud. That the sacrifices were meaningless. That the tradition was irredeemable.
You cannot defend what you have been taught to despise. You cannot fight for what you have been told was never worth having. The left’s moral unseriousness—its performance of critique without commitment to repair—systematically dismantled the memory structures that would have inoculated the republic against exactly this kind of assault.
The regime did not have to destroy the republic’s memory. The opposition had already done much of the work….
Moral seriousness is the willingness to be a link in that chain. To receive the inheritance and pass it forward. To accept that you owe something to the dead and something to the unborn and that the debt is not discharged by critique alone….
Rank-and-File Dems to Leaders: It’s Time to Take the Gloves Off
Emily Cooke, February 12, 2026 [The New Republic]
In TNR’s exclusive new poll, loyal Democratic voters make it plain: They want a party that goes after the people making their lives harder.
What the Democrats Need to Do Now
Michael Tomasky, February 12, 2026 [The New Republic]
To win back working-class voters, they need to signal more clearly to working people that they are on their side. That means picking fights on their behalf with the bad actors who are making their lives harder—and the democracy-hating billionaires….
Navin Nayak was there. I first met him at another such dinner, in the wake of the 2022 elections. At the time, he worked at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and he and some colleagues had undertaken a massive study of Democratic ad messaging during those midterms. He was interested in an issue that has obsessed me for a while now: why polls routinely find that Americans think Republicans—whose last three presidents have presided over 1) a massive savings and loan crisis and a double-dip recession, 2) the near-collapse of the entire global capitalist economy, and 3) a pandemic-related economic meltdown that saw the disappearance of 23 million jobs—are better stewards of the economy than Democrats. Nayak and his team looked at more than half a million pieces of Democratic communication to voters in 2022 and found that, to their surprise, “only 5 percent mentioned the words ‘economy’ or ‘economics.’” So maybe one reason Republicans outpoll Democrats on the economics question is that Democrats don’t talk about it much….
That insurgent mindset among Republicans, that belief that they had to wage war against a powerful establishment whose values were destroying America, goes back to Newt Gingrich, who told the College Republicans in 1978 that “one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” This way of thinking has basically held sway ever since: Bush and his neocons challenging an inert foreign policy establishment, creating their own reality; the Tea Party movement; and, of course, Trump and MAGA….
Resistance
Exposing ICE and Trump-proofing elections
Jordan Zakarin, Feb 10, 2026 [Progress Report]
...Just about every aspect of American civic life and government has been profoundly altered by Donald Trump’s decade of political dominance, turning even the most mundane government bureaucracy into ideological flashpoints and high-stakes war zones. Take the state secretary of state position: what was once a largely nonpartisan administrative job now demands a defiant, outspoken brawler with the niche legal and policy acumen to combat what have become endless attacks from the federal government.
The role has made a resistance star — or conservative pariah — out of more than a few election administrators, and this winter, the spotlight is on Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows. Now in her second term, Bellows has spent the last year dealing with one federal incursion after another, playing defense and fortifying her state on multiple fronts….
Steve Bannon recently said that Trump is planning to have ICE “surround the polls” on Election Day. Did you take it seriously? How do you deal with that?
It’s stupid to have ICE at the polling places because non-citizens are not voting. Only citizens vote in federal elections in this country. That is clear in the Constitution. It’s clear in the data. We have safe, free, and secure elections in America.
It is unconstitutional. It’s also illegal: There’s a federal law that prohibits armed federal officers from being in polling places on election day. And there are also state laws here in Maine, for example. It is the civil service, election wardens who are in charge of the polling places. And actually, no member of law enforcement can enter without their permission and their consent. So for a variety of reasons, this is an unlawful, unconstitutional action that the President and the White House and Bannon are threatening.
So they are barred from entering the polling places during voting hours. How else could they interfere with elections?
My concern is ICE may choose to roam the streets on Election Day. What we saw in Maine, the operation conducted by Homeland Security with the surge of ICE in our streets, it was brief but violent and chaotic, people were afraid to go to work. They risked eviction from their homes because they were so scared. They were afraid to go to school. We saw over 20% absenteeism in the greater Portland school districts. They were afraid to go get groceries or just go about their daily business.
If people are afraid to go to work, or school, or get groceries, they’re going to be afraid to go out and vote. It’s going to be really important for election officials to fight back, to proactively safeguard our elections from federal interference….
If ICE Pulls You Over, Say These 4 Words Immediately (LAWYER Explains)
[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 02-14-2025]
“I will comply with any lawful instructions but I am exercising my right to not answer any questions”
“I do not consent to searches. Am I free to leave?”
Remove Your Ring Camera With a Claw Hammer
Hamilton Nolan, Feb 10, 2026 [How Things Work]
...What is destructive is the insidious belief that the world outside your front door is to be treated with suspicion; that every passerby is a potential threat; that every neighbor is a potential enemy; that every human interaction must be stored and cataloged as evidence of possible crime. This attitude is destructive of good will, of brotherhood, of peace, of love. This is the attitude of the Gestapo. This is the attitude of the paranoid lunatic. This is totalitarianism creeping into your home disguised as safety.
One swift stroke of that claw hammer will fix all that….
Cory Doctorow, 10 Feb 2026 [Pluralistic]
America's descent into authoritarian fascism is made all the more alarming and demoralizing by the Democrats' total failure to rise to the moment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KADW3ZRZLVI
But what would "rising to the moment" look like? What can the opposition party do without majorities in either house? ….
I think Dems should start a Nuremberg Caucus, named for the Nazi war-crimes trials that followed from the defeat of German fascists and the death of their leader:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials
What would this caucus do? Well, it could have a public website where it assembled and organized the evidence for the trials that the Democrats could promise to bring after the Trump regime falls. Each fresh outrage, each statement, each video-clip – whether of Trump officials or of his shock-troops – could be neatly slotted in, given an exhibit number, and annotated with the criminal and civil violations captured in the evidence….
While they're at it, the Nuremberg Caucus could publish a plan to hire thousands of IRS agents (paid for by taxing billionaires and zeroing out ICE's budget) who will focus exclusively on the ultra-wealthy and especially any supernormal wealth gains coinciding with the second Trump presidency.
Money talks. ICE agents are signing up with the promise of $50k hiring bonuses and $60k in student debt cancellation. That's peanuts. The Nuremberg Caucus could announce a Crimestoppers-style program with $1m bounties for any ICE officer who a) is themselves innocent of any human rights violations, and; b) provides evidence leading to the conviction of another ICE officer for committing human rights violations. That would certainly improve morale for (some) ICE officers….
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Ali Breland, January 21, 2026 [The Atlantic]
...The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery. The leaders of these departments so far refuse to answer questions about their social-media strategies, but the trend is impossible to miss: Across the federal government, officials are advocating for a radical new understanding of the American idea, one rooted not in the vision of the Founders, but in the ideologies of European fascists.
On January 10, the Department of Labor posted a video with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” which sounds eerily similar to the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“One people, one realm, one leader”). The post has 22.6 million views. One week ago, the Pentagon’s research office posted silhouettes of Revolutionary-era troops with glowing white eyes. The glowing eyes, and the filter that gave their boots a red and cyan tint, are often used in the Right Wing Death Squad subgenre of “fashwave” memes—content posted by neo-Nazis trying to make their views more aesthetically pleasing. DHS also recently posted an image of a horse rider with a B-2 bomber overhead, superimposed with the text “We’ll have our home again.” That phrase is nearly identical to lyrics from a song by a group affiliated with the Mannerbund, a far-right folk group that draws upon Germany’s ethno-nationalist Völkisch movement: “Oh by God, we’ll have our home again.”….
In November, DHS posted on X: “The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now.” In another DHS post in recent weeks, viewed by 20 million people on X, a vintage car sits on a beach in front of palm trees. Serene, serif text declares, “America After 100 Million Deportations.” The same day, the official White House X account posted a portrait of President Trump with a single word: “remigration.”
The notion of removing 100 million people from the United States is dramatic, to say the least. Deporting all undocumented immigrants would mean removing some 14 million people, according to one of the most recent estimates by the Pew Research Center, from 2023. Canceling all green cards would remove roughly 12 million more. Trump has voiced interest in revoking the citizenship of naturalized Americans and deporting them from the country—an additional 26 million people. But even adding all of those categories together gets only about halfway to the fantasy of 100 million deportations. The only way to reach that figure is to include tens of millions of native-born Americans….
The Conservative Activists Behind One of Trump’s Biggest Climate Moves
Lisa Friedman, Feb. 10, 2026
As Maxine Joselow and I report, the swift and meticulous dismantling of climate rules we are now seeing did not happen by chance. It was set in motion by a cadre of conservative lawyers who served in the first Trump administration and spent years honing arguments to block government regulations of climate pollution.We told the stories of four key players. Russell T. Vought and Jeffrey B. Clark, both high-profile allies of Trump, drafted executive orders. Mandy Gunasekara and Jonathan Brightbill, two conservative attorneys with long histories of fighting climate policies, collected what they called an “arsenal of information” to undermine the scientific and legal consensus that the planet is dangerously warming and the United States must take action.Both independently and in tandem, the four activists spent the Biden administration years charting roadmaps that a future Republican president could use to undermine established climate science and legally support the repeal of environmental rules. Those plans included Project 2025, a set of conservative policy recommendations for a second Trump term….
Voting: A Right, Not A Privilege, For Now — Republicans want to change that with the SAVE Act
Joyce Vance, Feb 12, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
Wednesday, House Republicans passed the SAVE Act. It’s currently pending in the Senate. The most important thing to understand about it is that it’s not about protecting our elections from fraud. It’s about making it legal for Republicans to suppress Democratic votes. It’s just that simple.
As of tonight, the measure has 49 Republican co-sponsors in the Senate, shy of the total it needs to move forward but close enough to require us to get to work.
“But you have to show ID everywhere; you need it to cash a check. What’s the big deal?” That’s the argument.
It sounds reasonable until you consider the consequences. I wrote about them in my book, Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy. I shared the story of George Smiley in Alabama, one of the foot soldiers who marched across the bridge in Selma as a kid, voted in every election once he was able to, and in the final years of his life, was denied the right to vote after Alabama passed its voter ID act. That happened because George Smiley was poor and well past the age where he had a driver’s license, let alone the ability to afford a passport. And while Alabama paid lip service to the availability of state IDs, they were difficult to come by, not made available to the people who needed them the most and requiring access to documents and transportation to government offices.
Mr. Smiley is the kind of person the SAVE Act prevents from exercising their right to vote. People who don’t have a birth certificate and find it complicated to get the documents they need to establish citizenship or just can’t afford them. You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops and pay over $100 to be able to vote—it’s a right, not a privilege. The SAVE Act is, pure and simple, a poll tax….
If the SAVE Act becomes law, all Americans will have to provide a birth certificate, a passport, or one of a limited number of documents, such as certain (but not all) military ID cards, every time they register or reregister to vote. It seems innocuous enough, the idea that you have to prove you’re a citizen, but at least 21 million Americans don’t have that kind of proof readily available. Only 51 percent of Americans have passports, which cost adults applying for the first time a $165.00 fee, not to mention assembling the documents you need, getting a photograph of yourself, and making it to an appointment….
The bill would end registration by mail and online because it requires voters to show proof of citizenship to election officials “in person” when they register. That would also make it difficult, if not impossible, to conduct voter registration drives, say, at churches or schools. States that automatically register voters when they turn 18 would no longer be able to do so. And if you move or need to reregister for any reason, this applies to you, too. You’d have to bring your passport or original birth certificate in for inspection every time you do that.
If you’re a married woman who changed or hyphenated her name, you can expect problems if your name doesn’t match your birth certificate….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
US judiciary scraps climate chapter from scientific evidence manual
Nate Raymond [Reuters, via SCOTUSblog, Feb 10, 2026]
The federal judiciary has removed a controversial chapter on climate change "from the newest edition of its reference manual on scientific evidence," after receiving complaints about it from Republican state attorneys general, according to Reuters. "The section at issue in the fourth edition of the FJC's Reference Manual for Scientific Evidence was authored by Jessica Wentz and Radley Horton of Columbia Law School and was drafted to 'help judges evaluate the admissibility and weight of expert testimony and documentary evidence involving climate science,'" but critics said it "places the judiciary firmly on one side of some of the most hotly disputed questions in current litigation: climate-related science and 'attribution.'" "While the climate chapter was removed, a foreword to the manual authored by liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan appears to still nod to the now-excised section," Reuters reported.
Justice Department seeks to dismiss Steve Bannon's Capitol riot contempt case
Devan Cole [CNN, via SCOTUSblog, Feb 10, 2026]
On Monday, the Trump administration "moved to drop a criminal case brought during the Biden administration against Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump who was convicted years ago" for refusing "to provide documents and testimony to the House select committee that investigated the Capitol attack" on Jan. 6, 2021, according to CNN. "Bannon already completed a four-month prison sentence in 2024, but he had continued to challenge his conviction, including by appealing to the Supreme Court, which hadn’t yet decided whether to review the case." US Attorney Jeanine Pirro "asked US District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, to dismiss the matter with prejudice, which, if granted, would mean prosecutors are barred from refiling the case."
The South rises again
The Roots of Pete Hegseth's Theology of Violence (with Mark Ramm) — Youtube
Pat Kahnke [Culture, Faith, and Politics podcast, February 12, 2026]
What if Pete Hegseth’s rhetoric isn’t new at all?
In this episode, I sit down with writer Mark Ramm of Transparency Cascade Press to trace the historic roots of Pete Hegseth’s theology of violence — and how it connects to Christian nationalism, hardline masculinity, and a centuries-old debate inside American Christianity.
We follow the thread from Doug Wilson and the “Sin of Empathy” teaching… back through R.J. Rushdoony … and even further to Confederate theologian Robert Lewis Dabney. Is there a direct line from antebellum pro-slavery theology to modern Christian nationalist ideology?
And how did those ideas make their way into today’s conversations about ICE, masculinity, authority, and the U.S. military? ...We explore:
- Pete Hegseth’s speech to military leaders
- The doctrine of “inflicting pain” as moral authority
- The debate over empathy in Christian teaching
- Romans 13 and submission to authority
- The long conflict between liberation theology and hierarchy theology
- How churches have wrestled with power for over 200 years
Transcript:5:57clash of two sort of long running Christian ideologies and I decided to investigate that more deeply and ... to trace how Pete Hegseth is articulating in his speech to the generals, a philosophy and theology that … traces it back its way back to the antebellum south.
7:49…. the theology ... flows out of a need to defend slave owning and slavery in the south. And that theology has a very important component, which is that there's a hierarchy of authority, and that in order to appropriately exercise authority, you have to be willing to inflict pain, you have to be willing to cause suffering to get people to fall in line with the racial or gender hierarchies. That … theology makes it possible to both claim that you are a Christian and own slaves.
And that sort of theology is very helpful today in people who want to support ICE, support that sort of anti-immigrant movement, and claim that they're Christian. It is just a direct line [to people] like a Confederate chaplain [who wrote] theological treatises and sermons. And those things [have been] republished ….
13:37Robert Lewis Dabney, who was a Confederate chaplain and a pro-slavery theologian during the Civil War era, who articulated … a way to reconcile Christianity with the existence of slavery … and there is an inherent moral authority white folks and the inherent racial hierarchy. So, Dabney articulates this idea that you need to be able to inflict pain to defend things like owning slaves, whipping slaves, beating your wife if she gets out of line. This sort of how do we enforce reconcile enforcing this sort of authority structure with our Christian belief?
18:16...I don't want this to just seem like there's like this white nationalist Christianity and that's all I see. Imean, also you have um abolitionists and civil rights leaders and everyone thinking about how to combat this ideology for 200 years. We're not the first ones... this is not the first time that American Christianity has been challenged to choose between the theology of enforcing hierarchy and the theology of liberating the slaves.
Dixie’s Daughters, the Lost Cause and the roots of white Christian nationalism
AnalysisElla Wall Prichard, January 18, 2024
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