Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 01, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Iran Calls Trump’s Bluff as Deep State Rebels Over War
[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 02-27-2025]
...Trump’s initiative is collapsing before his sallow eyes amidst internal revolts as staff leak all kinds of damaging bulletins to the press. The latest from the Pentagon stovepipe is that the US only has munitions for days of a sustained high-intensity conflict with Iran, a fact we’ve known all along….
It’s clear an internal revolt is taking place—from the potential sabotaging of the carrier by its crews, to yesterday’s sudden firing of the Director of the Joint Staff, Vice Admiral Fred Kacher….
Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute Daniel McAdams writes:
My guess - and it is based on limited but not extensive contact with Navy warfighters - is that he holds the position that a war on Iran would be a disaster. I don't want to be too specific, but I believe from what I know that this view is widely held among particularly Naval personnel in the Pentagon.
It’s becoming more and more clear that many inside the Pentagon believe the US will face generational disaster if it over-commits to a large-scale conflict with Iran. The going theory cited by experts, which I agree with, is that Trump has boxed himself in by amassing a huge armada that was meant to intimidate Iran into surrender. Now that Iran has called his bluff, Trump is faced with the humiliating choices of either TACO-ing out or allowing the US military machine to be exposed in a disastrous war of attrition….
Trump is one wrong move away from imploding his administration, and his legacy along with it. An Iran war would likely also send oil prices skyrocketing, handing Russia a massive boon that would nullify virtually every hostile economic action against its energy sector of the past year, and ensuring another huge boost to the Russian SMO efforts.
Trump is left with few good options: we can only assume he will have to take a major compromise on Iran while gussying it up in his now-infamous style into some kind of “victory”. More than likely, he’ll lie by twisting the result of the “deal” into something it actually isn’t by announcing major restrictions on Iran’s uranium enrichment which will be gross exaggerations of the contractual reality; this has been the precedent that has defined Trump’s elliptical style during his second term.
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Brad Reed, February 26, 2026 [CommonDreams]
A group of right-wing activists is crafting an executive order that would let President Donald Trump unilaterally ban mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the order being drafted by Trump allies would give him “extraordinary power over voting,” even though the US Constitution explicitly gives individual states the powers to run their own elections.
An advocate for the order, Florida attorney Peter Ticktin, acknowledged in an interview with the Post that the Constitution does not give the president any role in shaping elections, but he said Trump needed to act to prevent China from supposedly interfering with American elections.
“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” Ticktin said. “But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”
The activists drafting the emergency order said that they are working in coordination with the White House….
Trump Says He’s ‘Entitled’ to Illegal Third Term as Allies Draft Voter Suppression Decree
On Friday, Democracy Docket published an April 2025 version of the draft order provided by a Trump ally, which the outlet described as “riddled with errors.”
Doug Bock Clark, February 28, 2026 [propublica.org]
...According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting. …
ICE Whistleblower Confirms What We Already Knew
This Week in Democracy, Feb 27,
While testifying before Congress, an ICE whistleblower sounded the alarm on the agency’s “deficient, defective, and broken” training program for new deportation officers.
Ryan Schwank, who previously worked as an ICE lawyer in the department’s training academy, noted the standard 584-hour training program had been cut by 240 hours, and he received “secretive orders” to teach new recruits “to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.”
….Later, as part of his new role combating the so-called “war on fraud,” Vice President JD Vance announced that the Trump administration will withhold $259 million in Medicaid payments for Minnesota – another move driven by anti-Somali racism.
Cuban man’s death at El Paso tent camp was result of “spontaneous use of force,” ICE says
[Texas Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 02-25-2025]
Witness who saw friend fatally shot by immigration agent in Texas last year dies in car accident
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 02-25-2025]
High school students protesting ICE remain jailed days after police assault in Pennsylvania
[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 02-25-2025]
Monopoly Round-Up: Trump Loses on Tariffs, Has His ‘Withdrawal from Afghanistan’ Moment
Matt Stoller
Trump's DHS kills again--this time a US citizen and a blind immigrant
Dean Obeidallah, Feb 26, 2026
There are two reasons why Trump’s Department of Homeland (DHS) agents—be they ICE or Customs Border Patrol (CBP)—so easily kill people. First, they have been told by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and others in the Trump regime that they are immune from criminal prosecution. And second, Trump, Vance, Miller and others have dehumanized immigrants—and even US citizens who oppose them—to the dangerous point that they don’t view them as human beings….
The most recent horrific case involves the death of Shah Alam, a 56-year-old Rohingya refugee in Buffalo, New York. Alam--who has only been in the United States since 2024—doesn’t speak English, is blind and per his family can’t use a cellphone nor does he know his family’s phone number….
CBP knew that Alam didn’t speak English, they knew he was blind, they even knew he had a lawyer given they just picked him up from prison. Add to that the CBP’s statement admits they knew where Alam lived, noting they dropped him at “a location near his last known address.” (A random coffee shop miles from his house,)
Well then why not drop him at his actual last address?! Or why not simply make a phone call to his family or lawyer!? As Alam’s son told the press, “Nobody told me or my family or attorney where my dad was dropped off.”
Shortly thereafter the family filed a missing person’s report when their father could not be located. But sadly he was discovered days later dead. The exact circumstances surrounding his death are still unclear….
Bufalo Mayor Sean Ryan noted in a statement, “A vulnerable man − nearly blind and unable to speak English − was left alone on a cold winter night with no known attempt to leave him in a safe, secure location,” He added, “That decision from U.S. Customs and Border Protection was unprofessional and inhumane.”
Journalists Jailed by ICE Are Revealing the Horrors of Incarceration
[Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 02-22-2025]
ICE Took Their Papers—and Won’t Give Them Back
[Mother Jones, via Naked Capitalism 02-26-2025]
Ken klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 02-26-2025]
...From the killing of Bin Laden in 2011 to the present, the US (and Israel) have conducted more and more regular decapitation strikes, a method of warfare that is nothing like the many failed attempts to take down Saddam Hussein. Aided by ubiquitous surveillance, tippy-Top Secret techniques, and artificial intelligence, individuals can now be found and tracked in real time….
What Trump celebrated in the State of the Union—and what no one has really named—is this practice that I call lethal doxxing: the acquisition of someone’s most sensitive personal information revealing their up-to-the-moment location, followed by the lethal part. It’s doxxing at nation-state scale, with a kill chain attached….
And as with Internet doxxing, the information age has made this easier than at any point in human history. Maybe that’s why ICE is so paranoid about it, treating doxxing as a life-or-death threat to their officers.
The killing of Mexican cartel leader “El Mencho” is just the latest indication of a quiet shift toward lethal doxxing as a routine instrument of diplomacy, statecraft, warfare, or even just revenge. That shift, scarcely discussed at all in the mainstream, has taken place for reasons that make it likely to outlive the Trump administration….
Dean Obeidallah, Feb 22, 2026
Donald Trump’s ICE is doing exactly what he wants. And now they are holding a political prisoner for nearly a year in an ICE detention camp simply because 33-year-old Leqaa Kordia dared to champion views the Trump regime opposes. This should concern all Americans especially given the recent warning from concentration camp expert Andrea Pitzer—who explained on my SiriusXM show that history tells the Trump regime building massive ICE detention camps will ultimately be used to imprison political prisoners….
That is why the case Leqaa Kordia demands far more attention given it’s a sneak preview of what we can expect from Trump for not just immigrants--but also U.S. citizens. Leqaa is a 33-year-old Palestinian woman with family in Gaza and the United States. Her mother is a US citizen living in Paterson, New Jersey—which is where Leqaa was staying and working as a waitress until she taken by ICE….
Trump’s War on the Constitution
Josh Marshall, February 27, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
It’s a cliché and more or less true that the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” language can mean whatever Congress wants it to mean. That is not only because in this area Congress’ decision-making is certainly un-reviewable. It is because the Constitution’s writers were intentionally expansive in their definition. They were most focused not on statutory crimes but misrule. I wanted to take a moment to note that what we have unfolding in Minnesota is really a definitional impeachable offense.
I say this with no expectation that he will be charged with it, let alone convicted and removed from office, certainly not under Republican rule. But these are precisely the kinds of abuses of power, unconstitutional actions, that are most squarely within the impeachment mechanism’s meaning.
President Trump first undertook what amounts to an invasion of the state, with poorly trained and abusive paramilitaries creating menace, mayhem and death. The aim of this action was to terrorize and dominate the state. It wasn’t about immigration enforcement. Now, having been forced to scale back at least the visibility of their invasion of the state, they are resorting to cutting off budgetary support for social services programs. This money is distributed pursuant to congressional law. The executive branch has no right to impound it based on some vague definition of not being a good “custodian” of the money.
I don’t expect to get much disagreement when I say these are illegitimate actions. I doubt even the administration expects this decision to withstand judicial scrutiny. These are abuses that go far beyond statutes or criminal law. The president is elected to see that the laws are carried out, ensure the national defense and prosperity and provide civilian leadership of the armed forces. He has no right to go to war with states or regions he disagrees with politically, or has a vendetta against, or to try to coerce or punish them into compliance.
The fact that Trump won’t be impeached for this, at least not this year, shouldn’t obscure the fact that he should be, that these are the basic forms of misrule that merit removal from office, that quite apart from the statutory legality of specific actions, the entire class of actions — coercion by violence and theft of funding — is ruled out entirely.
Donald Trump, Jeff Epstein and the Politics of Impunity TPM
Josh Marshall, February 23, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
Strategic Political Economy
Canaries in the Coal Mine- Working people understand the state of the union in ways the wealthy cannot see.
Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Feb 25, 2026 [Working Class Storytelling, via Naked Capitalism 02-26-2025]
Global power shift
Why Arab states are terrified of US war with Iran
[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 02-22-2025]
China’s newest air force jets have next-generation radars. New USAF F-35’s have no radars at all
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 02-24-2025]
China Is Trying to Use Fancy Quantum Sensors To Unstealth U.S. Navy Nuclear Submarines
[1945, via Naked Capitalism 02-22-2025]
The rail ahead: as high-speed lines saturate China, how far can their global reach extend?
Ralph Jennings, 21 Feb 2026 [South China Morning Post]
...High-speed services are already accessible in 97 per cent of Chinese cities with populations of more than 500,000, the State Council said in December, and China’s high-speed network is the world’s largest.
Analysts point to Southeast Asian countries such as Laos, Malaysia and Thailand as the most likely future destinations for Chinese-invested high-speed projects, with Central Asia not far behind as it leverages existing trade-linked infrastructure that China has already helped build there.
Some of the same countries are already planning new railways to ease congestion, update older tracks or reach international borders.
Chinese contractors are building a 610km (379-mile) rail project in Thailand that will connect Bangkok to Nong Khai – for people as well as cargo – at 250km/h (155mph), Xinhua has reported. Upon the line’s expected completion in 2030, passengers could connect onwards as far as China via an existing medium-speed railway in Laos….
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Record 129 press members killed in 2025; Israel responsible for 2/3 of deaths
[Committee to Protect Journalists, via Naked Capitalism 02-26-2025]
Oligarchy
The ideology of the Epstein Network
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-23-2025]
1/5 Buried inside the Epstein files is something far more disturbing than a blackmail network, as sinister as that is. What the documents reveal is a worldview. A coherent, funded, institutionally embedded worldview about what human beings are, what they’re worth, and who gets to decide.2/5 Epstein donated to the World Transhumanist Association. He funneled thirty million dollars into Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. He was in active discussions about financing a designer baby project, altering human germline DNA so parents could engineer heritable traits in their children.3/5 He told scientists and wealthy associates that he planned to use his New Mexico ranch to impregnate twenty women at a time. His goal, in the words of the New York Times, was to “seed the human race with his DNA.”4/5 He wanted his head and penis frozen at death for future resurrection. He exchanged emails with top AI researchers who entertained ideas about genetically modifying Black people’s intelligence and casually floated the notion that mass death of the elderly and infirm might be evolutionarily beneficial.5/5 This is what transhumanism actually is when you strip away the academic language. It is the belief that the human being as currently constituted is a problem to be solved. That through genetic engineering, AI, and technological intervention, we can transcend the limitations of being human. Live forever. Design superior offspring. Merge with machines. Upgrade the species.This is not a new idea. It is an old one with a new name.
Jim Stewartson, Feb 26, 2026 [MindWar]
[TW: Important historical background.]
Fast Forward Four Decades
In April 2024, there was a secret meeting in the Hollywood Hills with a dozen or so members of the Slime, now updated for the 21st century. It included: junk-bond criminal Michael Milken; disgraced former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick; PayPal Mafia members Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks; and Rupert Murdoch.
This meeting was a planning session for the theft of another election, much like the one engineered for Ronald Reagan. Just as it had in 1980, this plan involved the laundering of massive amounts of money, and the deliberate misleading of the American public, this time through Elon Musk’s bastardized version of Twitter….
Epstein’s Fury: The Inevitable Calculus of WWIII
Jim Stewartson, Feb 28, 2026 [MindWar]
...At the same time that Reagan and the GOP were promoting the “moral imperative” of using American power to advance Israel’s interests, Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey was using Israel as a go-between in what became the “October Surprise.”
Israel guaranteed the Ayatollah that Iran would continue receiving arms shipments, in exchange for waiting until Reagan’s inauguration to release the hostages being held in Tehran. As I recently wrote, those negotiations also involved Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn….
Many of the people in Trump’s Cabinet and the White House believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible that results in the Second Coming—and are actively engaged in trying to make it happen. They don’t see a hot war in the Middle East as a bad thing; they see it as a mandatory part of their personal salvation….
Epstein Received Sensitive Military Intelligence Amid Gates Foundation Polio Campaign in Pakistan
Waqas Ahmed and Murtaza Hussain, Feb 27, 2026 [Drop Site]
Lifestyles Of The Rich, Famous, And Epstein-Connected
Freddy Brewster, Feb 26, 2026 [The Lever]
...As founder of the massive private equity firm Apollo Global Management, Leon Black has long been a public face of the industry, which is known for buying up companies in health care and far beyond, running them into the ground while milking them for profits, and delivering questionable returns, alongside high fees, to investors and pension fund owners.
But newly released government files on financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein — a close confidant of Black’s — reveal the other half of the private equity playbook: How Wall Street moguls at the helm of these firms spend the obscene wealth they’ve made from allegedly exploiting companies, workers, consumers, and pensioners.
“You have a private equity billionaire who’s buying Picasso while the firm that he founded is running companies into the ground,” said Matt Parr, communications director for the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a watchdog organization that has closely tracked Apollo’s work. “While Black was getting rich, his private equity firm was poorly running hospitals and health care facilities and poorly running companies that have affected people all over the country.”
Black was a longtime associate of Epstein, paying the sex trafficker $158 million for tax and estate planning advice, according to a Senate investigation. (Multiple women have also accused Black of rape, though several suits were later dropped, and Black has denied the allegations.)
Jim Stewartson, Feb 22, 2026 [MindWar]
...a protege of Musk and Peter Thiel, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, said this when asked about the nightmarish energy costs of his technology:
- “One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is people talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query. But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life, and all of the food you eat during that time, before you get smart.
- “And not only that, it took like the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learn not to get eaten by predators and learn how to figure out science and whatever to produce you. And then you took whatever you took. So the fair comparison is if you ask ChatGPT your question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis measured that way.”
The Ultra-Rich Are Different from You and Me
[Paul Krugman, via The Big Picture, February 24, 2026]
The billionaire class doesn’t just have more money — they operate in an entirely different economic and political reality, one that’s increasingly detached from everyone else’s.
[Paul Krugman, via The Big Picture, February 24, 2026]
Since Citizens United, billionaires’ share of political contributions exploded 1700% even as their numbers only grew 85%, making the oligarch power grab the defining feature of American politics. Their power grab is a dire threat to American democracy.
Felonomics
US Brain Drain Threatens Scientific and Biopharmaceutical Leadership
[Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, via The Big Picture, February 24, 2026]]
The United States, once the world’s premier destination for scientific talent, now faces a growing risk of brain drain. After major cuts to federal research budgets, hiring freezes across universities, and the termination of key programs, many researchers—especially early-career scientists—are looking abroad. A recent Naturesurvey found that more than 75 percent of U.S.-based scientists are considering leaving the country, most commonly for Europe or Canada. Among early-career researchers, the share was even higher—nearly 80 percent.
Trump’s Challenge to Free Market Capitalism
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, February 25, 2026]
Stakes in private companies. Handshake deals with chief executives. The president’s economic agenda — tariffs, industrial policy, picking winners — represents a fundamental break with Republican free-market orthodoxy. The party is going along with it anyway. The president’s economic policy has drifted far from principles that long defined the Republican Party. Is it capitalism at all?
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989
[Board of Governors Federal Reserve, via Naked Capitalism 02-28-2025]
Health care crisis
2025: Big Insurance’s $1.7 Trillion Year
[HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 02-25-2025]
Predatory finance
The giant void of nothingness where US financial regulation used to sit
[Financial Times, via The Big Picture, February 24, 2026]
The regulatory apparatus that once policed Wall Street has been hollowed out. What’s left is mostly a void — and the markets know it. ‘There has never been a better time to be a crook’
Finance in the Dark: The unregulated industry at the heart of the American economy
[Phenomenal World, via The Big Picture, February 26, 2026]
...Over the past two decades, private equity firms have steamrolled into healthcare, buying up hospitals, home health care companies, and even hospice providers because of their dedicated public revenue streams. Increasing the profitability of these assets requires aggressively cutting costs and reducing the quality of care; this has been well documented by Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt. And most recently, private equity has become the biggest landlord, worsening the housing affordability crisis.
The takeover of more and more of the real economy by unregulated finance threatens to supercharge this process. Businesses will mainly borrow from private credit funds or be held in private equity fund portfolios. Most household retirement portfolios will be allocated to unregulated financial assets….
Crypto super PACs have hundreds of millions ready to spend on the midterms
[Citation Needed, via The Big Picture, February 24, 2026]
The crypto industry is gearing up to pour enormous sums into the 2026 midterm elections, hoping to lock in favorable regulation before the window closes. With Trump faltering and their policy agenda incomplete, the crypto industry has moved at least $288 million toward the midterms in a desperate bid to keep Republicans in control of Congress.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Justice Department withheld and removed some Epstein files related to Trump
[NPR, via The Big Picture, February 25, 2026]
An NPR investigation finds the DOJ has removed or withheld Epstein files connected to the president. The cover-up is becoming the story.
DOJ Deleted Record Revealing That Maxwell Holds Potential Blackmail Over Trump
[Substack, via The Big Picture, February 24, 2026]
A DOJ filing was quietly scrubbed from the record — one that referenced Ghislaine Maxwell’s leverage over unnamed powerful figures. The document, which was re-posted after removal was reported, shows Maxwell’s lawyers possess three FBI interviews with an underage Trump accuser that haven’t been released to the public.
How Jeffrey Epstein sought to infiltrate the justice system
[Miami Herald, via Naked Capitalism 02-27-2025]
UK probes Epstein’s use of RAF bases for sex trafficking
[RT, via Naked Capitalism 02-28-2025]
[Citizens Reunited, via Naked Capitalism 02-276-2025]
For two decades, child sexual exploitation online has largely been framed as a moderation problem. But the renewed focus on the Epstein files has reopened a more uncomfortable question: what if this is not a failure of enforcement but a feature of the system?
The files exposed how closely the broligarchy - the billionaires who control the tech platforms shaping public life - intersected in Epstein’s orbit. As our founder Carole Cadwalladr wrote: “Epstein’s world is our world. That’s the darkest revelation of these files. He wasn’t an aberration. He was our culture made flesh.”
That culture - an obsessive, pervasive sexualisation of teenage girls, and to a lesser degree boys - does not exist outside the internet. It is threaded through it….
Amazon BUSTED for Widespread Scheme to Inflate Prices Across the Economy
Matt Stoller, Feb 24, 2026 [BIG]
California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged Amazon led a price-fixing conspiracy of online retailers to inflate prices across the entire economy. And he's demanding an immediate halt.
Restoring balance to the economy
New Playbook Provides Solutions to Stop Private Equity Takeover of the Child Care Industry
[Open Markets Institute, via Naked Capitalism 02-25-2025]
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-24-2025]
Another amazing Brazilian scientist, Dr. Mariangela Hungria, a microbiologist at Embrapa's soybean research center, spent decades studying bacteria that pull nitrogen from the air and feed it to plants.The result: Brazil went from importing nitrogen fertilizer to becoming the world's largest soybean exporter — using microbes instead of chemicals.Her work won the 2025 World Food Prize. But the real prize is the 40% reduction in synthetic fertilizer use across Brazilian agriculture….
Breakthrough Discovery Targets Virus Infecting 95% of the World’s Population
[SciTech Daily, via Naked Capitalism 02-22-2025]
Disrupting mainstream economics
What’s the biggest secret about money?
Richard Murphy, February 27, 2026 [Funding the Future]
People keep asking me how money is created, and the answer matters because misunderstanding money leads directly to bad economics and bad politics….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI Opted to Use Nuclear Weapons 95% of the Time During War Games: Researcher
Brad Reed, February 25, 2026 [CommonDreams]
“THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS”
Citrini Research, via Naked Capitalism 02-26-2025]
What follows is a scenario, not a prediction… This is the CitriniResearch Macro Memo from June 2028, detailing the progression and fallout of the Global Intelligence Crisis….
It should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than economic panacea. The velocity of money flatlined. The human-centric consumer economy, 70% of GDP at the time, withered. We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)
AI capabilities improved, companies needed fewer workers, white collar layoffs increased, displaced workers spent less, margin pressure pushed firms to invest more in AI, AI capabilities improved…
It was a negative feedback loop with no natural brake….
AI Is Destroying Grocery Supply Chains
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 02-23-2025]
Meta’s Smart Glasses Are Wreaking Havoc in Schools Across the Country. It’s Only Going to Get Worse.
[Slate, via The Big Picture, February 24, 2026]
As the discreet wearable cameras become more popular, students are saying they feel constantly watched and harassed—and professors are reshaping their classrooms in response. Students are using Meta AI glasses to cheat on exams and surveil classmates, forcing schools to ban wearable tech entirely.
Collapse of independent news media
Brad Reed, February 27, 2026 [CommonDreams]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-27-2025]
One family is about to control CBS, CNN, HBO, and TikTok. They’ll buy WBD with $24 billion in money from the Saudis, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. To win over Trump, they canceled Colbert, blocked a CECOT investigation, and blocked Talarico. Much more will follow. Block this rotten deal.
Newspapers Did Not Kill Themselves
Maureen Tkacik, February 26, 2026 [The American Prospect]
New docs say Jeffrey Epstein collaborated with the Russian mob to loot the New York Daily News, then tried to help Mort Zuckerman discard it when reporting became inconvenient.
The Man Who Wasn’t There: How an embittered Brit decimated the Washington Post.
[New York Magazine, via The Big Picture, February 22, 2026]
“He had two settings: charming Brit and asshole Brit. And he quickly moved into the latter category,” a former Post staffer tells me. “He was just like, ‘Fuck the feelings of the newsroom,’” an executive at a rival media organization says. “He was just going to plow through and get his job done for his boss.”
Climate and environmental crises
Renewables reach 26% of 2025 U, S generation
[Renews, 25 February 2026, via Clean Power Roundup]
How the climate repricing of housing will unfold
[Climate Change and Your Home, via Naked Capitalism 02-23-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
Scoop: Dems working on secret report found Gaza cost Harris votes
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 02-23-2025]
The Abundance Gang Has a Big AI Problem
Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, February 25, 2026 [The New Republic]
...The abundance ecosystem has tried to develop a “grass-tops” movement, which parlays an elite influence campaign into building a mass constituency. Abundance world has certainly been successful at the first part; with hundreds of millions of dollars (this figure is meant literally, not figuratively) flowing into abundance organizations and Klein playing an intellectual power-broker role within Democratic politics—to the point that it raised eyebrows internally at The New York Times, according to reporting from Axios. But with sitting mayors and governors explicitly name-checking the book and its authors, abundance has thoroughly permeated the political class. It has not, however, been as successful at building a broad-base constituency….
...Democratic voters have been notably leery about the abundance framework. Polling has shown that the base is far more interested in tackling corporate greed than it is in municipal red tape….
Curtis Yarvin, whom prominent abundance intellectual Steve Teles links to in this piece as the far-right edge of abundance, is considered central to the “new right,” which James Pogue described as “a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.” Yarvin, an antidemocracy nutball who wants to replace the republican system of government with a dictatorship or monarchy, also believes white people are innately more intelligent than other races, and has minimized slavery.
Despite this movement being studded by such miscreants and autocratic enablers, abundance is poised to exert significant influence in the near term, especially through a donor class that absolutely loves it and inside organizing like Ezra Klein’s appearance at a major Senate Democratic retreat. But if abundance liberals are to avoid missing the moment and find durable standing within center-left politics, they have to confront a glaring contradiction: their relationship to the AI industry.
AI skepticism and populist anger at data centers are surging. But abundance groups are increasingly aligning with deeply unpopular tech-titan pet projects like California Forever, an attempt by Silicon Valley bigwigs to build their own city from scratch between Sacramento and San Francisco….
Gerald Epstein [Boston Review, via Naked Capitalism 02-26-2025]
Trump’s return has vaulted pro-crypto interests into power. As they capture ever more Democrats, the political will to stop them is dwindling….
For the crypto industry, Trump was only one target of their intense, highly focused intervention into the 2024 elections. By some estimates, crypto firms spent over $245 million, more than any other industry. Leading the charge were three major pro-crypto PACs—Fairshake, Protect Progress, and Defend American Jobs—which raised and channeled funds from firms like Coinbase, Ripple, and Jump Crypto and investors like Andreessen Horowitz and the Winklevoss twins (Tyler and Cameron) to elect as broad a bipartisan slate of pro-crypto candidates as possible.
It was an astonishingly successful effort. The PACs spent $40 million to defeat Democrat Sherrod Brown in Ohio and elect his Republican challenger, but they also supported pro-crypto Democrats Elissa Slotkin in Michigan and Ruben Gallego in Arizona, among others. They spent over $10 million in California to defeat crypto critic Katie Porter in a Senate primary against the more pro-crypto Democrat Adam Schiff, and they spent more than $2 million against Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat who had denounced crypto. After Bowman’s defeat, Tyler Winklevoss took to X with a warning: “Politicians everywhere need to understand that this is what happens when you pick a fight with the crypto army.” He had reason to gloat: of the 58 House and Senate races Fairshake entered, their favored candidate won in 53 of them. As the dust settled on the 2024 election, Winklevoss and the other major crypto players would find their interests now thoroughly represented throughout the federal government….
At this point it should be clear that the speed, scope, and scale of crypto’s rise from the ashes reflects the success of a political project much more than a purely economic one. But just what does this project seek to accomplish—and at whose cost? By harnessing the greed and corruption of the Trump family and its cronies, as well as many Democrats, the crypto industry has assembled a juggernaut of power that aims to revolutionize the financial system to place crypto and their businesses at the center of finance, not just in the United States but throughout the globe. The most immediate economic risk of this is the prospect of a crypto-induced financial crisis—a danger exacerbated by the industry’s ever-tighter entanglement with the looming AI bubble.
But Trump and his tech-sector allies do not plan to stop there. Not only do they want to take over the private financial system; they also want to privatize the most important public financial asset in the world economy: the U.S. dollar. By tying crypto to the dollar through so-called stablecoins, they hope to reap the rewards accruing to the United States by the singular role its currency plays in the global economy—a project whose success depends on Trump’s political power, the continuous (and increasing) support of the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve, and a barrage of deregulation to clear the way....
[Sludge, via Naked Capitalism 02-27-2025]
Resistance
Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 02-23-2025]
Judges Grow Angry Over Trump Administration Violating Their Orders
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, February 24, 2026]
At least 35 times since August, federal judges have ordered the administration to explain why it should not be punished for violating their orders in immigration cases.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The Golden Age is Behind You—On last night’s State of the Union
Mike Brock, Feb 25, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
...The address was oriented entirely toward memory.
Not its content — its direction. Every framework has one. The golden age is not ahead. It is behind, being recovered. The border is “back.” The economy is “back.” America is “respected again.” The word again — the whole architecture of this movement — is the most revealing word in the political vocabulary of our moment. It is the linguistic signature of a framework that has pointed imagination backward and called it vision. You cannot move toward again. You can only defend it from what threatens its return.
A legitimate government describes the present honestly and orients toward what the republic has not yet become. It looks at the anomalous data — the people excluded from the golden age, the costs of the restoration, the gap between the declaration and the practice — and asks what it is actually being told. What I watched last night was the opposite: a government that has installed its own prior as the measure of all things, and is now managing the data to protect it….
‘Disgusting’: Republicans Applaud as Trump Brags About Taking Food Aid From Millions
Jake Johnson, February 25, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Republican Lawmakers’ Bid to Execute Tennessee Abortion Patients Slammed as ‘Christofascism’
Brett Wilkins, February 23, 2026 [CommonDreams]
“If you kill a baby from embryo on up with a pill or a scalpel, we oughta execute you.”
That’s not social media rage bait by some random zealot, it’s the premise of legislation recently introduced by Republican state lawmakers in Tennessee to make abortion a capital offense, as voiced by one of the measure’s sponsors….
The Big Lie at the Heart of Republican Electoral Strategy
Harold Meyerson, February 24, 2026 [The American Prospect]
...Shortly after the Republicans on the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, his political consigliere Karl Rove, doubtless upset at how narrow Bush’s margins had been, complained that if stricter laws were not enacted, “elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government; it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most.” Rove directed Bush’s attorney general, John Ashcroft, to go after cases of voter fraud, such as noncitizen voting.
Ashcroft did, but couldn’t find very much. From 2002 to 2005, the mighty Department of Justice convicted all of 24 individuals for voting when they shouldn’t have, 14 of them noncitizens who mistakenly believed they could vote. Not a single case of organized voting from those ineligible to vote was turned up.
After the Republicans got clobbered in the 2006 midterm elections, Rove turned up the heat again. Bush’s new attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, fired seven chief federal prosecutors—all of them Bush appointees—who’d tried but failed to find evidence of fraud or noncitizen voting in their districts. This blatant politicization of the federal justice system redounded against the administration, compelling both Gonzales and Rove to resign….
The ensuing scandal prodded think tanks and universities to study what clearly was the myth of widespread voter fraud and noncitizen voting. The most authoritative work was that of political scientist Lorraine Minnite. In her 2010 book The Myth of Voter Fraud, she wrote that authorities found just one (1) case of voter impersonation in the United States from the years 2000 to 2005….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Inside the Roberts Court and its Failures
[Lincoln Square, via The Big Picture, February 26, 2026]
The Chief Justice humiliated our Constitution when he offered a president a year-long you-don’t-need-to-obey-the constitution card before telling us the obvious about Trump’s illegal tariffs.
Clarence Thomas Has Lost the Plot
Matt Ford, February 24, 2026 [The New Republic]
The associate justice’s dissent in the tariffs case deserves some extra attention, because it is hopelessly uncoupled from law, history, and the Constitution….
“That seems doubtful,” Gorsuch explained as politely as possible while citing historical scholarship. “Tariffs may have been among the King’s prerogative powers during the reign of Edward I. But even before the year 1400, Parliament had achieved some ‘victory over the King in the matter of imposing import duties.’ And after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, as this Court has put it, Parliament ‘secured supremacy in fiscal matters.’” In other words, Thomas has profoundly misread the arc of Crown-Parliament relations in English history….
[TW: Justice Thomas relying on British imperial jurist Blackstone is exactly why Thomas has been so destructive to American jurisprudence. James Wilson, a signer of the Constitution and one of the first members of the Supreme Court, explicitly explained that the USA as a republic must repudiate British law — intended to preserve the social, political, and economic hierarchies of the British oligarchy — and develop its own legal precedents based on justice and the General Welfare.]
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