Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 05, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
A German Journalist’s ‘Civil Death’
Patrick Lawrence, March 31, 2026 [via defenddemocracy.press]
… With the seizure of his spouse’s bank accounts last Friday, Dogru and his family now face what amounts to a starvation blockade of the kind the Trump regime (not to change the subject) currently imposes on Cuba and Israel imposes on Gaza.
This story reads like something out of Dostoyevsky or Kafka, I have to say. We are talking about a family of five going hungry in the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany as punishment for… what?… for seeing with his eyes open, for thinking about what he sees, then commenting on what he sees?
I would love to suggest various ways readers could support the Dogru family, but there are none. Were someone to donate so much as a loaf of bread to help sustain them the German authorities would count it a criminal offense punishable by a prison term of up to several years.
Strategic Political Economy
Richard Murphy, April 02, 2026 [Funding the Future]
The UK is in a war economy, and most people don't realise it yet. The Middle East conflict has already cut global oil supplies by around 20% and gas supplies by roughly 30%. With approximately half of all UK food imported, and global fertiliser supplies under severe pressure, the shortages hitting our shelves and energy bills are only the beginning.Markets cannot solve this. When supply collapses, markets ration by income and those with money survive; those without do not. That is not a policy choice. That is a failure of government. The energy crisis and emerging food shortages demand an active UK state response.
Drawing on Lord Keynes's approach at the start of World War II, and John Kenneth Galbraith's wartime work in the United States, this video argues that the only credible response to this supply chain crisis is a combination of government-led rationing and a serious redesign of the tax system.
It means government intervention in the economy at a scale not seen since the 1940s.
The alternative is leaving resource allocation to the market, which will transfer wealth upward, destroy social cohesion, and risk public unrest. That is not how to manage a war economy. That is a policy choice to let the poor bear the cost of a crisis they did not create.
[TW: Interesting! Can the consequences of Trumpanyahu war be used to drive a regime change of political economy away from neoliberalism? We must try….. ]
Aurelien, via Naked Capitalism 04-01-2025]
...It’s not so much that numbers can be confused with reality, as that reality in the end is nothing but numbers, and decisions are made and workers rewarded without any kind of real-world check. Everything is possible, therefore, because ultimately everything is numbers.
The modern political class, increasingly dominated by those who have worked in finance, or its close relative management consultancy, therefore largely consist of people with little experience of the real world. Over the last forty years, unsurprisingly, this way of thinking and working, combining symbolic manipulation of numbers and the ticking of symbolic boxes, has become the default in government, and even the military and diplomacy. So the emphasis now is not on the capability to do things and achieve actual objectives, but on the skills of making the numbers look right, and proving that you have carried out the correct steps in the correct order. That is all the system knows how to do….
...It is the nature of a crisis that most attention is focused on transitory daily issues, such that the big picture, if there ever was one, disappears from view. I know from personal experience that in a crisis every long and exhausting day is overwhelmed with meetings, telephone calls, video-conferences, unexpected news or initiatives, requests for interviews, media statements, questions in parliament … the list goes on and on. For those like me who had the temerity to ask what the point of all this was, and about longer-term objectives and plans, the response was typically “we’ll worry about that later.” And quite soon, of course, it’s later, and the system realises that it has no idea how it got to where it is, especially because it actually wanted to be somewhere else. But by then it’s too late.
So the real problem is not so much that the left brain dominates, as that the two modes of thinking are never brought together. This means that quite a lot of left-brain work can go on effectively on auto-pilot, because it develops a life of its own. Thus, ideas for using US ground troops in Iran can rapidly be developed at a technical level, with force composition and generation, potential targets, entry points, logistic resupply, ISR etc, all without the questions of “why are we doing this?” or “what do we hope to achieve?” ever being posed. But of course the output of such activities can be easily expressed in whizzo graphics and AI generated simulations, and it provides the planners with something to do….
Thus, statements of faith in an ultimate Ukrainian victory, or of a future “Free Palestine,” or of the inevitable defeat of Iran, have to be seen, even more than most political statements, as symbolic and metaphorical. They are not deduced from the facts of the situation, nor do there have to be actual processes capable of making them happen. They are battle-cries, slogans for chanting, descriptions of fantasies and in certain cases nightmares. The problem arises when the extreme right-brain thinking that has always characterised politics, exacerbated by the ignorance of modern politicians about real life, collides with the extreme left-brain culture of our modern world as exemplified in government systems, without any transmission mechanism to enable them to work together….
The greatest challenge, as often, is intellectual. Our masters will have to recognise that chains of consequence and causality do actually exist, that Father Christmas is a right-brain myth, and that there are hard limits on what can actually be done, and hard requirements about what needs to be done, and neither can be circumvented with words. In particular, they need to abandon the delusion that only finance matters, and that numbers on paper represent the underlying reality of the world. (Not even Pythagoras would have suggested that you can eat numbers.) This is most obvious in the endless, earnest discussion of what the Iran War will do to “the price of oil.” In a few cases, pundits even realise that “the price of oil” might affect the prices of other things as well. But from their point of view, “price” and “oil” are two different concepts. The idea that there might just not be enough oil, and that that lack may have practical consequences other than price doesn’t get much of an airing. After all, surely if the price goes up, new suppliers will come forward? That’s how the market works, isn’t it? Isn’t it? The idea that the world will soon lose some of its supply of oil-based products, and that this is a hard limit that cannot be got round, has only just begun to register, and, to the extent that it has, pundits appear to believe that we can substitute, say, solar power for oil, and all will be well. Can you use solar power to make fertiliser? Indeed, can you make solar panels at all without oil-based products?
...I doubt if any western country is now equipped, organisationally or even intellectually, to handle problems caused by scarcity of food. Western states now enjoy little absolute food security—a problem I discussed in some detail last year—but our governments are far from even beginning to grasp the nature of the problem, let alone its implications. Ah well, it will be said, people eat too much and anyway too much food is thrown away. Indeed, but that’s not the answer….
As it happens, there is a lot of experience of what happens in situations of severe shortage, and the answer is that the rich buy what they want, the poor buy what they can, and organised crime steps in to put those with money in touch with those with things to sell. The capacity of western states has been radically reduced over the last couple of generations, even as the power of organised crime has grown. We can imagine what shortages of basic medicines would do, and who might wind up controlling their retail sale. In reality, attempts by government to control the availability of everyday necessities will lead nowhere and arouse public opposition. The Internet will have a field day: it will be worse than Covid. This shortage of food doesn’t really exist you see, it’s just the Davos brigade trying to kill off as many people as it can, this time by hunger….
Richard Murphy, April 02, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Donald Trump has signalled his intention to attack Iran's civilian infrastructure, power stations and desalination plants, and that is a war crime under international law. The law is unambiguous: military gain does not justify targeting civilian populations and the infrastructure they depend upon, and pre-announcing an attack does not reduce culpability. This is the reality of the Iran war that the world urgently needs to confront….
...There is a deeper ideological logic at work here, which is neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics reduces human beings to units in a system, economic cogs with conditional worth. When civilians are treated as expendable targets in a war in Iran, that is not aberration. That is the neoliberal system working as designed.
Margaret Thatcher applied the same logic to UK communities in the 1980s, treating unemployment and social harm as acceptable costs of economic policy. Trump's Iran policy is the modern expression of that same ideology, now directed at Iranian civilians on a far grander and more lethal scale. The mindset is identical; the human cost is simply larger.
The collapse of moral constraint we are witnessing in the US-Iran conflict is a systemic danger. Neoliberalism, combined with distorted justification, is overriding both international law and basic humanity…
Never doubt that dangerous ideas are a threat to humankind
Richard Murphy, March 31, 2026 [Funding the Future]
...This is the consequence of neoliberal thinking. When, as that philosophy does, you reduce people to being cogs in a machine, those cogs become expendable. Margaret Thatcher treated people in this way when managing the UK economy with supreme indifference to its population in the 1980s. Donald Trump is treating the people of Iran in this way when managing his maniacal war agenda in the 2020s. There is a difference in the scale of the contempt shown, but the indifference to human suffering that underpinned both courses of action is similar.
The fact is that the courses of action required to fulfil the neoliberal agenda of ever-increasing the wealth of a few in society at cost to many have been presumed by all those who subscribe to this ideology as justification for their contempt for their fellow human beings, and as an excuse for the suffering that their ideology has caused to billions around the world….
Trump’s assault on 2026 Election
Trump Will Not Accept the 2026 Results. These Are the Legal Weapons to Force Certification
W. A. Lawrence, Mar 29, 2026 [Glass Empires]
Trump is not attempting to win the election. Trump is attempting to establish the outcome as settled before certification, because a public that accepts inevitability becomes far easier to override.
Since January 2025, actions to expand federal control of election administration have moved from proposal into execution. Courts have blocked portions on constitutional grounds. Legal countermeasures stand ready. Effective use requires speed, coordination, and sustained pressure applied before administrative strain.
American elections transfer governing authority through a statutory and constitutional process requiring convergence of canvassing, certification, judicial review, and final recognition within fixed time limits….
Stage one is voter roll disruption before the election. The SAVE America Act forces all 211 million registered voters to re register in person with documentary proof of citizenship before November, generating mass eligibility disputes designed to overwhelm certification administrators at the moment deadlines permit no unresolved claims.
A parallel draft executive order carries identical provisions for unilateral imposition under a declared national emergency if the Senate fails to act. Trump confirmed the fallback, stating the requirements will govern the midterms whether approved by Congress or imposed by executive authority….
Trump signs executive order creating national voter list, restricting mail-in voting
[Associated Press, via Drop Site Daily: April 1, 2026
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to create a national list of verified eligible voters and seeking to bar the U.S. Postal Service from sending absentee ballots to those not on state-approved lists. Voting law experts say the move unconstitutionally usurps states’ authority to run elections. Federal funding could be withheld from states that do not comply.
Nearly Two Dozen Democratic States Hit Trump With Elections Lawsuit
Finn Hartnett, April 3, 2026 [The New Republic]
Officials from 23 different states (and the District of Columbia) are taking Donald Trump to court over a brazenly unconstitutional executive order that looks to limit Americans’ voting rights.
The executive order, signed on Tuesday, banned the U.S. Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots to anyone not on a preapproved list compiled by the USPS itself. Trump and his cronies like to claim mail-in voting is rife with fraud—despite a lack of evidence and the fact that the president likes to vote by mail himself. But the executive order’s solution to this is sketchy at best. Why, and how, does the USPS get to choose who can vote by mail?
Perhaps even more insidious is another section of the executive order, which calls on the federal government to compile its own list of voters in each state, which will then be sent to states 60 days before each federal election—presumably along with a bunch of threats that they better not find anyone who doesn’t match their list voting….
Letters from an American, March 31, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Apr 01, 2026
...Trump is ordering the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with the Social Security Administration to create a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state. The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to voters on the list, and to mark each ballot with its own unique barcode. It threatens any states refusing to cooperate with the order with a loss of federal funding and directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate anyone wrongfully distributing mail-in ballots. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “there is no such thing as a federal list of citizens. It does not exist.”
“This is unconstitutional on its face,” election law expert David Becker told Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket. “The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections….
State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms
Cory Doctorow, March 31, 2026 [Pluralistic]
Writing for Jacobin, Eric Blanc points out that Democrats don't have to sit by passively while Trump – who repeatedly promised that if you voted for him in 2024, "you won't have to vote anymore" – steals an election:
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/ice-trump-election-theft-laws/
...On March 13, the New Mexico state legislature passed a law banning armed federal officials from showing their fascist asses anywhere within 50 feet of a polling place or ballot drop-box:
https://www.koat.com/article/new-mexico-prohibits-armed-agents-voting-sites/70729595
Other blue states like "California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington" are contemplating similar laws.
It's a start, but as Blanc says, what the fuck are the other blue statehouses waiting for? This is a white-hot, hair-on-fire emergency. There isn't a moment to spare. This should be on the agenda for every union, at every demonstration, at every DSA and Democratic Club meeting. As Blanc says, if we wait until November to find out what Trump is going to do, it'll be too late. The time to act is now.
War
Drop Site Daily: March 30, 2026
Trump resumes threats on civilian infrastructure: President Donald Trump threatened Monday on Truth Social to target Iran’s energy infrastructure, oil wells and Kharg Island, and desalinization plants, if a ceasefire deal is not reached soon. In an interview with the Financial Times on Sunday, Trump said he was considering seizing Iran’s oil infrastructure, including Kharg Island, saying his “preference would be to take the oil.” Trump set an April 6 deadline for Iran to accept a deal or face further strikes on its energy infrastructure. “We’ve got about 3,000 targets left—we’ve bombed 13,000 targets—and another couple of thousand targets to go,” he told the paper. “A deal could be made fairly quickly.”
Drop Site Daily: March 31, 2026
Israel shifts to attacking Iranian economic infrastructure: Israel has pivoted toward striking Iran’s economic infrastructure after largely exhausting its initial military target list, entering what Israeli officials are describing as the “completion phase” of the war, the Times of Israel reported Monday. After hundreds of strike waves and more than 13,000 bombs that Israeli officials claim have severely degraded Iran’s missile systems, air defenses, and weapons production capacity, leaders have ordered attacks on the country’s gas infrastructure and major steel plants. Israeli officials framed the shift as a strategy to weaken the Iranian government and “create conditions” for its collapse.
Broker for Hegseth attempted to buy defense fund ahead of Iran strikes: A broker acting on behalf of U.S. War Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to purchase a multimillion-dollar stake in BlackRock’s Defense Industrials Active Exchange-Traded Fund through Morgan Stanley shortly before U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran began, the Financial Times reported Monday. The transaction was never completed because the fund was not yet available to Morgan Stanley clients. The Pentagon denied the report, calling it “fabricated.”
U.S. embassies to work with Pentagon psychological operations unit and Elon Musk: Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a cable Monday directing every U.S. embassy and consulate in the world to launch coordinated campaigns against foreign propaganda, endorsing Elon Musk’s X platform as an “innovative” counter-disinformation tool and instructing diplomatic staff to coordinate with the U.S. military’s psychological operations unit, according to The Guardian. Embassies were directed to recruit local influencers, academics, and community leaders to carry counter-propaganda messaging in ways designed to appear locally organic rather than centrally directed by Washington. The cable specifically endorses X’s Community Notes feature as a crowdsourced instrument for countering anti-American propaganda “without compromising free speech or privacy.”
Andrew Cockburn [London Review of Books, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]
Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad’s Assassination Campaign, by Aviva Guttmann. Cambridge, 336 pp., £25, August 2025, 978 1 009 50307 5
The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with a number of other leading officials, in the first few hours of the Iran War has confirmed that assassination is a routine tool of Israeli policy. Over the past two years, Israel has successfully targeted the military and political leadership of Hizbullah, Hamas and the Houthis, serially eliminating officials almost as soon as they step into the shoes of their murdered predecessors. The targets don’t have to be high-profile figures. Last October, an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon killed two engineers, Ahmad Saad and Mustafa Rizk, employees of a development organisation run by Hizbullah, who were on their way to assess war damage to buildings and infrastructure. This was part of an ongoing strategy to target not only Hizbullah’s military arm but its civilian functionaries, an approach assiduously deployed against civilian infrastructure in Gaza, down to workers trying to repair the devastated water system. For Israel, it seems, there is no political problem that can’t be solved, at least in part, by the elimination of individuals….
How The Empathy Gap Swallowed America
Brian Beutler, Mar 31, 2026 [Off Message]
The writer Yonatan Touval has written the best analysis I’ve read of how Donald Trump blundered into cataclysm by launching an illegal war of choice against Iran.
Touval is based in Tel Aviv; his critique is of all of the war’s architects, including Benjamin Netanyahu. But I’m most keenly interested in Trump’s role.
Touval fleshes out at length what I tried to capture here, about how Trump’s predatory temperament and antipathy make him a bad fighter. If you’re unable to contemplate humans as complex creatures with interior lives, passions, and honor systems, if you see them as mere pawns or binary instruments—useful vs. not useful—they will beat you in a war, because you will routinely misjudge how they’ll respond to provocation….
The Iran War Is a Failure of Imagination
Yonatan Touval, March 29, 2026 [New York Times, via Off Message]
...It is tempting to describe this as a failure of intelligence. Technically, it is not. The spycraft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive. Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered “target-production machine” capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.
Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war…....culture has increasingly ceded authority to systems that mistake information for understanding and speed for judgment….
Brett Wilkins, Mar 30, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Alarm mounted Monday over the Trump administration’s “Greater North America” plan, a geopolitical blueprint for US imperial hegemony from Greenland to Guyana that’s drawing comparisons with a messianic project being pushed by President Donald Trump’s far-right allies and war partners in Israel.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth first unveiled the plan earlier this month, telling reporters: “Trump has drawn a new strategic map, from Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal and its surrounding countries. At the Department of War we call this strategic map the Greater North America.”
“Why? Because every sovereign nation and territory north of the Equator, from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana, is not part of the ‘Global South,’” Hegseth added. “It is our immediate security perimeter in this great neighborhood that we all live in.”….
Numerous observers have compared Trump’s “Greater America” with the “Greater Israel” movement, whose most zealous proponents want to conquer everything between the Nile and Euphrates rivers—that is, all of Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan; most of Syria and Kuwait; large parts of Egypt and Iraq; and some of Turkey—for Israel.
“Hesgeth’s ‘Greater North America’ should be taken VERY seriously as a real threat,” University of Lausanne professor Julia Steinberger, who is Swiss-American, said on social media. “Right now the US and Israel are realizing ‘Greater Israel’ by attacking-invading Lebanon and Iran. Hegseth is saying it’s Greenland, Cuba, Canada, and Mexico next.”
Based on the biblical boundaries of ancient Jewish kingdoms, Greater Israel is rooted in the supremacist supposition that the Abrahamic deity figure God promised the Jews all of the lands between the Nile and Euphrates….
Far-Right Religious Leaders Advising Trump See Iran as an End Times Holy War
Alain Stephens, April 4 2026 [The Intercept]
...Trump has surrounded himself with a constellation of evangelical advisers who not only support his policies but also frame them as divinely sanctioned. Their specific strand of evangelical theology interprets global conflict, especially in the Middle East, as a precursor to the end times. For Trump, this alignment may well be transactional, another way to energize and consolidate a critical voting bloc. But for many of the religious figures now orbiting him, the stakes are far more cosmic: The war is not simply geopolitical; it is eschatological….
“Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding U.S. Losses Under Trump in the Middle East
Nick Turse, April 1 2026 [The Intercept]
Israeli Sources Confirm Iranian Missile Strikes Have 80 Percent Success Rates as Air Defences Falter
[Military Watch Magazine
Iran’s operational momentum persists despite US claims of capacity degradation: data
[TRT World, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]
Theodore Postol: Iran Already Has Nuclear Deterrent to Israeli Nuclear Strike (video)
[YouTube, March 30, 2026, via defenddemocracy.press]
MIT Professor and Pentagon advisor Ted Postol explains the extent to which the quantity and quality of Iranian missiles and drones were underestimated, and the consequences of this miscalculation.
‘What awaits Israel in the next round of the war is frightening’
[Conflicts Forum, via Naked Capitalism 03-30-2025]
[Military Watch Magazine Editorial Staff, March-28th-2026]
Matt Stoller, Mar 29, 2026 [BIG]
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Who Struck It Rich in the Markets When Trump Postponed Bombing Iran?
John Cassidy, March 30, 2026 [The New Yorker]
...Since the war began, trading in the futures markets has been heavy and, sometimes, frenetic. In terms of their absolute size, the trades that took place immediately before Trump’s announcement last Monday weren’t off the charts. But the volume of trading was unusually large for the time of day: according to data collected and analyzed by Bloomberg, it was roughly nine times the average volume at the same time during the previous five days. The sudden surge in trading of stock futures was also unusual: until Trump’s post, there had been no big news. “The timing and the fact that the two trades were placed at the same time, it kind of smells like something was off,” Mike Khouw, a veteran futures trader and portfolio manager who used to run a derivatives desk at Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street investment bank, told me….
W. A. Lawrence, Apr 04, 2026 [Glass Empires]
...On April 1, 2026, Donald Trump hosted an Easter luncheon at the White House and told his guests, on the record, that he had personally ordered his budget director to cut all federal funding for childcare. “Don’t send any money for day care,” he told Russell Vought, “because the United States can’t take care of day care.” The country was fighting wars, Trump explained. States would have to raise taxes to cover the gap, and working families would absorb whatever remained.
Buried inside the same week’s White House budget proposal sat a number the administration neither highlighted nor explained: $377 million for White House repair and restoration in 2026, followed by $174 million more in 2027, labeled “mandatory,” drawn from “federal sources,” with no plain-English explanation of the legal authority behind either figure. The ordinary upkeep line reads $5.975 million. The nine-figure sum beside the upkeep line is wrapped in accounting language calibrated to escape notice.
Working American children have nothing allocated in this budget. Half a billion federal dollars flow instead to the residence of a man who gained $3.4 billion in personal wealth in a single year in office.
Political scientists use the term sultanism for systems where the state stops functioning as a public institution and begins operating as a private revenue structure controlled by a governing family….
Economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, whose work on why nations fail identified the transition from inclusive to extractive institutions as the single most reliable predictor of national economic deterioration, documented this sequence across centuries of comparative history before this administration took office. Extractive institutions are those designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a narrow elite at the expense of the broader population. Every country that completed this transition took the same path: oversight capture first, financial extraction second, institutional hollowing third, and population bearing the biological cost last….
The critical variable in every case is not the volume of theft. Plenty of governments have sustained corruption without producing failed states. The critical variable is the deliberate destruction of the institutional layer between the extraction and the population.
Courts stripped of the capacity to adjudicate. Oversight bodies stripped of the capacity to investigate. A civil service that demands tribute to function. A press that cannot report. When governing elites engineer those four conditions simultaneously, the state does not weaken gradually. The state hollows. Hollowed states do not self-repair, because the governing network destroyed the institutions that repair would require.
What the historical record shows, without a single counter-example, is that the population pays the cost in biological terms. Life expectancy falls. Child mortality rises. Treatable diseases become fatal because supply chains for basic medications deteriorate when procurement systems serve extraction rather than public health….
Trump’s Corrupt Pardons May Well Be the Most Corrupt Thing About Him
Madeleine Dean and Norman J. Ornstein, April 2, 2026 [The New Republic]
Trump convenes “God Squad” to override Endangered Species Act, up oil production
[ars techica, via Naked Capitalism 03-31-2025]
...A rarely tapped panel nicknamed the “God Squad” will meet Tuesday to discuss whether overriding Endangered Species Act regulations for all federally regulated fossil fuel operations in the Gulf of Mexico is more important than preventing the extinction of several imperiled species. That includes sea turtles and a whale species down to its last 51 individuals….
But after the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the meeting, the Trump administration told the court that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted all federal oil and gas activities in the Gulf exempted “for reasons of national security.” ….
The situation puts the country in uncharted waters. No administration has ever before requested a national security exemption from endangered-species protections….
US counterterror officials plan Antifa summit, sources say
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]
DHS Launches Massive “Less Lethal” Chemical Weapons Buying Spree
Sam Biddle, April 3 2026 [The Intercept]
What’s Our Plan to Stop ICE From Stealing the Midterms?
[Labor Politics, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]
...On college campuses and in immigrant neighborhoods, for example, ICE agents could systematically demand that everybody in line show a passport or birth certificate — basically imposing the SAVE Act through force. Large-scale ICE provocations along these lines on election day could disrupt polling locations, dramatically drive down turnout, and cast doubt on any election results that don’t go Republicans’ way.
Bannon just said the quiet part out loud. This is voter suppression infrastructure being built in real time, in the open, with the explicit encouragement of the president’s close political allies. We should take them at their word….
Federal law already prohibits deploying military personnel to polling stations. But there’s a gap: the law doesn’t explicitly cover civilian federal agencies like ICE. That’s the loophole the administration is exploiting. So why haven’t Democrats and pro-democracy organizations yet prioritized fights to fix this legal loophole?
Jim Stewartson, Mar 31, 2026 [MindWar]
But now, according to a cable seen by the Guardian, Marco Rubio wants the Pentagon to run psyops directly on X—to “counter anti-American propaganda.”
Death of a refugee left at a Buffalo doughnut shop by Border Patrol is ruled a homicide
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 04-03-2025]
Letters from an American, Mar 31, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson. March 30, 2026
As the administration flails, insiders are leaking about some of the administration’s most powerful individuals. Two senior sources from the Department of Homeland Security leaked stories about White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to the Daily Mail, a tabloid out of the United Kingdom. They claimed Miller demanded agents in Minneapolis be sent to areas where DHS knew there would be a lot of protesters because he wanted to “force confrontations” between agents and protesters that would enable the administration to “win the ‘PR battle.’” They echoed others in suggesting that Miller, not the president, was in charge of immigration policy.
Yesterday Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post reported that former high-ranking military officials, experts on religion and law, and veterans groups, as well as current Pentagon staff and officers, have expressed deep concern over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s extremist evangelical worship services and his casting of the U.S. military as a force for Christian holy war. Last Wednesday he prayed for U.S. troops to assert “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” saying: “We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”
Letters from an American, April 2, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson. April 03, 2026
...After World War II, Republican businessmen, southern racists, and religious traditionalists hated the government that both Democrats and Republicans had embraced since 1933, one that leveled the American social and economic playing field by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. They insisted that such a system of government action was socialism or even communism, and contrasted it with their fantasy of an independent white man on the frontier who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone.
In 1960 a ghost-written book released under the name of Arizona senator Barry Goldwater…
In place of a strong federal government, the book said, power should go back to the states to restore true freedom to Black Americans, farmers, and workers. Federal action had given those groups too much power, and they were using it to destroy liberty and lower the American standard of living. In their hands, the book said, the U.S. was on its way to becoming a totalitarian state. At the same time, the government must protect the country with an increasingly strong military.
At an Easter lunch reception yesterday, Trump echoed this argument precisely. “I said to [Office of Management and Budget director] Russell [Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare,’” he said. “That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have fifty states, we have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it, too. They should pay. They’ll have to raise their taxes, but they should pay for it. And we could lower our taxes a little bit to them to make up, but we, it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection.” ….
Those who oppose government social welfare programs, regulation of business, and so on, have worked to concentrate power in the president, knowing that Congress will hesitate to slash programs their voters like. Yesterday Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, of the Office of Legal Counsel, published an opinion for the White House that claims the Presidential Records Act, which requires that presidents keep records of their official business and turn them over at the end of their term, is unconstitutional. Gaiser clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.
“The PRA is not a valid exercise of Congress’s Article I authority and unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President guaranteed by Article II. The Act establishes a permanent and burdensome regime of congressional regulation of the Presidency untethered from any valid and identifiable legislative purpose,” the memo reads. “For these reasons, the PRA is unconstitutional, and the President need not further comply with its dictates.”
The Justice Department said that a federal law enacted in the wake of the Watergate scandal that requires the president to preserve certain documents and turn them over to the National Archives at the end of his administration is unconstitutional.
The opinion from Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, who leads the Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that the Presidential Records Act exceeds Congress' power and "aggrandizes the legislative branch" at the expense of the independence of the executive branch.
Gaiser, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, wrote that as a result of his determination that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, President Trump does not need to comply with it.
Global power shift
Cory Doctorow, April 1, 2026 [Pluralistic]
...Now, thanks to Trump's America First agenda, America's many advantages are collapsing. The dollar is in retreat, with Ethiopia revaluing its national debt in Chinese renminbi:
Ethiopia and China Move Toward Final Stage of Debt Restructuring Agreement
China Is Rapidly Overtaking the United States as the World’s Scientific Superpower
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 03-29-2025]
China Is Planning Decades Ahead on Clean Energy. The U.S. Has Other Priorities.
[Council on Foreign Relations, via Naked Capitalism 03-29-2025]
Trump considers pulling out US troops from Germany: Report
[Andolu Agency, via Naked Capitalism 03-29-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
“We Jews Are God’s Chosen People And The Gentiles Must Learn Their Purpose”
By Nemos News Network -March 21, 20260150
“We Jews are God’s chosen people and the Gentiles must learn their purpose in life is to fight and die for Israel.”
Oligarchy
Lindsay Beyerstein, March 26, 2026 [Dissent
The real scandal of the Epstein saga is not that a billionaire cabal runs the world. It’s that there is a billionaire class.
Jeffrey Epstein checks every conspiracist box. The late sex trafficker was a Jewish financier linked to the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. His influence extended to the House of Saud, the House of Windsor, the Russian Federation, and Israel. He liked pizza. Renewed attention to the astonishing number of prominent men cultivated by Epstein has poured fuel on simmering conspiracy theories of shadowy child trafficking rings run by powerful elites. As Ana Marie Cox observed in the New Republic, “every new file drop brings at least a whisper of validation to QAnon’s core contentions.” Even some serious-minded observers are willing to entertain increasingly outlandish claims. Tara Palmeri, one of the most prominent journalists on the Epstein beat, even suggested that Epstein might have been growing mind-control plants in his garden to turn his victims into zombies….
QAnon was a right-wing movement, but Epstein conspiracism has now gone fully bipartisan. Presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hold the powerful to account, we are teetering on the edge of lunacy. Yet the real scandal of the Epstein saga is not that a billionaire cabal runs the world. It’s that there is a billionaire class. The moral of the Epstein files is that nobody should be that rich….
It is notable that all the arrests sparked by the release of Epstein-related documents so far have been for public corruption, rather than sexual abuse. In the UK, the files precipitated the first arrest of a senior member of the royal family in nearly four hundred years. The country’s self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness, former senior Labour cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, has also been arrested and investigated by the Metropolitan Police for allegedly leaking state secrets to his close friend; in 2009, he reportedly colluded with Epstein to undermine his own government’s policy on taxing bankers’ bonuses. In Norway, former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland was stripped of his diplomatic immunity by the Council of Europe and charged by police with gross corruption after the files revealed him to be a member of Epstein’s inner circle who allegedly accepted travel and other goodies while he chaired the Norwegian Nobel Committee and the Council of Europe in the 2010s….
As the notorious 2003 birthday album demonstrates, Epstein’s friends knew he was a pervert, whether they realized he was preying on underage girls or not. In 2008, Epstein pled guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor. From then on, it was a matter of public record that Epstein was a convicted felon who had served jail time for sex crimes against minors. His friends couldn’t have cared less.
By paying the girls, Epstein created disposable victims in the eyes of his peers. He painted himself as the victim of overzealous prosecutors and feminists who wanted to interfere with a man’s right to enjoy “rub and tug” massages in the privacy of his own home. “The view among Epstein’s wide circle of loyal, devoted, and largely unquestioning friends was that Epstein was guilty only of venial sins,” wrote Epstein’s would-be biographer Michael Wolff. To Wolff, Epstein was just “an insistent playboy (excuse me, pedophile) in a correct and prudish world.”
“I mean, he was with a 17-year-old prostitute, got prosecuted for it and got put away for a year,” onetime friend and client Leon Black—co-founder of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management, and once the king of the junk bond dealers—told a Puck reporter. “I didn’t think this was the end of the world, frankly.”
“I’m betting that for a lot of these girls the best thing they did in their day was to visit Jeffrey—compared to what they were doing in their miserable lives,” Epstein’s lawyer Reid Weingarten told Wolff, “but you can’t actually say that.”….
Epstein’s gone, but we’re stuck with a class of people with effectively infinite resources that they can devote to whatever they want—whether it’s undermining democracy, crushing unions, or abusing children.
The Epstein Case Is Beyond Trump’s Reach
W.A. Lawrence, via Naked Capitalism 04-01-2025]
...For years, accountability appeared containable within a single system, a single archive, a single point of pressure. That condition no longer exists. Evidence now sits inside multiple sovereign courts, where it can be acted upon without delay or negotiation and cannot be withdrawn. Control has been replaced by inevitability.
Recognition of that shift determines who understands the trajectory now and who accepts a revised version later.
Individuals named in Epstein-related files face exposure without reliance on American disclosure. Prosecutors pursue charges wherever evidence intersects with territorial jurisdiction, financial systems, or institutional authority, while extradition, asset tracing, financial seizure, and parallel indictments impose legal exposure across borders. Outcomes vary by jurisdiction yet drive charges, penalties, and sustained legal consequences.
International enforcement follows jurisdiction. Arrest authority attaches where prosecutable conduct intersects with territorial law, regulated systems, or citizen impact. Prosecutors satisfy evidentiary thresholds, file charges, obtain warrants, and initiate extradition through established frameworks. Enforcement develops through travel restrictions, asset tracing, and parallel investigations that intensify pressure across jurisdictions. Expanding overlap among sovereign systems drives enforceable action where jurisdiction, evidence, and political conditions align….
Felonomics
Julia Conley, April 02, 2026 [CommonDreams]
...close to 100,000 US veterans are currently behind on their mortgage payments or are in the process of foreclosure as a result of the White House’s decision to shut down a Department of Veterans Affairs program that helped people with VA-backed home loans when they were behind on their monthly payments.
As NPR reported Thursday, more than 10,000 have already lost their homes, nearly a year after the Trump administration abruptly did away with the VA Servicing Purchase (VASP) program….
FTC reveals a record $15.9 billion in consumer fraud losses in 2025
[Detroit Free Press, via Naked Capitalism 03-29-2025]
[TW: I have been telling friends ever since Trump’s re-election that corporate fraud and malfeasance was going to explode because the crooks now reign, and Trump’s regime will do nothing to restrain their most depraved schemes.]
Predatory finance
The Subprime AI Crisis Is Here
Ed Zitron, via Naked Capitalism 04-01-2025] Important
The (Poly)Market Nobody Knows How to Govern
[Can We Still Govern?, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
The Philosopher And The Pedophile
Anand Giridharadas, April 1, 2026 [The Lever]
...Then, four months into reading through the files, I found an email that stunned me.
It is not the most salacious email I’ve seen, nor the one with the most boldface names. But it’s the only one in which Epstein, who in that same thread professed an inability to decipher how others saw him, seemed to be interested in just that: both the conventional wisdom in the ether, and what people really knew. And, for once, someone in his network did what no one around Epstein ever did: told him the truth.
This may be the single-most-overlooked email in the whole trove. When I have Googled phrases from it, only one link comes up — a lonely Reddit thread. But here is testimony to the thing so many in the network prefer to deny existed: a common sense of who Epstein was and what he had done and how and why, a 1,500-word, 360-degree assessment of his character, his criminality, his manipulations, his gifts, his network cultivation — written by someone who wasn’t especially close to him, but seemed to believe that this is how others saw him, this is what many people knew about him.
It turns out that legalising gambling is bad
Robin Wigglesworth [Financial Times]
The gambling industry is huge, even if you exclude the stock market and newfangled “prediction” sites. But how healthy is it for society?Fortunately, a perfect natural experiment in the US offers an easy way to find out — so easy that Alphaville is a little surprised we haven’t seen research like this before.Since 2018, about 30 different US states have legalised mobile sports betting through apps like DraftKings and Flutter. Some economists at the New York Federal Reserve therefore decided to examine granular consumer spending and Equifax credit reports to see the impact before and after legalisation. Alphaville’s emphasis below:We find that legalization increases spending at online sportsbooks roughly tenfold, but betting does not stop at state boundaries. Nearby areas where betting is not legal still experience roughly 15 percent the increase of counties where it is legal.At the same time, consumer financial health suffers. Our analysis finds rising delinquencies in participating states, with spillover effects across state lines. What is more, even though the share of people taking up sports betting after legalization is small (roughly 3 percent of the population), overall credit delinquency rises by about 0.3 percentage points. Our findings suggest that sports betting can have dramatic implications for household financial stability.
On Monday, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), the Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee, along with U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee; and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI ), Co-Chair of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control sent a letter to Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury, raising questions about the extent of Elon Musk’s role in the Treasury Department decision to limit key requirements of the bipartisan Corporate Transparency Act (CTA). The lawmakers expressed particular concern given new reporting that Mr. Musk uses a network of dozens of secretive companies that are potentially the same type of entities that would be subject to the law’s transparency requirements….“(N)ew reporting has revealed that Mr. Musk uses a network of dozens of secretive companies—potentially the type of entities that, under the CTA, are required to report ownership information to the Treasury Department. It would be deeply troubling if Mr. Musk intervened in any way to limit these transparency requirements,” wrote the lawmakers…“In other words,” the lawmakers summarized, “the Treasury Department announced its plans to gut the CTA one day after Elon Musk, who at the time served as the head of DOGE, announced that he would ‘look into’ the law. Mr. Musk owns a slew of private companies that, had Treasury continued to enforce the CTA as required in statute, would likely have been required to report their true owners to FinCEN. Instead, the Treasury Department issued an interim final rule that permits entities tied to Mr. Musk to continue operating in obscurity.”
Disrupting mainstream economics
The national debt lie that makes the rich even richer
Richard Murphy, March 27, 2026 [Funding the Future]
...The real problem isn't the debt itself, it's who owns it. More than 80% of global debt is privately held. Pension funds are among the biggest holders, because governments are seen as reliable payers. But behind those pension funds sit the world's wealthiest people. Just 1% of the global population, roughly 80 million people, control the vast majority of this wealth. Interest payments on national debt now total an estimated $3.2 trillion a year, meaning the richest earn around $40,000 per head from interest alone, while average income for the other 99% is only $13,500. This is wealth inequality hardwired into the system, with unearned income flowing from governments to the rich, funded by ordinary taxpayers.
I set out four solutions.
- First, interest rates on national debt must come down; they are too high.
- Second, unearned income from interest and government bonds needs to be taxed more heavily, not less than earnings from work.
- Third, we need more progressive tax systems worldwide.
- And fourth, the ownership of this wealth needs to be democratised, brought back under public control as it was during quantitative easing.
National debt is not a crisis. It is a transfer mechanism, and right now, it transfers wealth upwards.
Are we at a Galileo moment in economics?
Richard Murphy, April 04, 2026 [Funding the Future]
What if everything you think about money is wrong? And does it matter for the UK economy if it is?
Most people believe governments must tax or borrow before they can spend. That belief shapes every political debate, every austerity programme, and every argument that public services "can't be afforded." But what if that belief is simply false?
In this video, I explain why modern monetary theory (MMT) is forcing a reckoning with economic orthodoxy, and why understanding how money works and how money creation actually functions is essential if we are ever to escape the trap of unnecessary austerity and constrained public investment.
The parallel with Galileo is not accidental. Just as heliocentric astronomy was resisted by those with institutional power to lose, the truth about government spending and fiscal policy is resisted today by politicians, commentators, and economists who cannot afford to admit they were wrong. The cost of that resistance is paid by the rest of us: in underfunded public services, stagnant wages, and a UK economy that fails the majority.
Economic questions: the Viktor Frankl Question
Richard Murphy, March 30, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Viktor Frankl was not an economist. He was a psychiatrist, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of psychology centred on the search for meaning. His most famous book, Man's Search for Meaning, is often read as a personal testimony. It is that. But it is also something more: a theory of what sustains human beings under extreme conditions, and what destroys them even in comfort.
Frankl's claim is stark: people can endure almost any hardship if they can find meaning within it, but they may collapse even in materially adequate conditions if life becomes purposeless. Meaning is not a luxury. It is a requirement. It is the psychological foundation of resilience, moral agency, and hope.
Once this is understood, economics can no longer pretend that well-being is reducible to income, consumption, or growth. The political economy of any society must be judged by whether it enables its members to live lives that feel worthwhile.
Hence, the Viktor Frankl Question: If human beings cannot live without meaning, why do we tolerate an economic system that so often deprives people of purpose, dignity, and the chance to matter?
The five things that really matter in life
Richard Murphy, March 29, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Capital Ideas — Two books on the history of capitalism provide lessons for how to tame it.
Robert Kuttner, April 3, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Alarming Study Finds That Most People Just Do What ChatGPT Tells Them, Even If It’s Totally Wrong
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 03-29-2025]
Yes, Therapy Sessions Are Being Used to Train AI
Matt Stoller, Apr 04, 2026 [BIG]
There's a political fight over the practice of therapy, spurred by AI. As Wall Street driven health platforms try to reorder mental health care, therapists are pushing for regulation of insurance.
AI Just Hacked One Of The World’s Most Secure Operating Systems
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 04-04-2025]
Why AI lies, cheats and steals
[ComputerWorld, via Naked Capitalism 04-04-2025]
AI accused of ‘unjust exploitation’ as bots reprint entire books
[Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 04-04-2025]
Resistance
Chicago’s ICE playbook spreads as cities challenge Trump’s crackdown
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 03-29-2025]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Michael Whatley faces scrutiny over close ties to known sex offender
Michael McElroy, March 30, 2026 [Cardinal & Pine]
[Whatley is the former chair of the Republican National Committee now running for US Senate in North Carolina]
Top Trump Donor, Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Revealed as Funder of False, Racist “NO” Ads
lowkell, April 01, 2026 [Daily Kos]
The South Rises Again
Trump officials cite white supremacists in bid to end birthright citizenship
An argument heading to the Supreme Court is built in part on a post-Civil War campaign that scholars say was steeped in anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism.
By Justin Jouvenal
David Cole [The New York Review, April 23, 2026 issue]
For the Supreme Court to accept the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, it would have to repudiate the Constitution, its own precedents, and the long-standing position of all three branches of the US government.
Civic republicanism
[TW: The links above, to articles about religious beliefs in the apocalypse, and “Greater Israel” clearly show why the USA as a republic is supposed to have a separation of church from state, because religious belief as the primary driver of policy is simply dangerous.]
Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram’s obedience experiments
[PsyPost, via Naked Capitalism 03-31-2025]
The most frequent violation in obedient sessions involved reading the memory test questions over the simulated screams of the learner. Doing this effectively guaranteed that the learner would fail the test and receive another shock. By talking over the protests, the obedient subjects abandoned the goal of testing memory and simply facilitated continuous shocks.
Kaposi and Sumeghy interpret these patterns as a complete breakdown of the supposedly legitimate scientific environment. The subjects were not committing violence for the sake of an orderly memory study. With the scientific elements either forgotten or rushed, the laboratory changed into a setting for unauthorized and senseless violence.
Chris Armitage [The Existentialist Republic, via Naked Capitalism 04-04-2025]
...State prosecutors have criminal jurisdiction over crimes that harm their residents. The abuse happened to people who live in states. The trafficking network operated within state borders. The foreign interference targeted state residents and state institutions. The obstruction produced harm within states. State grand juries can subpoena what the federal government has spent years and millions of dollars trying to bury. State prosecutors can charge the agents who obstructed justice. State RICO statutes reach the entire enterprise. No presidential pardon touches any of it.
The founders built this into the constitutional structure because they understood exactly what it looks like when the people running the accountability system are the ones who need to be held accountable. Two sovereigns. Independent jurisdiction. No single institution able to shut down accountability entirely because the authority to act is distributed across states and thousands of elected prosecutors and attorneys general and governors who swore an oath to the Constitution, not to any single administration.
The option has always been there. It has never been taken away. And it is available right now.
This is the third piece in The American Reformation, a public series built around the working paper “The Constitutional Architecture of State Opposition: A Taxonomy of Sovereign Posture Under Federal Authoritarian Capture and Electoral Autocracy,” currently available for public review and forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals.²
Michael Gorra [The New York Review, April 23, 2026 issue]
Reviewed:
George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries
edited by Geoff Wisner (Library of America, 885 pp., $45.00)...George Templeton Strong. Born in 1820, he too was a lawyer and spent much of his professional life on Wall Street, working in an atmosphere of rents, real estate, and red tape that recalls the world of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). He represented banks and insurance companies and drew up the will for the woman New York society knew as “the Mrs. Astor.” He was also a long-serving vestry man at Trinity Church, on the board of Columbia College and one of the founders of its law school, an early supporter of the New York Philharmonic, a member—like Archer—of the Century Association, and in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, an organizer of the Union League Club of New York. Membership there had political as well as social requirements. Much of the city’s governing and financial elite saw the profits in cotton and wanted to make a deal with the Confederacy; they would let the seceding slave states go and get back to business as usual. The Union League, in contrast, was for those who could demonstrate their commitment to the national cause, and its clubhouse quickly became a place to get the latest news from the Southern battlefields.
The Union League was an outgrowth of Strong’s actual war work, the work that really did make him a good citizen. He could run a meeting, and he could also be trusted with other people’s money. In 1861 he was asked to become the treasurer of the United States Sanitary Commission, a New York–based relief organization that over the next four years raised up to $25 million in the currency of the day for war-related medical supplies and personnel. Some of its efforts concerned sanitation itself, with inspections to ensure the proper digging of latrines in camps and the adequate ventilation of disease-ridden wards. Much more went into the purchase and provision of bandages, clothing, food—“curried cabbage” for scurvy—and drugs. The commission also hired doctors and nurses, financed entire hospitals, some of them on ships, and then nursing homes for disabled soldiers: anything that the army’s overstretched medical service might need.
The members of its executive committee were all unpaid volunteers—Frederick Law Olmsted was another of them—but for more than four years they met almost daily in New York, along with frequent trips to Washington, and Strong went to the front lines in Virginia and Maryland as well. He was at the Antietam battlefield immediately after the fighting ended, with the money to fund whatever the surgeons needed. And the commission also had its own battles with the army, whose medical corps was all too apt to function on the basis of seniority rather than competence. Lincoln trusted the commission; his bullheaded war secretary Edwin Stanton did not and at times looked ready to shut it down. But it lasted until the conflict’s end and stands as a forerunner of the American Red Cross….
The history of civilization can be seen as a repeating battle for control over powerful new technologies which are neutral about whether they serve civilization or its destruction. These technologies—Bronze Age weapons, chariots, writing, money, radio and television, the atomic bomb, AI—share a common feature: they give a small group of people leverage over many. Wars are fought, empires rise and fall, and humanity finds a way forward only to the extent it can contain these technologies—and their abuse by elite, extractive, anti-civilizational forces.When Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age”—a threat mirrored by his “War Secretary”—he was openly vowing to use his technological capacity to erase civilization from a country of ninety million. The Stone Age, defined loosely as the era humans needed to use stone tools, may sound primitive and alien to civilized people, but it accounts for 99% of homo sapiens’ 300,000 year existence.
Historically, civilization is the aberration, not the other way around.
The threat was not idle. Trump and Hegseth followed through by destroying the tallest bridge in Iran—not a military target—in a double-tap strike that killed rescuers.
Trump’s glorification of the destruction of civilian infrastructure—in Iran and Washington DC—is emblematic of those who seek to sabotage civilization because it threatens their unfair advantage over the population….
This inversion of American morality was made clear by Trump’s proposed 2027 budget: $1.5 trillion in military spending, a 40% increase over this year, paired with sweeping cuts to services and entitlements.
”Trump has proposed a $1.5 trillion defense budget — a 40% increase, the largest since WWII. In exchange for more war he wants to: -Cut the EPA budget by half -Cut $10.7 billion for housing -Cut $8.5 billion for K-12 programs -Cancel $15 billion for clean energy -Cut $2.5”
On Good Friday, thinking he was off-camera, Trump explained his budget to a room of evangelical Christians in the White House:
“I said to Russell [Vought], the United States can’t take care of daycare… We’re fighting wars. It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things… We have to take care of one thing, military protection.”
This is as clear an abdication of the civilized world as you can find in the 21st century: the “one thing… we have to take care of” is our ability to kill other people—not “all these individual things” like healthcare and children.
But Trump’s malignant narcissism and increasing disinhibition did not allow him to stop his confessional there. He went on to deliver one of the most telling and honest things he’s ever said.
“You know, we’re not supposed to be seduced that way, right? But I am. When someone’s nice to me, I love that person. Even if they’re bad people. I couldn’t care less. I’ll fight to the end for them.”
This is not the logic of the civilized world; it is the dead-end logic of clans, mafias, and cults—authoritarian groups that use coercion, lies, and violence instead of law, and elevate personalist loyalty over everything else….
Civilization is not the accumulation of power, or the building of grand monuments to a leader or a nation. It is not creating the greatest capacity for violence, posting the highest number in a stock market’s history, or adding chatbots to the kill chain. To the contrary, it is the ability of a population to constrain those very powers that defines whether it is truly civilized, or merely a sacrificial battleground.
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