Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 12, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
“A curtain of darkness is settling over our nation.”
Heather Cox Richardson, Apr 11, 2026 [Letters from an American, April 10, 2026]
It feels like something shifted in the United States this week after President Donald J. Trump threatened on Tuesday that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” As professor of human rights, global affairs, and philosophy Mathias Risse of Harvard University’s Kennedy School noted, the Geneva Conventions prohibit “acts or threats of violence whose primary purpose is to terrorize civilians.” He notes that Trump’s threat terrorized 90 million Iranians by threatening them with genocide.
Joyce Vance, Apr 08, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
...“You have asked,” it begins, “whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (“PRA” or “Act”) is constitutional.” The answer follows immediately: “We conclude that it is not.” There are two reasons, either of which, standing on its own, would have been sufficient to undo the PRA. The opinion explains that they are “interlocking.” The Act “exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers”, and it also “aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.” In other words, we’re watching another power grab by this administration, a stratagem to expand the power of the executive at the expense of Congress, while claiming it’s the other way around….
[TW: I hope readers who have been here long enough will remember that in the past few years I often linked to law journal and scholarly articles debunking the conservative arguments about “enumerated” powers:
- David S. Schwartz, “A Question Perpetually Arising: Implied Powers, Capable Federalism, and the Limits of Enumerationism,” 59 Arizona Law Review. 573, 575–79, 581–84 (2017)
- David S. Schwartz, Recovering the Lost General Welfare Clause [63 William & Mary Law Review 857 (2022)]
- Jonathan Gienapp, “The Myth of the Constitutional Given: Enumeration and National Power at the Founding,” [Am. U. L. Rev. 183, 194-209 (2020)]
- John Mikhail, “The Constitution and the Philosophy of Language: Entailment, Implicature, and Implied Powers,” 101 Virginia Law Review 1063, 1091–97 (2015) [hereinafter Mikhail, The Constitution and the Philosophy of Language] (parsing the Necessary and Proper Clause to argue that the Constitution’s text implies that Congress possesses many more implied powers than the expressly enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8)
- Andrew Coan and David S. Schwartz, The Original Meaning of Enumerated Powers (pdf) [Legal Theory Blog]
- Robert D. Cooter & Neil S. Siegel, “Collective Action Federalism: A General Theory of Article I, Section 8,” 63 Stanford Law Review 115, 150, 178–80 (2010) (promoting the authors’ theory of collective action federalism as a way to interpret Article I, Section 8 such that Congress is not limited to the specific instances of regulation provided for in the Constitution)
- Richard Primus, “The “Essential Characteristic”: Enumerated Powers and the Bank of the United States,” 117 Michigan Law Review. 415, 419–20 (2018) (examining the controversy surrounding the first Bank of the United States to uncover alternative understandings of the Constitution’s enumerated power at the Founding) ]
Brian Beutler, Apr 10, 2026 [Off Message]
Donald Trump now claims to own all of his presidential records. To be more precise, his Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which interprets law for the entire executive branch, recently opined that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, and thus that any government documents that cross the president’s desk, or pertain to his work, are his to keep, unless he chooses to leave them with the National Archives….
This is bullshit because the president works for the public, not the other way around; he is no more entitled to make off with our documents than you’re entitled to charge a Ferrari to the company credit card….
...And we should suspect the worst, because this action only really makes sense as a fabricated legal defense against actions Trump and his subordinates have already taken or intend to take imminently. There was no reason for Trump to do this unless he means to make off with or destroy a large number of incriminating or valuable public records in short order—not merely at the end of his term. If Trump had sincere, above board motives, he could have challenged the Presidential Records Act in court directly, rather than make a lawless assertion of power and wait for litigants and judges to stop him. The reason an administration of such low character would do this now, years before Trump leaves office, is to begin the process of burying or destroying or privatizing records right away—many months before Democrats regain control of Congress….
Trump's New Attempt To Keep You From Voting
Joyce Vance, Apr 06, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
Last Tuesday, Donald Trump signed a new executive order designed, to put it simply, to make it more difficult for us to vote.
War
Yes, Trump Might Use Nukes in Iran
Andrew Day, Apr 7, 2026 [www.defenddemocracy.press]
...Maybe these statements were just bluster, maybe not. Regardless, if Tehran doesn’t budge, Trump will feel pressure to follow through and turn Iran into an apocalyptic hellscape before tomorrow morning.
Trump might even be tempted to accomplish this monstrous objective with the use of nuclear weapons. Amid muddled messaging from the White House, one of the most consistent themes has been the declared intention to “obliterate” Iran—and nuclear weapons offer the surest way to do that….Moreover, Trump doesn’t seem to have internalized the “nuclear taboo,” the idea that strategic planners consider the nuclear option illegitimate and uncomfortable to even contemplate. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC reported during the 2016 presidential race that Trump had questioned a foreign policy adviser about the impermissibility of using nuclear weapons. “Three times he asked at one point, if we had them, why can’t we use them,” Scarborough said.
Campaign officials denied the report, but Trump had said something very similar months earlier during an MSNBC town hall. The moderator, Chris Matthews, pressed Trump on his prior refusal to rule out using nuclear weapons in Europe and the Middle East, leading to a remarkable exchange:Trump: First of all, you don’t want to say, “Take everything off the table,” because you’d be a bad negotiator if you did that.
Matthews: Just nuclear.
Trump: Look, nuclear should be off the table. But would there be a time when it could be used? Possibly, possibly.
Matthews: OK. The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it. [Then–Prime Minister] David Cameron in Britain heard it. The Japanese, where we bombed them in ’45, heard it. They’re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.
Trump: Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?
Arguably, Trump had a point. After all, a president can’t take nuclear weapons “off the table” without thereby negating their deterrence value. Still, the exchange suggests Trump approaches the issue with less gravity and forbearance than the average world leader….
“President Trump is clearly frustrated and looking for an off ramp to end the war, but seems to want to put some kind of exclamation point on the campaign,” Jennifer Kavanagh of Defense Priorities told The American Conservative. “He’s hoping for a big win that he can use to sell the war as a massive success. This could push him to escalate, even as the returns are diminishing.”….
When War Crimes Rhetoric Becomes Battlefield Reality: The Slippery Slope to Total War on Iran.
[JustSecurity, via The Big Picture, April 07, 2026]
Iranian power plants and other critical civilian infrastructure are protected from attacks by the law of war the United States helped craft after World War II. Such an object can lose its protection only if it is used for military purposes by the enemy and its destruction “offers a definite military advantage.” Even then, such an object can be attacked only if, after a case-by-case rigorous analysis, the “concrete and direct military advantage anticipated” outweighs the civilian suffering that is expected to result.
[TW: Aa number of Democratic Senators and Congressmen declared Trump should once again be impeached. Even former prominent Trump boosters such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have begun calling for the use of the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
[Because the (anti)Republicans in Congress will block another impeachment, I think a more useful and effective response is to introduce and fight to pass a law making it an explicit war crime for any President — absent a nuclear attack on the US or any of its allies, or without a Declaration of War by Congress — to order the use of nuclear weapons. To maintain the deterrent capability of US nuclear weapons, this law must be explicit that it does not apply to an order in which a nuclear attack on the US or any of its allies has already been inflicted or has already begun. This is necessary to maintain US strategic deterrence.
[By contrast, this new law would clearly state that any use of nuclear weapons outside this deterrent role would be a war crime.
[The introduction and debate of this new law can be framed and managed in such a way as to force supporters of the unitary executive theory to admit that either there are limits to presidential authority, or admit that their interpretation of unitary executive theory is not even bounded by the war powers clause of the Constitution. This admission would inflict serious damage on the unitary executive theory, especially in the court of public opinion.
[This would be much more likely to attract the support, or at least votes, of Republican members of Congress, and could be used to great benefit in attacking the unitary executive theory.
[This new law should also include sturdy and robust safeguards for members of the military who refuse unlawful orders. We have already seen Trump’s vindictive attempt at retribution against the Vindman brothers during his Trump’s first term, and the threats to prosecute Senators Slotkin and Kelly, and the Congressmen who joined them in publishing a video remining members of the military their duty includes refusal to obey unlawful orders. Will a JAG lawyer who advises a commander not to obey an order be subjected to retaliatory investigations, abuse, professional damage, and even personal danger by Trump and his agents? Using the hypothetical Seal Team 6 question during the Supreme Court hearing on Presidential immunity – what if Trump orders certain military units or operatives to kill any JAG lawyer opposing illegal orders? ]
Confirmed: Trump admin threatened to overthrow the papacy
Adam Lynch, April 08, 2026 [Alternet, via DailyKos, April 08, 2026]
Pope Leo XIV chronicler Christopher Hale says he has confirmed that Trump’s Pentagon threatened to declare war on the Vatican.
“In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture,” said Hale.
“America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world,” Colby and his associates informed the cardinal. “The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
As the room temperature grew, Hale said he confirmed that one U.S. official “reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.” ….
Citing a Free Press report, a writer obtained accounts from Vatican and U.S. officials briefed on the Pentagon meeting. According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at President Donald Trump. Hale said what “enraged them most” was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”
“The Pentagon read that sentence as a frontal challenge to the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’ — Trump’s update of Monroe, asserting unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere,” said Hale….
The Pentagon's January confrontation with Cardinal Pierre signals an unprecedented willingness by Trump officials to pressure religious institutions into alignment with administration goals. This represents a potential inflection point: where diplomatic courtesy once governed state-Church relations, coercion may now be replacing negotiation. The Vatican's refusal to participate in the 250th anniversary celebration underscores that even America's most prominent religious institution will not compromise its moral authority for political expediency.
The Public Theology We Need Now — Moral compromise is far too common, but we know a better way.
William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Apr 11, 2026 [Our Moral Moment]
In the spring of 1933, while the world faced rising authoritarian movements, Franz von Papen traveled to Rome as a delegate of Germany’s new Chancellor. There he began negotiations for an agreement between the Vatican and the German Reich – a Concordant both parties would sign that summer, preparing the way for Hitler’s regime to advance its agenda for the next dozen years without mass resistance from German Christians. The details of the agreement were spelled out in several pages, but the structure was simple, and largely reflected how most Catholic and Protestant churches would negotiate the Third Reich: churches would be free to worship, run schools, and conduct social services as long as their preachers stayed out of politics.
The pastoral ministries of the Church could continue if it silenced its prophetic critique.
When the US President threatened genocide on social media this week, Pope, Leo XIV - the first American Pope - told reporters, “This truly is not acceptable.” He encouraged US citizens to call their representatives in Congress and demand a check on the President’s war powers. This was not the first time Leo (or Pope Francis before him) challenged Trump’s agenda, but it was remarkably direct….
The central question of public theology is always what God requires of us, no matter who is in charge. Throughout history clergy have been accused of being “too political” in times and places where political leaders did not want to have to deal with the challenge our moral traditions offer. The compromise that Trump demands today and that German Christians agreed to in 1933 has been made far too often in human history. It was the basic agreement between white churches and the Jim Crow regime in the American South, between church leaders and the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century, and between many governments and church institutions in between.
But this is not the only story of public theology that we have inherited. Two years before von Papen traveled to Rome to meet with Vatican officials in 1933, a handful of clergy, scholars, and activists traveled to New Haven, Connecticut at the invitation of seven African-American students at Yale Divinity School who had dedicated themselves to “service and sacrifice for Christ.” The students were concerned about the authoritarian movements of their day, both in Europe and in the American South. They also knew God had called them to become leaders in the church who could work together for “the creation of a new social order based on the principles of Jesus.”
Not content to simply wait for their theological school to equip them for this moral leadership, they called on a young scholar from Howard University (Benjamin Mays), a young labor organizer (A. Philip Randolph), a couple of preachers who had built large churches in New York City and Atlanta, and a couple of PhD’s who would go on to lead HBCUs over the next few decades. Only one of their professors, Jerome Davis, helped facilitate the gathering. For a few days, the small group reflected together on this question: how could they practice the militant nonviolent love of Jesus in a way that would bring down Jim Crow? They recorded their resolutions in a document they titled, “Whither the Negro Church?,” then they set about building institutions that could operationalize their vision.
Just five years later, one of those seven students and his spouse traveled with Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman to India, where they met Gandhi and continued the discussion they’d started about nonviolence. Others who’d participated in the seminar worked together to build the Institute for Religion at Howard University, where Thurman became Dean of Rankin Chapel. Mays left Howard to lead Morehouse College, and others from this “Rankin Network” went on to teach and lead at Virginia Union, Lincoln University, Shaw University, North Carolina College (now NC Central University), and other HBCUs. But their growing network came back to Howard for regular meetings and stayed in touch through the “Journal of Religious Thought” that William Stuart Nelson, a Yale graduate, edited.
The public theology of this network did not make headlines for the next couple of decades. Most of its adherents didn’t get big book deals or respected teaching posts….
Before Martin Luther King, Jr., James Farmer, Diane Nash and many others were leaders of the modern civil rights movement, they were students at the HBCU’s shaped by this Rankin Network. There they learned a faith that demanded social action, the philosophy of nonviolence, and the hope that movements could change what seemed immovable. When he was martyred in 1968 after becoming the most recognizable moral leader of the 20th century America, Dr. King was eulogized by his mentor and college President – one of the handful of people who’d been at that initial seminar in 1931 - Dr. Benjamin Mays….
Trump decided on war with Iran after secret Israeli pitch, New York Times reports
[Drop Site Daily, April 8, 2026]
President Donald Trump authorized strikes on Iran following a February 11 Situation Room meeting in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appearing alongside Mossad chief David Barnea and military officials, presented a four-part regime-change pitch that included a video montage of potential replacement leaders such as Reza Pahlavi, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Netanyahu argued Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed within weeks, that the regime would be too weakened to close the Strait of Hormuz, and that Mossad-fomented street protests combined with a Kurdish ground front from Iraq could trigger an uprising. Trump’s immediate response was reported as: “Sounds good to me.” Vice President JD Vance was absent, stranded in Azerbaijan. U.S. intelligence officials pushed back sharply the following day. Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe called the regime-change scenario “farcical,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “bullshit,” and General Dan Caine told the president the Israelis routinely “oversell” plans that are “not always well-developed,” the Times reported. War Secretary Pete Hegseth was described as the strongest proponent of immediate action.
Here’s A List Of Gulf Energy Infrastructure Damaged In Iran War
[Bloomberg, April 12, 2026, via gCaptain]
Joy Reid: Forget Impeaching Trump, we need to demand he stand trial at the Hague!
A recording from Dean Obeidallah's live video
Dean Obeidallah and Joy-Ann Reid
Apr 08, 2026
‘Food security timebomb’: a visual guide to the Gulf fertiliser blockade
[The Guardian, via The Big Picture, April 07, 2026]
The Strait of Hormuz isn’t just about oil—it’s a chokepoint for global fertilizer supplies. The blockade is threatening food security from Asia to Africa. UN says record numbers of people could face acute hunger if conflict continues.
The Cascade: The war’s secondary effects have crossed a threshold.
[The Omission, via The Big Picture, April 06, 2026]
The war’s secondary effects have crossed a threshold. They are no longer consequences. They are independent crises with their own momentum, and most of them will not stop when the bombing stops.
Christopher Armitage, Apr 05, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
...There are many reasons for our pre-War complacency, but one of them surely is that mainstream economic theory led us to believe that the global economy is robust. It did this, not through real analysis, but through fantasy. The two key fantasies that mainstream economics promulgates on this front are:
That every commodity is homogeneous and has a multitude of suppliers; and
That inputs to production can easily be substituted for one another…..
U.S. academics suspended or dismissed over opposition to Iran war
[Drop Site Daily: April 6, 2026]
At least three American academics have been suspended or dismissed in the past month after voicing opposition to the U.S.-Israeli actions in the Middle East, the Guardian reported. Shirin Saeidi was formally dismissed from the University of Arkansas following social media posts supporting Palestine and praising Iranian leadership, as well as allegations she used university letterhead to advocate for the release of an Iranian official convicted in Sweden. Idris Robinson, a philosophy professor at Texas State University, filed a lawsuit after his contract was terminated following an off-campus talk on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Aria Fani was removed as director of the Middle East Center at the University of Washington after sending emails via the center’s listserv criticizing Israel and U.S. policy, though he retains his faculty position.
Matthew Cunningham-Cook, April 10, 2026 [The American Prospect]
...In 2025, the Marcus Foundation donated $19 million to FDD, according to Forbes—well more than half of the group’s total budget for the prior year and a massive increase from the $5.75 million it had contributed to FDD in 2024 (which was similar to the amount it had given in previous years).
Launched by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who died in November 2024, the foundation is now chaired by Frank Blake, who served as CEO of Home Depot from 2007 to 2014. The foundation’s board includes Marcus’s two sons and Ken Langone, a major GOP donor who co-founded the world’s largest home improvement retailer with Marcus.
The Marcus donations are by far the largest FDD has ever received, helping to fuel the organization’s rapid growth over the past few years. In 2021, FDD spent just under $17 million on its small battalion of analysts and commentators. By 2024, that number had almost doubled to $32.5 million.
As a hawkish pro-Israel group, the FDD views Iran as engaged in a “multi-front war” against Israel. After advocating for strikes on Iran over the course of many years, FDD has actively argued against a diplomatic settlement in recent weeks, with Dubowitz writing in the New York Post that any truce that does not result in the destruction of Iran’s missile capability is unacceptable, and most recently arguing for resumed combat and regime change if Iran does not accept U.S. terms….
BBC Caught Fabricating Quote Of An Iranian Calling For The U.S. To Drop An ‘Atomic Bomb’.
[The Dissident, via Naked Capitalism 04-07-2025]
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Trump promises pardons to his entire staff
[Wall Street Journal , via Zeteo, This Week in Democracy – Week 64, April 10, 2026
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has already promised mass presidential pardons to his staff before he leaves office, saying in a private meeting that he’d “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval.”
Exclusive: FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center
Ken Klippenstein [,via Naked Capitalism 04-06-2025]
Dan Boguslaw, Apr 08, 2026 [Deeper States]
FBI emails I obtained show the administration is pushing state and local police to target Americans with left-wing views…. Its target is not a foreign power thousands of miles away, but US citizens who disagree with the president and his hardline advisers. This domestic war’s chief weapon is a national security presidential memorandum, NSPM-7, which attempts to criminalize a laundry list of common left-wing beliefs and viewpoints….
What this development means in practice is if you have criticized a corporation on social media, held a sign that demands ICE leave your city, shared a meme about alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO killer Luigi Mangione, or publicly condemned Trump’s Iran war at a local town hall, both the federal government and your local police could take note and forward along a list of your thoughtcrimes to the FBI for further review….
Mehdi Hasan and Team Zeteo, Apr 11, 2026
...Kordia, who was freed last month, joins Mehdi to highlight just how bad the conditions were inside the detention center she was kept in - one of many that have sprung up all over the country since Trump took office. “I actually stayed sleeping on the floor for three months straight,” Kordia tells Mehdi, adding that she saw women who were seven and eight months pregnant in her ‘dorm’. “I thought that I knew about these things… but the reality was absolutely shocking.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says it detained Kordia for overstaying an expired F-1 student visa, but also cited her role in Columbia University’s 2024 pro-Palestine protests, which likely made her a target for ICE….
Three Hundred Habeas Cases in Which the Government Has Defied Court Orders
[Lawfare, via Naked Capitalism 04-06-2025]
Army veteran charged with leaking classified Delta Force tactics to journalist
Courtney Williams, 40, a former Army veteran who supported Delta Force operations at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, appeared in federal court in Raleigh on Wednesday on a charge of unlawfully transmitting national defense information, accused of disclosing classified “tactics, techniques and procedures” of an unnamed special military unit to journalist Seth Harp, in whose book Williams is cited repeatedly and by name. Harp said Williams had endured years of sexual harassment while providing special operations troops with cover documents, including passports and credit cards for overseas deployments. “Courtney Williams is a veteran, a mother, and a patriotic American. She has committed no crime. Trump’s unhinged DOJ will not even say what ‘classified information’ she allegedly leaked. Her arrest and imprisonment is an outrage,” Harp wrote on X. FBI Director Kash Patel has also commented on the case, praising Williams’ arrest as “outstanding work” on the part of the Bureau and its partners. Williams faces a maximum penalty of ten years in prison.
The Beginning of The End of Donald Trump’s Presidency?
(Judge J. Michael Luttig [via The Big Picture, April 05, 2026]
Jay Powell was always the one man in the world who could stand up to Donald Trump, and Trump knew it, which is why, despite his false bravado, he feared the Reserve Board Chairman. Trump forced the latest confrontation with Jay Powell in one last desperate attempt to force Powell from office so that he could finally seize control over the independent Federal Reserve Bank in the eleventh hour and manipulate the interest rates to disguise the crippling economic impact of his sweeping, unconstitutional global tariffs and his unconstitutional war in Iran. It turned out to be the worst miscalculation of his life.
Strategic Political Economy
Josh Marshall, April 10, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
...I don’t think people have really absorbed the extent of it, it’s significance, the scale of growth. The president wants to increase the defense budget by more than 40%. That comes on top of his request for $200 billion to fund his current war with Iran.
It’s important to appreciate that there’s simply no way for the Pentagon to productively absorb that scale of resources on that timescale. Again, almost a 50% increase on a budget that is already massive in absolute and relative terms. If you think about what that scale of diversion means, you still won’t really quite grasp it, just as I’m not able to fully grasp it.
We have to see this in the context of the already massive cash diversion to ICE and the mass deportation and detention system, which the government also cannot remotely absorb. And finally the now-quite open admission from Republicans and Trump himself that they think all of this will come with massive cuts to all of the social safety net. It is a huge reorientation of the entire federal government from being a modern government, focused primarily on supporting and protecting its citizens, to one focused on, and built for, force and violence.
Are we going backwards? What happens when reason stops mattering in politics?
Richard Murphy, April 08, 2026 [Funding the Future]
What happens when reason stops mattering in politics? We are living through the answer in real time. For 45 years, neoliberalism has been the dominant force in Western democracies, and in that time, it has done something far more dangerous than redistribute wealth upwards. It has systematically dismantled the intellectual and ethical foundations that make democratic politics possible.
The Enlightenment gave us something extraordinary: the idea that reason, evidence, and the equal moral worth of every human being should guide how we organise society. Neoliberalism replaced that with markets. It reduced people from moral equals to economic actors, stripped public services in the name of efficiency, weakened democratic accountability, and narrowed the boundaries of political thought until Margaret Thatcher's "There Is No Alternative" became conventional wisdom rather than a political choice.
The consequences are now impossible to ignore. Careful reasoning is being replaced by crude slogans. Evidence is losing ground to belief. Nuanced debate has given way to hostility. And the backlash against neoliberalism's failures is not producing a return to Enlightenment values; it is producing the conditions for fascism: demands for loyalty over accountability, indifference to consequences, and the deliberate promotion of inequality for the benefit of an elite….
Richard Murphy, April 06, 2026 [Funding the Future]
The Enlightenment, emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was an intellectual and moral project. It asserted that reason, evidence and debate should replace deference to authority. It argued that all people have equal moral worth (although I am all too aware that early proponents had decidedly limited views on who might qualify for such treatment). It insisted that power must justify itself. From those ideas flowed democracy, human rights, the rule of law and the expectation of accountability. These things then underpinned the supposed Western ideals which were taught as the values of the society to which we were told we should at least aspire when I was young.
Neoliberalism, by contrast, is a much later political and economic doctrine. It is a late twentieth-century project that sought to reassert the primacy of markets, reduce the role of the state, and recast individuals as primarily economic actors….
Second, neoliberalism stripped out the ethical core of the Enlightenment. The idea of equal moral worth, and respect for the "other", as seen in the work of Adam Smith, was subordinated to the idea of market value. Those without economic power were, in effect, treated as having a lesser claim on society.
Third, neoliberalism weakened the institutions that the Enlightenment helped to create. Public services, democratic accountability, and the capacity of the state to act in the collective interest were all eroded in the name of efficiency.
Fourth, neoliberalism denied complexity. It insisted that markets could solve problems that are, in reality, social, political and ecological. In doing so, it allowed those problems to accumulate….
The Bottom 50%: The Untold Economic Story
[The Counterprogramming Club, via Naked Capitalism 04-06-2025]
...How much of our nation’s wealth is controlled by the bottom 50% in the United States today?
2.46%. That’s it. Half of the population controls just 2.46% of our nation’s wealth….In 1989, the bottom 50% controlled only 3.52% of the nation’s wealth. Over the past four decades, the wealth share of the bottom 50% decreased by precisely 1.06%….… In 1989 Q3, the top 0.1% held 8.6% of the nation’s wealth. As of 2025 Q4, the top 0.1% controls a whopping 14.5%. For context, the minimum wealth cutoff for the top 0.1% is over $46 million (latest data 2022).
The top 1% have grown their wealth share by 9.1% since 1989.
If the bottom 50% only saw a minimal reduction in their wealth share (1%), where did the top 1% pull from?
The wealth share of the 90-99% decreased by 1.6% since 1989 (from 38% to 36.4%).
The wealth share of the 50-90% decreased by 6.4% (from 35.7% to 29.2%).
Dominant narratives suggests wealth is being transferred from the bottom to the top. The data tell a different story. The bottom 50% has hardly seen a change in their wealth share. It’s the middle and upper classes’ wealth share that’s shrinking….
The top 10% holds $119.7 trillion in wealth, compared to the bottom 90% with $55.6 trillion (31% of total wealth). When the top 10% controls most of the nations capital (68%), the bottom 90% is cut out of economic decision making.
88% of stocks and funds in the United States are owned by the top 10%—a significant spike compared to 81.8% in 1989. The top 0.1% is responsible for the entirety of that increase: growing their share from 14.8% to 24% since 1989….
How It Is. And how it always was, actually.
Aurelien [Trying to Understand the World, via Naked Capitalism 04-09-2025]
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve set out two-thirds of an argument, which I hope to complete today. Briefly, I suggest that the nature of conflict in all its aspects (military and technological, but also economic and political) has changed and is changing further, and generally to the disadvantage of the West. The military battle-space is no longer ruled by high-technology and extremely expensive weapons platforms, whose effectiveness is increasingly disputed by drones and missiles. These new systems can make attacks prohibitively expensive, but they can also be used offensively, and defence against them is difficult. Moreover, the resources and technologies needed to construct and use them are relatively modest, and within the capabilities of far more nations that can afford a fifth-generation jet aircraft. Likewise, economic levers not previously exploited become weapons with the new capabilities these systems provide.
These developments would be less of a problem if western states had more intellectual flexibility, and better-operating government systems. But stranded between cloudy aspirational pronouncements and actual implementation on the ground, they have lost the ability to make operational-level plans and carry them through. This suggests that as the indirect consequences of the continuing Iran crisis start to bite, western governments will be increasingly less capable of coping with them as they affect their economies and their societies, and indeed will lack the ability to plan, and even to understand what is happening.
All this suggests that there will be a considerable rebalancing of strategic and political power in the world in the next few years. The purely military dimension is important, of course, but it’s not the only one, because economic power, the use of control over commodities, processing and manufacturing, and even the internal stability of countries are also parts of the equation....
The Fed, Congress, and the President: The Constitutional Authority to Make Money
Christine Desan, Apr 6, 2026 [Institute for New Economic Thinking]
Excerpt:
"Democratic theory, constitutional text, and the long history of legislative struggle all point toward the same conclusion: money-making in its very design must flow from the people’s immediate representatives. If the executive could dominate the central bank, the danger would not be confined to inflation. It would reach the deeper possibility that money creation could be directed to reward allies, reshape markets, and hollow out the distribution of powers that democratic government depends on..…The power to make money is the power to rule. In a representative system, that authority cannot simply be absorbed into presidential control without altering the constitutional order itself. The fight over the Federal Reserve therefore concerns more than one institution. It asks whether the constitutional architecture of democratic sovereignty still has force or whether one of its most essential prerogatives will be surrendered in the name of executive uniformity."
US Fertility Rate Falls To All-Time Low
[NPR, via Naked Capitalism 04-11-2025]
“Economic Civil War”: States Push Laws to Shield Oil and Gas Companies From Accountability
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 04-05-2025]
Global power shift
[Events in Ukraine, via Naked Capitalism 04-07-2025]
...The Australian Army Research Centre (AARC) has been working with the Ukrainian army on drones, and in mid-March a Ukrainian analyst published a two-part article on ‘myths of drone warfare’ for the AARC….
Furthermore, the article criticized the idea, popular among Ukrainian government speakers, that drones are vastly cheaper than other weapons systems. Though a single drone may be cheaper than a single missile, there are many other costs that go into drone warfare:
“The sustainment overhead of using drones further undermines the notion that they are a low-cost, low-overhead capability. High sortie rates, short platform lifespans, and intensive electronic contestation impose substantial logistical demands. Batteries, motors, airframes, sensors, frequencies, and software all require continuous replacement and modification. Tens of Mavic-type drones are lost per day in one brigade, which is tens of thousands of dollars daily – that demands proper staffing, procurement, write-off procedures, training, etc. Ukraine has shown that mass drone employment entails industrial-scale sustainment pipelines comparable in complexity—if not in unit cost—to conventional munitions supply. Volunteer teams operating outside formal logistics systems cannot support this scale or tempo of operations over time.”
…. But the most important myth is that drones can replace humans. It is just this illusion that Ukraine’s chronically undermanned army believes in. But as the Ukrainian website Militarny wrote a few weeks ago, drones are a dead end unless integrated into broader combat operations along with infantry and other weapons systems.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 04-06-2025]
GRAPH — Chinese high speed rail network superimposed on US and Canada 2026
U.S.-South Korea Relations Are at Breaking Point
[Foreign Policy, via Naked Capitalism 04-09-2025]
Israel / Gaza
What if Israel just won’t stop?
[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 04-07-2025]
Oligarchy
The Fire Next Time — They will understand it when it arrives. That will be too late.
Mike Brock, Apr 11, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
...Elite society in America — across the spectrum, left to right, Democratic donor class to Republican establishment, corporate boardroom to think tank — is operating under a shared and catastrophic misapprehension. They believe that what has gone wrong is a messaging problem. A policy gap. A failure of communication between the people who know how to run things and the people who need to be persuaded to let them keep running things. They commission polls. They convene focus groups. They hire consultants who tell them which words land and which don’t. They propose new policies calibrated to the data. They are, in their own estimation, being responsive.
They are blind to what is coming. Some of them will read these words and find in them the ravings of someone who has lost perspective — someone captured by grievance, by alarmism, by the kind of thinking that serious people learn to dismiss….
What they cannot see — what their position inside the system makes structurally invisible to them — is how they are perceived from the outside. Not what people think of their policies. What people think of them.
The distinction is everything.
A policy problem is solvable with better policy. A legitimacy crisis is not. A legitimacy crisis is not a question of what the people in charge are doing. It is a question of whether the people in charge have any right to be in charge at all — whether the system that produced them, rewards them, and protects them from consequence is a system that serves the people it claims to represent, or a system that serves itself while claiming to represent the people.
The answer, in the minds of a growing majority of Americans, is the latter. And no policy proposal, however well-designed, answers that question. Because the question is not about policy. It is about legitimacy. And legitimacy, once lost, is not recovered by competence. It is recovered — if it is recovered at all — by accountability, by justice, and by the visible arrival of genuinely different people in positions of power….
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Emergency Prices: How Private Equity Captured the Ambulance Market
Matt Stoller and Dan Geller, Apr 11, 2026 [BIG]
Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy
By Brian Callaci
University of Chicago Press
Felonomics
He’s Not Grifting Anymore. He’s Just Taking It.
[Meidas+, via Naked Capitalism 04-06-2025]
2.5 Million Poor Americans Have Lost Food Aid Since Trump Signed GOP’s Big Ugly Bill Into Law
Brad Reed, Apr 08, 2026 [Common Dreams]
Trump’s Wreckage of Social Security and Medicare
Robert Kuttner, April 9, 2026 [The American Prospect]
...As Trump blurted out the other day, he believes that the direct costs of the war combined with his unprecedented request for a 44 percent increase in military spending mean that the federal government can no longer afford Medicare. This is of course preposterous—most of the cost of Medicare is financed by the dedicated payroll taxes that workers pay. Trump has also floated cutting Social Security’s disability program, another form of social insurance with a dedicated stream of tax revenue….
Beginning in 2034, Social Security’s trust funds face a projected shortall of 19 percent, according to the latest Trustees’ Report. Under the law, unless Congress acts, benefits must be cut by that amount.
Why the shortfall? One reason is aging. As lifespans increase while birth rates decrease, there are fewer workers per retiree. But a bigger reason is that the very rich have captured an ever larger share of national income since the late 1970s, and thanks to the payroll tax cap, they do not pay a proportionate share of the payroll taxes that finance Social Security. (Any income above $184,500 is not subject to payroll tax, making it effectively regressive.)
An authoritative study by the RAND Corporation found that if the income distribution of the first two postwar decades had persisted, the bottom 90 percent (who pay Social Security taxes) would have an additional $2.5 trillion a year. Payroll taxes (12.4 percent) on $2.5 trillion would be $310 billion, or more than the annual Social Security deficit of around $250 billion a year.
Restoring a decent income distribution will take years of brave policies. But in the meantime, we can start taxing the very rich and dedicate some of the proceeds to making Social Security whole. An obvious start would be to uncap the payroll tax, which would bring in something like $3.2 trillion over a decade….
Americans ‘Falling Behind’ On Debt: Subprime Delinquencies Hit 11-Year High
[Benzinga, via Naked Capitalism 04-08-2025]
Soon after massive honeybee deaths, Trump moves to close the nation’s premier bee lab
[KCUR, via Naked Capitalism 04-07-2025]
DOGE Attacks on Social Security Have Left Millions in the Lurch
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 04-07-2025]
When Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was running roughshod over the Social Security Administration (SSA) last year, experts warned it could spell disaster for disabled, ill, and aging Americans who depend on its programs. A March 2026 report by the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) and the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) offers insights into just how dire the situation has become.
“It seems that applications are taking longer and being denied more often and running into more errors in the process,” Matthew Borus, a professor at Binghamton University and one of the report’s authors, told Truthout.
The new report is based on interviews with more than 50 benefits specialists working at dozens of organizations nationwide that, together, assist about 8,000 claimants each year in obtaining and maintaining Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). Those programs provide financial assistance to about 13.5 million older Americans and those with disabilities….
The Social Security Administration lost about 7,500 employees, or 13 percent of its workforce, from January 2025 to January 2026, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. Customer service positions were hit especially hard, with a loss of over 3,000 staff tasked with assisting visitors to field offices and callers to the administration’s national 800 number, according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report. That same report found that leadership shifted thousands of the remaining workers into customer service positions to plug gaps, but this means that many now responsible for customer support have little to no experience in their roles.
DOGE Cuts Left U.S. Unable to Help Americans Stranded in Iran War Zone
Nick Turse, April 12 2026 [The Intercept]
...the Trump administration fired hundreds of key State Department personnel with the skills needed to safeguard U.S. citizens abroad and usher them from harm’s way, lawmakers say. These foreign service officers — who lost their jobs amid Elon Musk’s purge of the federal workforce — contacted members of Congress last month with dire warnings about the department’s inability to manage the ongoing crisis.
“The Department is actively preventing experienced, cleared, available officers from helping American citizens in crisis,” a group of nearly 250 mostly mid-career and senior State Department foreign service officers wrote in a letter sent to lawmakers that was shared exclusively with The Intercept. “The crisis now unfolding in the Middle East is, in part, a foreseeable consequence of this and other short-sighted decisions taken by this administration to undermine the federal bureaucracy by eliminating expertise and politicizing our apolitical workforce.”
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Housing Is Cheap. Capital Makes It Expensive
William Murphy [via Naked Capitalism 04-11-2025]
Housing isn’t expensive because of some mysterious shortage of materials or a lack of engineering capacity. The physical reality is far more blunt: at the level of commodity production, a basic family housing unit can be manufactured for roughly $7,000–$15,000, and in some cases even lower when you push standardization, scale, and minimal design….
So what explains the gulf between that and the six-figure price tags in the United States?
Not materials. Not engineering. Not even labor in any simple sense.
It’s the structure of the system.
Housing in the U.S. is not treated primarily as shelter—it’s treated as an asset class. Land is speculated on. Developers must extract profit. Finance capital inserts itself at every stage. Local zoning regimes fragment production. Regulatory and legal layers accumulate costs. Each step adds a toll, and each toll is justified as “necessary,” even though the underlying production process is already known and replicable….
Warwick Powell [via Naked Capitalism 04-07-2025]
[Construction Physics, via Naked Capitalism 04-10-2025]
America’s booming annoyance economy
[Business Insider, via The Big Picture, April 05, 2026]
Companies have figured out that bad customer service is more profitable than good customer service. The annoyance economy is booming—and you’re paying for it.
Health care crisis
Long COVID disability burden in US adults
[Nature, via Naked Capitalism 04-06-2025]
The Human Cost of Failing to Name COVID ‘Airborne’
[The Tyee, via Naked Capitalism 04-06-2025]
Out-of-pocket for Insulin by Medicare insured
[JAMA, via Naked Capitalism 04-08-2025]
Question Was implementation of a $35 monthly insulin out-of-pocket cap in Medicare associated with changes in spending, insulin use, or clinical outcomes among Medicare beneficiaries with type 2 diabetes?
Findings In this cohort study of 4.8 million US Medicare beneficiaries from 2019 to 2023, an interrupted time-series analysis found that implementation of the insulin out-of-pocket cap in 2021 and 2023 was associated with significant reductions in insulin out-of-pocket spending, increased insulin use, lower hemoglobin A1c levels, and small increases in rates of severe hypoglycemic events.
Meaning These findings suggest reducing cost-sharing policies could improve access and adherence to essential medications for patients with chronic conditions.
Predatory finance
Maureen Tkacik, April 6, 2026 [The American Prospect]
FO Exclusive: Big Trouble in the US Private Credit Market
[Fair Observer, via Naked Capitalism 04-05-2025]
The Hater's Guide to Private Equity
Restoring balance to the economy
Monopoly Round-Up: Lina Khan Is Back
Matt Stoller, Apr 05, 2026 [BIG]
...I want to focus on an announcement this week from former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. She is co-founding a new academic institute, the Center for Law and Economy, at Columbia University. The center will focus on the way “law and legal institutions structure the economy.” As such, it’s a useful moment to spend a bit of time looking at the long-term institution building of the anti-monopoly movement, and how it is addressing the democracy crisis in America.
Khan, of course, isn’t alone, she’s leading a movement. For instance, the Fordham Law Review just did an entire issue on Antitrust Law and Oligarchy, with articles by a host of former Biden officials. What these twin intellectual events show is that the movement to tame anti-democratic forces in America is growing, under the radar, in powerful ways….
In 1964, Robert Bork, Milton Friedman, and George Stigler were all advisors to the conservative Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. It was the height of the Civil Rights movement, and if Goldwater lost, the government was sure to take over parts of the health care system….
Sure enough, their nightmare came true. Goldwater was smashed, the government created Medicare and Medicaid, and the environmental, consumer rights, and women’s rights movements rewrote the American order. But Bork - a former Marxist - was not discouraged. Shortly after the election, he wrote a letter to a friend at Kirkland and Ellis, a major corporate law firm. “I am not as discouraged as people think I should be,” he said. “I think our general attitude should be that of the Bolsheviks after 1905.”
I found this letter in the Bork archives, and it shocked me because it shows just how radical Bork truly was. He hated the mid-20th century American system, and sought to overthrow it, as Lenin had the Russian monarchy.
He didn’t seek to do it via armed conflict, but through intellectual work, historical excavation, and organization. His movement told a different story about America than the populist stories animating the New Deal world in which they found themselves. To them, it was the power of concentrated capital that led to prosperity, not the ‘populistic’ regulations and antitrust laws regulating corporate America….
HAWB - Introduction - How America Was Built
Tony Wikrent, January 26, 2015 [real-economics.blogspot.com]
...Our intent is to frontally attack the conservative, libertarian, and neo-liberal interpretations of USA economic history, which are so distorted by their focus on "private property" and "free enterprise" and their hostility to "statism" as to constitute a lie. Everyone is probably familiar with these conservative, libertarian, and neo-liberal memes, which are repeated literally everyday in the mass media:
- The only thing government ever does is tax you
- Government is the problem
- Government never created a single job
- Government workers are useless bureaucrats living high on the hog
The actual history of the USA economy shows that these are all rotten lies. It is not that there was no role played by free enterprise and the private sector: they were just as important as the role of government. It is just that the exclusion and derision of the government role has become so extreme that it becomes a lie in effect of application.
Here is just some of the highlights of the chronology:
- 1783 Benjamin Franklin’s Reflections on the Augmentation of Wages, Which Will Be Occasioned in Europe by the American Revolution
- Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1785….
- 1794-1816 The federal armories lay the foundation of modern industrial mass production
- 1801–1806 Oliver Evans develops the high-pressure steam engine
- The Coast Survey Act of 1807 and the discovery of a deep water channel into the port of New York City
- 1804-1859 The Army Corps of Topographical Engineers explore and map the West
- 1817 The Erie Canal
- 1802-1835 The US Military Academy at West Point and its role in engineering and education
- The General Survey Act of 1824
- The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1824
- 1835-1852 The Illinois-Michigan Canal and the creation of Chicago
- 1838-1842 United States Exploring Expedition of the US Navy
- 1843 Direct funding to Samuel Morse for development of the telegraph
- 1850s Admiral Benjamin Franklin Isherwood and the development of steam power
- Land Grant Act of 1850
- Steamboat Act of 1852 and the power to regulate private property….
- 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Colleges….
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
What Causes Chronic Pain? Scientists Identify Key Culprit in the Brain
[SciTech Daily, via Naked Capitalism 04-05-2025]
Scientists just watched Alzheimer’s damage happen in real time
[Science Daily, via Naked Capitalism 04-05-2025]
China Flies World’s First Megawatt-Class Hydrogen Turboprop Engine
[Fuel Cells Works, via Naked Capitalism 04-08-2025]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Economic questions: the Herman Daly question
Richard Murphy, April 07, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Herman Daly (1938-2022) spent much of his career challenging one of the central dogmas of modern economics: the belief that continuous economic growth is both possible and desirable. Working first within mainstream economics and later helping to establish the field of ecological economics, Daly argued that the economy cannot be understood apart from the physical systems that sustain it.
Conventional economic models often treat the environment as a backdrop or as a supplier of resources and a sink for waste. Daly reversed this perspective. The economy, he insisted, is not the whole system. It is a subsystem embedded within the biosphere, dependent on flows of energy and materials that the planet can supply only in limited quantities.
Once this is recognised, the idea of endless growth begins to look less like ambition and more like denial.
Hence, the Herman Daly Question: If the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere, and the biosphere has limits, why do we organise economic policy around the assumption that growth can continue indefinitely?
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
I broke up with my Kindle. My new e-reader treats me better
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture, April 07, 2026]
Was it the bibliophile Eden some Kobo fans described? Not quite. The reality was messier than expected — but still better. After Amazon’s Kindle removed my ability to download and back up my own e-books, I went in search of an alternative.
Kill switches, guardrails: The raging debate over healthcare AI agents
[Becker’s Hospital Review, via Naked Capitalism 04-06-2025]
How do social media platforms trap users in networks they would rather leave?
[TECHNOLOGY.ORG, via Naked Capitalism 04-05-2025]
The Inevitability of the AI Depression
Charles Hugh Smith [via Naked Capitalism 04-06-2025]
Testing Suggests Google’s AI Overviews Tells Millions of Lies Per Hour
[ars technica, via Naked Capitalism 04-08-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
America’s Power Supply Just Flipped in Surprising Direction
[Newsweek, via Clean Power Roundup, April 10, 2026]
Renewables generated more than one-third of America's electricity in March, overtaking gas for the first time and marking the cleanest month on record for the nation’s power supply, according to new monthly data compiled by energy think tank Ember.
Billionaires buy up Yellowstone after destroying global ecosystems
[Drop Site Daily, April 7, 2026]
An investigation by In These Times found that seven of the ten largest landowners in Montana’s Park and Sweet Grass counties—home to some of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s most celebrated wildlife habitat—are ultra-wealthy investors and industrialists who accumulated their fortunes through industries that are actively destroying ecosystems elsewhere. The MacMillan family, majority owners of Cargill Inc. and proprietors of the 44,000-acre Wild Eagle Mountain Ranch in the Crazy Mountains, illustrate the pattern most sharply: Cargill’s 2003 opening of a soy export terminal in Santarém, Brazil, triggered an explosion of industrial soy cultivation on the Planalto Santareno that has razed more than 660 square miles of Amazonian forest cover since 2000, poisoned waterways, and displaced the Mundurukú and other Indigenous communities who had managed the land sustainably for generations. The investigation from Joseph Bullington is here.
Democrats' political malpractice
Center-left think tank has board members with AI financial ties
[Drop Site Daily: April 8, 2026]
The Searchlight Institute, a Washington think tank launched last fall to push the Democratic Party toward the center, has not disclosed that its board includes philanthropist Simone Coxe—whose multibillion-dollar fortune stems largely from her venture capitalist husband Tench Coxe’s investments in Nvidia—or billionaire hedge fund manager Stephen Mandel, whose firm Lone Pine Capital is heavily invested in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Nvidia’s largest chip manufacturer, The Lever reported Tuesday. The think tank has been vocally opposing data center moratorium legislation proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) while publishing white papers favoring lighter-touch AI regulation. Read the full report from The Lever here.
DNC Shoots Down Resolutions Calling Out AIPAC and Limiting Arms to Israel
Matt Sledge, April 9 2026 [The Intercept]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Britain is a key arena in the struggle against a new form of fascism
Richard Murphy, April 07, 2026 [Funding the Future]
A piece by Lewis Goodall, published on 6 April, deserves much more attention than it is getting. In his account of his recent visit to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the USA, he suggests that the American right is no longer simply observing Britain. His suggestion is that it is reimagining it….
Goodall reports that those attending the CPAC have created a narrative in which the UK is suggested to be “gone. Fallen. Lost” and as a country supposedly overrun, governed by Sharia law, and stripped of free speech. None of this, of course, is even remotely true, but truth is not an issue that worries those at the CPAC. Pathways to power are, and that matters because what Goodall is describing is not just myth-making. It is the early stage of something far more consequential, which is the deliberate construction of a political target.
If I read Lewis Goodall correctly, the consequences of this targeting of the UK by those at the CPAC are clear. US money will follow this false narrative that they are creating, and when it does, the consequences for the UK will be profound.
First, we need to understand the background to this suggestion. Most importantly, the American radical right, centred on figures like Donald Trump, does not operate purely as a political movement. It has been clear for some time, and especially since the Citizens United decision in 2010, that it is also a financial ecosystem. Media platforms, influencers, political action groups, think tanks, and donors are all intertwined. Narrative is monetised, and outrage is capitalised.
What that means is that once Britain is successfully defined within CPAC as the country that has “fallen”, it becomes an asset within the wider US geopolitical narrative. It can be used to generate attention, mobilise supporters, and, crucially, attract funding….
Jonathan Chait, April 10, 2026 [The Atlantic]
...“The Vise” is the organizing metaphor for Tillman’s argument, in which he posits that the American left has gained quasi-permanent control of American politics. Although his metaphor is original, the underlying case is not. Numerous conservatives have employed other conceits to illustrate the left’s supposed control of American life: “The Cathedral,” the “long march through the institutions,” the “Flight 93 election,” and so on.
All of those constructs serve the purpose of imagining the Democrats not as a rival coalition with opposing policies but as a unified, impersonal force that is always on the precipice of totalitarian control. This desperate situation leaves Republicans with no choice but to destroy that which threatens to destroy them. And if the instrument of destruction available to them is an imperfect vessel, so be it….But Tillman also believes that the 2020 election was unfair. Conservative complaints about that election come in two broad categories. The strong version is Trump’s claim that the election was stolen through fraudulent ballots. The weaker version holds that the election was “rigged” by social media, liberalized mail-in balloting, and other stratagems, even if the vote count was technically correct. Tillman expresses openness to both theories. “We may never know the full extent of the manipulations that took place before, during, and after the 2020 election,” he writes. He justifies the January 6 attacks (“Without excusing violence, I note that when you squeeze ordinary Americans in a Vise, not all of them will comply with your demands”) and decries the sentencing of the rioters as excessive. “The Progressive Political Vise,” he asserts, using Trumpian-style capitalization rules, “worked to crush anyone who dared question the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.” ….
Trump and Orbán Are Tied at the Root — Pull the threads
Christopher Armitage, Apr 11, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
JD Vance flew to Budapest this week to campaign for a foreign leader…Viktor Orbán .... why does the most powerful government on earth need one specific man to win in a country smaller than Ohio?
The answer starts with a name almost nobody outside political consulting circles knows. Arthur Finkelstein spent four decades shaping Republican politics in near-total secrecy, working for Nixon, Reagan, Jesse Helms, and George H.W. Bush. He was so reclusive that colleagues said those who matter in politics knew him, and no one beyond that, which was exactly how he wanted it. Starting in 2008, he relocated to Budapest and rebuilt Orbán's failing party from the ground up, designing in secret the political identity Orbán still uses today. The formula he built there was the same one that later defined Trump's campaigns: manufacture a single face for everything the base fears, hold them in permanent siege posture, never let the enemy dissolve. Orbán used George Soros. Trump used whoever served the moment. The formula is identical because it came from the same man.
Finkelstein's protégés, known inside Republican politics as "Arthur's kids," went on to staff Trump's campaigns directly. Tony Fabrizio, one of his closest disciples, served as Trump's pollster in both 2016 and 2024. Before he died in 2017, Finkelstein also introduced Paul Manafort to the pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch network he had been cultivating across Eastern Europe. Manafort collected tens of millions of dollars from that network before offering to run Trump's 2016 campaign for free. The Senate Intelligence Committee later concluded that Manafort's ties to Russian intelligence while managing the campaign represented a "grave counterintelligence threat." Trump pardoned him in December 2020….
“I want to say how proud I am of everybody, just showing what can happen if we tribe up, and if we stick together and if we keep fighting back. Our future, our existence, depends on standing up for ourselves and not backing down,” Hendrix said in the video posted by @Make_EuropaSnow. “You can’t be afraid of the people who are so fragile to a word.”
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Supreme Court remade by Trump ushers in historic defeats for civil rights
Justin Jouvenal [The Washington Post, via scotusblog.com, Apr 10, 2026]
A new analysis of 270 Supreme Court decisions handed down “between 2020 and 2024 — the first five terms of the six-justice conservative majority” — shows that, over that period, the court became “the first since at least the 1950s to reject civil rights claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities,” according to The Washington Post. “The analysis shows that in addition to civil rights, the court powered by Trump’s picks — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — has pushed to the right of any modern court on religious rights and voting issues.”
Democrats’ Colossal Missed Opportunity to Shape the Supreme Court
Peter S. Canellos [Politico, via scotusblog.com, Apr 8, 2026]
In a column for Politico, Peter S. Canellos, author of a new book on Justice Samuel Alito, revisited President George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court seat that Alito was eventually confirmed to fill. Bush ultimately withdrew Miers’ nomination after facing pushback from “conservative judicial activists,” and after Democrats, according to Canellos, failed to do enough “to rescue” her. Canellos described “the Miers debacle” as a “colossal missed opportunity for the Democrats.” According to Canellos, Miers “was emphatically not a creature of the conservative legal movement,” and the Democrats should have celebrated the opportunity to add Miers to the court, especially given a Republican was in the White House and Republicans controlled the Senate.
How Alito Paved the Way for the Trump MESS (YouTube video)
Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz, April 8, 2026, [The Court of History, YopuTube]
Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz speak with Peter S. Canellos, author of “Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement,” his extraordinary rise, close links to the Federalist Society, crusade against Roe v. Wade, and his multiple scandals.
Civic republicanism
Stochastic Activism — The rules apply everywhere
Christopher Armitage, Apr 09, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
[TW: This is a primary motivation for why I offer this weekly wrap]
A chaotic system is not a random system. Precise, unchanging rules govern a chaotic system and determine its outcome. What makes it chaotic is that you cannot predict individual events in advance, not because the rules are absent but because the system is too complex to trace from cause to effect at the individual level. You cannot follow any single raindrop from cloud to ground, but you can predict with certainty that it is going to rain….
In the winter of 1170, King Henry II of England said words to the effect of “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Four of his knights heard it, rode separately to Canterbury Cathedral, and killed Thomas Becket on the altar steps. Henry issued no official order and no coordination happened between the four men; the signal was broadcast and the probability distribution handled the rest.² Researchers who study political violence eventually gave this mechanism a name: stochastic terrorism. A person with a large platform broadcasts that a particular group of people or individual are dangerous, subhuman, an existential threat to everything decent. He does not instruct anyone to commit violence or coordinate with anyone; he simply turns up the signal, consistently, at volume, and repeats it. Somewhere in the population receiving that signal, the probability distribution does what probability distributions do, and someone acts. No one planned it or ordered it. The violence was unpredictable at the individual level and statistically almost guaranteed at the aggregate level. The broadcaster provides the conditions and steps back while maintaining plausible deniability.
Now watch what happens when you flip it.
A publisher sends an article to fifty thousand subscribers. The article explains that DOGE employees transferred Social Security Administration data to an unauthorized outside server, sent a file containing the private records of roughly a thousand people to outside affiliates, signed an agreement with a political group seeking to use that data to challenge election results, and continued accessing SSA data after a federal judge ordered them to stop. The government’s own lawyers documented all of this in a federal court filing on January 16, 2026.³ The article explains that state computer crime statutes cover this conduct, that the president cannot pardon a state criminal conviction, and that here is the complaint filing process for your state.
Nobody coordinates with anybody, and nobody knows which complaint lands on which desk or which attorney general wakes up on which morning feeling particularly brave and ambitious. Readers filed over a thousand complaints across more than twenty states.⁴ The system self-organizes; the broadcaster provided the conditions while readers did the rest.
This is stochastic activism. It follows the same physical laws as stochastic terrorism because it is the same mechanism turned toward a different end….
When you excite an atom, it transfers energy to the atoms around it. It doesn’t use Roberts Rules of Order, coordinate with the receiving atoms, or need a central command structure telling it which direction to move. Energy transfers through matter according to laws that predate every government that has ever existed and will outlast every government that will ever exist. An atom moves around more, that creates what we call heat, sufficient heat applied to any system then produces changes that system; movement and time are the only variables.
Every person who files a complaint, makes a call, sends a letter, shows up at an office, crashes a fundraiser, or loudly shows up somewhere they were not expected is an atom now excited and generating energy. They transfer energy to the people immediately around them, those people transfer it further, their actions can even become amplified, this movement and energy generates heat. Heat softens and melts and allows reformation….
Governments are not closed systems, though, and that changes everything. The second law of thermodynamics describes what happens when no new energy enters. We are the new energy.
Here’s one example of what that looks like in practice. State legislators report that six to eight constituent contacts on one side of an issue feels like a landslide of public opinion.⁶ [6. Strand, M. (2018). How many contacts does it take to change a legislator’s mind? Nonprofit VOTE. https://www.nonprofitvote.org/how-many-contacts-does-it-take/]
Six people. That is a Tuesday afternoon, and three excited atoms finding three others….
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