Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 03, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
War, El Niño, Pestilence, and Famine: The Coming Shock to Global Food Supplies
Craig Tindale [via Naked Capitalism 04-27-2025]
Why Iran’s Oil Infrastructure Is Not Exploding Like Trump Said It Would
Murtaza Hussain, May 01, 2026 [Drop Site News]
Why U.S. Oil Companies Are Not Plugging the World’s Energy Gap
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Trump blames No Kings for assassination attempt
[Popular Information, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]
Comey Indictment Shows Justice Dept. Got the Message From Bondi’s Firing
Glenn Thrush, April 30, 2026 [Washington Post]
In naming only an interim successor as acting attorney general, President Trump has established even greater incentives to execute his most extreme demands, current and former officials say.
Report Details Trump Effort to Quietly Lay Groundwork to ‘Steal Future Elections’
Stephen Prager, April 28, 2026 [CommonDreams]
“It seems one of the ways this effort will take shape is, as with DHS’s deportation efforts, to racially profile voters and try to invalidate their votes by pretending they’re not citizens,” said one critic.
8 Things You Should Know About Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections
[ProPublica, May 1, 2026]
From dismantling guardrails that upheld the integrity of past elections to gutting federal agencies and installing allies who supported Trump’s claim that the 2020 vote was stolen, here are the key takeaways from our recent investigation.
Trump Used Shady Crypto Venture to Triple His Net Worth as President
Hafiz Rashid, May 1, 2026 [The New Republic]
Ruth Marcus, April 27, 2026 [The New Yorker]
Resistance
I Filed for Roberts’s Disbarment. Then This Happened.
Christopher Armitage, Apr 30, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
A week ago I mailed a formal disciplinary complaint against Chief Justice John Roberts to the District of Columbia Bar Office of Disciplinary Counsel. The paperwork is at the bottom of this article in full, with my personal information redacted.
I want to answer a few questions, recount what's happened since, and share some resources.
People have asked why the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the rest of the legacy press have stayed quiet on a documented corruption story involving the Chief Justice. Three things worth understanding.
The article has the receipts. Every factual claim is credibly sourced. The underlying reporting was done in pieces over the last decade by Business Insider, Politico, the New York Times, and the ABA Journal. The whistleblower complaint went through Congress. Senator Durbin’s Judiciary Committee received it. The Department of Justice received it. The records have mostly been sitting in the public domain since 2022 and 2023.
The receipts are there. They’ve been there. Anyone who wanted to verify what I wrote could verify it in twenty minutes.
I didn’t uncover something new. I pieced together a decade of public record that had fallen out of the news cycle, applied the statutes to the conduct, and filed paperwork. The synthesis is the contribution and the paperwork is the action....
What has the activist response been?
Attorneys joined in. Judges joined in. Private citizens joined in. The project got a lot of media. The article hit number one on Reddit.
The thing nobody who runs this system expected was that anyone outside it would do the work. Read the spreadsheets. Apply the statutes. File the paperwork. Treat the disclosure rules like the disclosure rules were meant to be treated. Show up at the post office with a certified mail receipt and put it in the public record.
The men and women running this system built their careers on the assumption that nobody was paying attention. That the forms would go unread. That the recusals would go uncounted. That the statutes would sit on the shelf. That the institutions would cover for each other and no one outside would notice the arrangement.
We noticed.
We noticed the ten million dollars documented and the eleven million more estimated. The sixteen years of false characterizations. The hidden equity stake. The Code of Conduct written to fail and the justices who signed affidavits for no one. The Judicial Conference that won’t refer and the Senate that won’t impeach and the Attorney General who won’t prosecute. We noticed every institution pointing at every other institution and shrugging....
The complaint I submitted is below in full. You're welcome to read it, share it, or put it on every car windshield wiper within a 5 block radius of the United States Supreme Court Chambers. Chase your bliss, even if that bliss takes the form of printing copies of this filing and placing it upon any doors of whatever Bar Association happens to be headquartered at 901 4th St NW Suite 700, Washington, DC 20001. Who am I to tell you what you should or shouldn't do on a Monday right before lunch break, which would arguably be the best time to make sure the flyers are seen.
What I do endorse is filing your own complaint with the DC Bar Office of Disciplinary Counsel at 515 Fifth Street NW, Building A, Room 117, Washington DC 20001. Do it in your own words. The facts are in the filing listed below as well as in the original article, which is hyperlinked within this sentence. The statutes to cite are 28 U.S.C. § 455, 5 U.S.C. § 13106, and 18 U.S.C. § 1001. The rule is DC Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(c).
This is happening because we are making it happen. Movement creates energy. Energy creates heat. Enough heat and you can reshape the outdated and corrupt 250 year-old steel. We are the heat. We are the pressure. We are the changemakers....
What It's Like Convincing a State Senator to Take Election Security Seriously.
Christopher Armitage, Apr 29, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
... I asked her if she thought Trump had the intent to interfere with free and fair elections. She said yes. I asked her if she thought things were already tilted unfairly toward Republicans at the federal and state levels. She said yes. I asked her if she thought it was getting worse under this administration. She said yes.
At this point we had established the GOP have the ability, capability, and intent to stay in power no matter what, all of it present at the federal level, and we probably needed to do more than hope elections are legitimate and enough. She agreed, and was ready to hear what I had to offer.
I handed her a one sheet that showed everything I was about to tell her, then told her about the bill, which establishes a public red line in advance and an automatic consequence the moment the federal government crosses it. The federal government decertifies state-approved voting equipment, deploys federal forces to polling places against state consent, refuses to certify legitimate state results, or takes any action to cancel, delay, or invalidate the state’s elections, and when that happens, the state orders ninety-day compliance from all employers operating in state to redirect federal tax withholdings into a state escrow account pending restoration of legitimate democratic governance.
They do anything blatantly and undeniably unconstitutional and we respond immediately, peacefully, and authoritatively.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The threat has to exist before the election because a threat made after has already failed. A threat made after the election is reactive and defensive, and it continues the trend of fascists pushing pro-democracy folks at an accelerating pace. The consequence has to be immediate because civil litigation does not work when someone steals an election. What is a judge supposed to say? “Sir, stop your coup please?”
I walked her through the legal framework, nullification, the Supremacy Clause, etc, and told her about the documented case for why this kind of measure is being considered now, which we built here and here, and told her this kind of system has a name in the political science literature, that political scientists who study countries where it has already been built call it competitive authoritarianism, and that we walked through the working version of it here. I told her the bill text and three other pieces of model legislation are here, and the deeper legal framework for the specific mechanism we were discussing is here, and she pulled out her phone and wrote it down....
Christopher Armitage, Apr 28, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
... In February, this publication walked through the laws that let every state in the country criminally investigate DOGE personnel for what they did at the Social Security Administration. Identity theft and cybercrime statutes let prosecutors charge crimes where the victim lives rather than where the defendant sat, a state conviction cannot be erased by a presidential pardon, and the federal Department of Justice has now admitted the underlying conduct in a federal court filing.
Over the last two months, thousands of Existentialist Republic readers got after it. They filed police reports with their local departments, sent referrals to county prosecutors and governors asking for criminal investigation under their state’s identity theft and computer fraud laws, and wrote to their state attorneys general directly with the conduct, the defendants, and the statutes named....
See in particular: The toolkit to do something about it: who to contact and what to say
New Mexico Becomes the Latest State to End Cooperation With ICE Under New Law
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 04-27-2025]
The prehistory of the Democratic Nuremberg Caucus
Cory Doctorow, 02 May 2026 [Pluralistic]
... You could be forgiven for assuming that this is just about reining in Wall Street greed, but that it isn't an especially political maneuver. That's not true: antitrust is the most consequentially political regulation (with the possible exception of regulations on elections). Every fascist power defeated in WWII relied on the backing of their national monopolists to take, hold and wield power. That's why the Marshall Plan technocrats who rewrote the laws of Europe, South Korea and Japan made sure to copy over US antitrust law onto those statute-books (that's also why the tech antitrust cases brought in Europe could be re-run in South Korea and Japan – their laws are all substantively similar, because they were harmonized with US antitrust in the 1950s):
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter
Fascism and monopolies go hand in hand, and smashing monopolies is key to the program of fighting fascism....
Inspired by those trials, I've proposed that Congressional Dems could form a "Nuremberg Caucus" that would publicly promise sweeping plans to denazify America after Trump and his allies have been swept from power:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification
The centerpiece of the Nuremberg Caucus playbook is a set of ready-to-file, public indictments against Trump officials who have violated the law, the Constitution, and the rights of the people of the USA. Dems should create and maintain a docket with exhibits and witness lists that gets updated every time one of these crooks runs their big, stupid mouths on Fox News or OANN or Twitter. The Nuremberg Caucus could even set dates for the trials of officials, with judicial calendars for each federal courtroom, starting on January 21, 2029.
The idea here is to both demoralize Trump's collaborators and to stiffen the spines of the Democratic base who will have to be convinced that turning out for the coming elections, and defending them, will mean something, delivering the change and hope they've been promised since the Obama campaign, but which has never materialized.
While trials and punishment for Trump's fascist goons are at the center of the Nuremberg Caucus plan, that's not all of it. The plan also calls for publicly announcing the intention to unwind every corrupt merger that was consummated under Trump. This serves two purposes: first, it promises the electorate that the monopolists who steal from them will face consequences for their crimes; but second, it also puts investors on notice that any gains from corrupt mergers will turn into massive losses once the next administration orders these companies to unscramble the inedible omelets they're cooking up, no matter what the cost....
The Supreme Court's legitimacy has been burned to the ground, and Trump's chud justices are pissing on the ashes. Packing the court is a very good idea:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court
It's also a very popular idea:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/18/the-people-no/#tell-ya-what-i-want-what-i-really-really-want
Which is why I included it in the Nuremberg Caucus plan. But packing the court is just table stakes. In his latest video, Jamelle Bouie lays out a detailed plan for denazifying the Supreme Court:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRzS61buXkQ
As Bouie points out, "as long as John Roberts has his majority, nothing the left of center in this country wants to do is safe or stable…We can have democracy and self-government in this country or we can have the Supreme Court as it exists, but we cannot have both.".....
Matt Stoller, Apr 30, 2026 [BIG]
Democrats are starting to make proposals for what they will do if they take control of Congress. Bans on surveillance pricing, restructuring corporate America, and utility reforms are on deck.
Time For The DNC To Sue CBS News For $20 Billion - A free idea for Ken Martin
Brian Beutler, May 01, 2026 [Off Message]
... whoever replaces him at DNC, could demonstrate to disaffected Democratic base voters that the party is remaking itself as one that won’t take shit lying down. That, whenever possible, it will impose penalties on Republicans and their enablers for dealing in bad faith.
It’s frustrating, because I’m basically restating what I wrote almost six years ago, just a few weeks before the 2020 election. Joe Biden was poised for victory, and it was clear to me that allowing bygones to be bygones wouldn’t just result in miscarriages of justice vis-a-vis specific crimes. It would teach Republicans that there’s no downside to operating in bad faith as a default mode. Reading back on it, as I do from time to time, is a bit painful.
"The Republican Party’s core rottenness—its dishonesty, corruption, pettiness, racism—is the defining political fact of our time. Whatever we say about it, confronting all of us in the weeks and months ahead is the more important question of what we do about it. What do the rest of us—most importantly elected Democrats, but also journalists, political elites, and regular citizens—need to change about public life to account for the fact that one of the two major parties has embraced bad faith as an organizing principle?
"[Democrats can] codify norms so that Republicans can’t violate them or take hostages going forward. Rather than increase the debt limit, they can eliminate it; rather than devise new stimulus every time the economy turns downward, they can create permanent programs that snap into effect when unemployment climbs. Donald Trump proved that Republicans will withhold disaster relief from states that don’t vote for Republicans; Democrats can change the law to treat all victims of disaster equally, no matter their politics or the partisan leanings of their states. Rather than shame Republicans out of suppressing votes, they can expand the franchise by law. Rather than acquiesce to the GOP theft of the courts, they can expand the judiciary, erasing decades of conservative scheming to rule the country without winning elections...."
Strategic Political Economy
The Empire Unmasked: Elite Impunity and the Slow Collapse of American Legitimacy
George Noble, April 26, 2026
[TW: Clinically interesting as evidence of distress among certain elites - Noble was first head of Fidelity's Overseas Fund, before establishing a hedge fund.]
American power is seriously frayed, but still intact; American legitimacy is not, and legitimacy is what makes power sustainable....
That plausibility is collapsing in real time. The problem is not that corruption exists; it always has. The problem is that it is visible, normalized, and unpunished in precisely those sectors that claim to anchor legitimacy: federal law enforcement, high finance, the presidency, and the “rules‑based” global order. The United States still has enormous residual power--military, financial, technological; but its ideological credit line is being run down faster than it is being replenished....
The new moniker “The Epstein Class” has gained universal usage because it is very true. The sickness is becoming more broadly accepted as far more pervasive and perverse than anyone admitted only a few years ago. What has become accepted is still likely just scratching the surface of a very large, ugly iceberg... The inner sanctum of the uber elites is increasingly seen as thoroughly corrupt and beyond the rule of law. This is not only the stuff of collapse, it is the fuel for revolution.
A similar dynamic appears in markets. Multiple investigations have noted clusters of uncannily well‑timed trades, index futures, oil options, concentrated equity bet placed shortly before surprise presidential announcements on tariffs, sanctions, military action, or public signals that sent prices lurching....
But it is not only the greed, unethicality and immorality of the self-dealing within the American government and the elite circles of sycophants that thrive in its wake, it is the blatant, in your face arrogance that is creating a tipping point domestically and in other similar ruling Western powers where the ability to recover legitimacy and faith will soon become virtually impossible....
The visible domestic impunity of U.S. elites; no accountability for torture, for the architects of the 2008 crisis, for sprawling influence‑peddling networks, for the full extent of Epstein’s clientele, for the obvious insider enrichment around presidential policy tweets....
...elite impunity is not a side‑effect of decline; it is one of its primary mechanisms. Each non‑prosecution, each legalized “gratitude” payment, each “well‑timed trade” that goes unexamined, each buried oversight report, each unpunished network of abuse, all of them communicate the same message: the rules are for you, not for us. The same stands for the appearance of the blatant extortionist policies internationally now being persued by the Trump Imperium. Over time, that message erodes the belief that the system is reformable, that there is any point in treating its promises as binding....
Matt Stoller, May 02, 2026 [BIG]
It wasn't Biden antitrust enforcers. There were many factors - Trump's Iran War, JetBlue, the big four airlines, and behind all of that, deregulation. And this story has happened hundreds of times.
Mike Brock, May 02, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
Spirit Airlines ceased operations last night. The final scheduled flight landed. Thirty years of business is over. Some thousands of employees lost their jobs. Some larger number of customers, holding tickets for flights that will not now happen, woke up this morning trying to figure out how to get home....
The CEO, Dave Davis, named the cause of the failure in plain language. “Everybody burning cash — we just had a smaller pile to start with.” The cash burn is from the doubling of jet fuel prices. The doubling of jet fuel prices is from the global supply contraction that followed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is from the war Donald Trump started against Iran without congressional authorization, in violation of the War Powers Act, in violation of the Constitution, against the advice of his own military leadership, and which he has now apparently lost....
Spirit was the first airline to fall. Davis was explicit about the rest. “They’re not that far behind us in the race.” The other low-cost carriers are now standing in the same fuel-price line Spirit was standing in. They have larger piles of cash. The piles are still finite. The fuel prices are still doubled. The math does what math does.
That is the chain. The chain is documentable. The chain runs from the executive’s unconstitutional war through a regional crisis through global commodity markets to the bottom line of an American airline whose final flight landed last night.
The libertarians and market fundamentalists, watching this happen in real time, have decided the proximate cause was Lina Khan.
The story they are telling: Khan’s FTC blocked the JetBlue-Spirit merger in 2024. The merger would have rescued Spirit by absorbing it into a stronger competitor. Khan, in her “anti-business” zeal, prevented the consolidation. Therefore Khan killed Spirit. Therefore Khan’s antitrust enforcement is responsible for the airline’s collapse. Therefore the lesson of Spirit is that we need to free the merger and acquisition market from the regulatory state’s interference, and the next time a struggling carrier wants to be absorbed by a larger one, the polity should get out of the way.
This is what the libertarian frame produces when it encounters the failure of Spirit Airlines. It produces a story in which the entrepreneur is the foundational actor, the regulator is the obstacle, and the failure of the entrepreneur is necessarily the regulator’s fault, because in the libertarian frame the regulator is the only available source of failure outside the entrepreneur themselves, and the entrepreneur cannot have failed on their own merits because that would mean the market does not always know best.
The story is wrong on the facts and wrong in its philosophical structure, and the two failures are related....
How to Think About Spirit's Failure - and the Airline Crisis
Ganesh Sitaraman and Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, May 01, 2026
If the only way for airlines to survive is to constantly merge or get bailed out by the government, then it’s time to admit that the industry is more like a public utility than a competitive market.
The Licensing Revolution: Is Resistance Futile? Part 1: Loss of ownership comes to the car
Thomas Neuburger, May 1, 2026 [God's Spies]
How a Chinese Finger Trap Explains America’s Political Dilemma
Matt Stoller, April 26, 2026 [BIG]
To get out of our malaise, we must do things that will make the stock market go down. But to preserve our institutions, we can't let the stock market go down.... today I want to spend a little time discussing the economic dilemma that prevents any meaningful political change. I’m thinking about this problem, what I call the Chinese finger trap economy, because I’m watching how the Democrats are preparing, or rather, not preparing, for their likely victory in six months in the midterm elections....
The limiting factor, in fact, is the stock market. There are many ways to talk about AI, as the technology itself is interesting. But most AI ‘policy’ is a proxy for juicing the stock market. As the Wall Street Journal just reported, “Exclude the AI version of the Magnificent Seven stocks—Broadcom alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia—and the market value of the S&P is actually down. Put another way, these seven are lifting the entire market.”
A little over 60% of Americans own stocks, and though most own very little, they still care about it because it’s often all they have for retirement. America is just much more reliant on stocks than it used to be. Here’s the balance sheet of American households and nonprofits....
What does this dynamic mean? Well, if financial assets fall in value, then it means the entire global hierarchy gets shaken up and reorganized, with unforeseen consequences. Many formerly rich people will go bankrupt, others won’t be able to feed or educate their kids, entire nations could go into civil war. In the 1930s, when this kind of thing happened, Hitler came to power in Germany. That is why we’re so scared of a market drop. That is why Trump is fighting the war with Iran, entirely bounded by the stock market. It is why we didn’t acknowledge the severity of Covid until the markets fell. Financial asset values are the lens through which we understand what problems are important to solve....
[TW: But....]
No, Government Should Not Be Pro-Business
Mike Brock, May 02, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israeli soldier: “It isn’t terrorist infrastructure; we’re destroying everything”
[Haaretz, via [Drop Site Daily, May 1, 2026]
Israeli soldiers told Haaretz their operations in southern Lebanon are focused on systematically leveling buildings in villages, not targeting Hezbollah infrastructure as claimed. The army’s plan, dubbed “Operation Silver Plow,” reportedly assigns units quotas for homes destroyed, with contractors paid per building destroyed. They must report “how many homes [they] destroyed” each day, a soldier said. Troops are ordered to guard them under drone threat: “We stand there, exposed… There’s no logic to this.” “The only mission is to continue the destruction,” one officer said. Another added: “It isn’t terrorist infrastructure; we’re destroying everything.”
Oligarchy
Who Rules America? Inside the Hidden Architecture of the Ruling Class
William Murphy [via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]
CEO pay soared in 2025, 20 times faster than workers’ pay
[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]
What the hell is "carried interest"
Cory Doctorow, April 29, 2021 [Pluralistic]
For at least a decade, US politicians have made symbolic, unfulfilled promises to do something about the "carried interest tax loophole," a thing that virtually no one understands. Yves Smith's explanation will remedy that.
Billionaire Bankrolling Anti-Platner PAC Gutted Maine Mill Towns
DropSite, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]
[Verso also wrecked the coated paper mill in Escanaba, Michigan, which should have remained world-competitive for decades.
Adam Tooze, May 02, 2026
Kevin Warsh, the presumptive new chair of the Federal Reserve, is no economist, nor monetary policy wonk. He is a Stanford- and Harvard-educated lawyer with Wall Street experience, who is connected to Republican circles not only by way of education and business experience, but also through marriage. Warsh’s father-in-law is Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics billionaire....
Jim Stewartson, May 02, 2026 [MindWar]
... To understand how bizarre and dangerous this deal is requires understanding a bit of history of Elon Musk and SpaceX, some basic arithmetic, and a little imagination. But in short: one of the worst men in the world will have total, dictatorial control of a load-bearing beam of the U.S. economy, a beam which will have no way to stay intact other than financial mythology and government dependency—and no way to get rid of Musk when it goes sideways.
SpaceX is not being set up as a normal public corporation. It has a wide variety of unique features that give Musk total control over an expansive entity with enormous resources and unlimited ability to tap the public market. He will be entirely unencumbered by federal or corporate governance. And he will be free to spew his racist poison, to interfere in politics, and to amplify AI-generated teenage girls on his website with no concern of consequences....
While there are other proofs-of-concept of the network state, including Thiel-funded Praxis and Pronomos Capital, it’s worth comparing SpaceX and the network state idea directly....
Billionaire Bankrolling Anti-Platner PAC Gutted Maine Mill Towns
Nathan Bernard, Apr 28, 2026 [Drop Site News]
Over the weekend, new FEC filings revealed a billionaire-backed super PAC supporting Republican Sen. Susan Collins has started running attack ads against Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner. Pine Tree Results is being funded by a litany of ultrawealthy donors, including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman ($2 million); Elliott Management CEO Paul Singer ($1 million); Reyes Holdings executives ($1 million); and Palantir CEO Alex Karp ($100,000)....
One benefactor does have a Maine connection—though it’s a sordid one. That donor is Apollo Global Management’s billionaire CEO and founder Marc Rowan, a giant in the world of private equity who has faced scrutiny for his links to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Rowan contributed $50,000 so far of the $2 million already dedicated to the anti-Platner campaign, and has been a major backer of AIPAC in recent years.
From 2006 to 2020, Apollo Management ran two of Maine’s largest paper mills into the ground, bankrupting them both, selling off their carcasses for scraps, and eliminating more than 1,000 jobs in Bucksport and Jay. That wasn’t a failure on the part of the private equity firm, which is able to profit by extracting wealth from healthy businesses through a process of stacking them with debt, filing for bankruptcy, and looting their assets, including pensions promised to workers.
In the case of the paper mills, they were the flagship properties of International Paper, which Apollo took over and redubbed Verso Paper. Apollo forced the new company it owned to take out $250 million in debt and hand the money over to Apollo, making sure its own investment was covered, in the form of a dividend, and proceeded to slowly bankrupt the company—what the mafia refers to as a “bustout.” The Star Tribune singled out the financial maneuver as “how Apollo got almost all of its money out of Verso.”
An oligarch’s dystopian scheme to discredit journalism with AI
[Oligarch Watch, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]
[Do Not Research, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]
Felonomics
The Trump plan to add work requirements to public housing
[Can We Still Govern?, via Naked Capitalism 04-30-2025]
[Drop Site Daily: April 29, 2026]
The Trump administration is working on a rule change that would deduct the value of a disabled adult’s bedroom from their Supplemental Security Income allotment—even if the family they live with is poor enough to qualify for food stamps—potentially slashing benefits by up to a third or eliminating them entirely for as many as 400,000 people, according to ProPublica. The effort, initiated by White House and Department of Government Efficiency officials, would undo a Biden-era policy that exempted families already certified as poor through other assistance programs from redundant income checks—a change disability advocates, evangelical groups, and budget experts warn would push disabled adults out of family homes and into far more expensive institutional facilities. Read ProPublica’s full report here.
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 04-30-2025]
Trump fires all 24 members of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s governing body
[Science, via Naked Capitalism 04-27-2025]
[TW: The civic republican counterpoint is A. Hunter Dupree's 1957 book, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities. Dupree documented how federal government support of science led to crucial national achievements in geographical exploration and expansion; civil works and construction; meteorology and early climate science; geometry and mathematics; physics, chemistry, biology, botany, husbandry, agriculture, and conservation; medicine and public health; and mecahnics and industrial and military technologies. JSTOR review:]
Review: Discerning the Relation between American Science and American Democracy: A. Hunter Dupree's "Science in the Federal Government"
Reviewed Work: Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities A. Hunter Dupree
Review by: John Cloud
Technology and Culture
Vol. 48, No. 3 (Jul., 2007), pp. 589-593 (5 pages)
Published By: The Johns Hopkins University
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
How not to ban surveillance pricing
Cory Doctorow, April 30, 2026 [Pluralistic]
...the new Maryland bill that (supposedly) outlaws surveillance pricing: this bill is, frankly, a terribly drafted piece of shit. Worse: it's a terribly drafted piece of shit bill that fails to resolve a serious and urgent problem. Even worse: the lawmakers who drafted this piece of shit bill and Maryland Governor Wes Moore were all loudly and repeatedly warned about the problems of this bill, and they did nothing and now the people of Maryland are fucked.
So what is surveillance pricing, why is it so dangerous, and what's wrong with Maryland's Protection Against Predatory Pricing Act?
.... For example, there's a McDonald's investments portfolio company called Plexure that supplies surveillance pricing tools to fast food restaurants. Plexure advertises its ability to use surveillance data to find out when a customer has just gotten a paycheck so that vendors can increase the price of their usual breakfast sandwich order. This isn't aimed at wealthy people – it's explicitly designed to target people who are living paycheck to paycheck.
Surveillance pricing is also used to determine how much you get paid; when that happens, we call it "algorithmic wage discrimination." Gig platforms like Uber use surveillance data about their drivers to predict which workers are most desperate, and those drivers are offered less money per mile and per hour, because a desperate worker will take whatever is on offer. Gig work apps for health-care do the same thing to nurses:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point ....
[Frontier Map, via Naked Capitalism 04-27-2025]
Data Centers Reveal America’s Economic Development Brain Rot
[Boondoggle, via Naked Capitalism 04-27-2025]
Your Dinner Got Worse On Purpose
[Worse on Purpose, via Naked Capitalism 04-30-2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Senate unanimously bars members from trading on prediction markets
[Drop Site Daily, May 1, 2026]
The U.S. Senate on Thursday unanimously passed a rule immediately barring senators from trading on prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket. On April 22, Kalshi suspended and fined one Senate candidate and two House candidates for trading on their own campaigns, and on April 23 the Justice Department arrested U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke on charges of using classified information to place Polymarket bets on the American military operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, winning nearly $410,000.
Restoring balance to the economy
Big Pharma Killed A Rule. Dems Can Run On Reinstating It.
David Sirota, Apr 29, 2026 [The Lever]
Democratic senator (and possible 2028 presidential candidate) John Ossoff has a solid video out explaining the link between legalized political corruption and high drug prices — and touting his work to end the ban on Medicare negotiating lower rates on a handful of medicines. That was long-overdue legislation, and now it’s time to go much further and do something that’s also long overdue: reinstating the drug pricing rule imposed by Republican President George H.W. Bush’s administration.
In 1989, Bush’s National Institutes of Health asserted the power to require that medicines developed at taxpayer expense be offered to American taxpayers at a “reasonable” price. The idea was common sense: If the public spent money to help develop a drug, the public’s return on such investment should be affordable prices for that drug.
Six years later, however, the Clinton administration bowed to pharmaceutical industry lobbying and rescinded the rule....
In the quarter-century since, there have been calls for presidents to use related “march-in rights” to license generic drug companies to produce lower-priced versions of medicines originally developed at government expense. The Obama administration rejected congressional Democrats’ calls to do this....
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
Shining Science@ShiningScience
Say “goodbye” to fertilizers. Dr. Mariangela Hungria, a distinguished researcher at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), has been named the 2025 World Food Prize laureate for her pioneering work in soil microbiology. Often described as the "Nobel Prize for Food," this honor recognizes her development of over 30 biological technologies that utilize natural bacteria to nourish crops. By harnessing the power of Biological Nitrogen Fixation through specific bacterial strains, Hungria has successfully replaced heavy reliance on synthetic fertilizers, drastically improving the sustainability and yields of soybean and other vital crops across South America....
New Chinese Iron Battery Lasts 16 Years
Haley Zaremba, Apr 30, 2026 (OilPrice.com]
China produced over 80% of the world's lithium-ion batteries in 2025 and controls roughly 90% of the energy storage battery market — a consolidation that creates serious supply chain and geopolitical risks for the West.
Chinese researchers have developed an all-iron flow battery with a record-breaking 6,000-cycle lifespan — equivalent to 16 years of operation with zero degradation — at a fraction of lithium's cost.
Iron is roughly 80 times cheaper than lithium in today's market, and the new electrolyte breakthrough could make iron batteries scalable, potentially reshaping global energy storage.
China’s new iron battery hits 99.4 percent efficiency over 6000 cycles
[Interesting Engineering, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Our declining healthy life expectancy
Richard Murphy, April 28, 2026 [Funding the Future]
The Health Foundation has published a report on healthy life expectancy in the UK that deserves far more attention than it is likely to receive. That is unfortunate, because it says something profoundly important about the state of this country and the consequences of the economic choices that have been made within it.
Healthy life expectancy is a much better measure of national well-being than life expectancy alone. It does not simply ask how long we live. It asks how long we can expect to live in good health, and that distinction matters a great deal.
The report shows that over the period from 2012–14 to 2022–24, healthy life expectancy in the UK fell by a little over two years. It now stands at 60.7 years for men and 60.9 years for women....
The geographic inequality within these figures is striking. In the wealthy London suburb of Richmond upon Thames, healthy life expectancy is more than 69 years for men and more than 70 years for women. In northern coastal towns, Blackpool and Hartlepool, it is barely above 50.
That gap of around twenty years between the healthiest and least healthy places in England cannot be explained by individual choices. It is the consequence of structural inequality, and as the report makes clear, we should stop pretending otherwise.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI automation will not be our salvation
Richard Murphy, May 01, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Democrats' political malpractice
Inside the Democratic Civil War Over Billionaire Power
David Sirota, April 27, 2026 [The Lever]
... Over the weekend, The Lever published a blockbuster report exposing a billionaire-funded political machine designed to co-opt — or defang — a rising tide of economic and anti-corruption populism boiling up in the Democratic Party.
The story is making waves because, for the first time, our reporters detail how this machine of super PACs and overlapping donors and operatives seems to be edging right up to the legal lines of anti-corruption laws prohibiting various forms of coordination between outside entities, consultants, and candidates....
As I wrote in a Bulwark essay upon the release of The Lever’s Master Plan book about the legalization of corruption, the better long-term path is for the party to make its brand anti-corruption — in word and in deed.
Primaries are the easiest first place to do this, because adhering to the kind of strict anti-corruption, anti-coordination, and anti-super PAC standards that Sanders’ group is pushing doesn’t risk losing resources for general election fights against Republicans.
It only risks reducing the power of billionaires, which is why they and their political operatives are so opposed to such reforms and so intent on building their own machine to buy primaries and remain in control of the party.
Gov. Wes Moore Claims Maryland Banned Surveillance Pricing for Groceries. It Didn’t.
[Boondoggle, via Naked Capitalism 04-30-2025]
DNC chair reverses course, will not release 2024 election autopsy finding Gaza policy hurt Harris
Drop Site Daily: April 29, 2026
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin confirmed he will not publicly release the party’s 2024 election autopsy report, reversing the transparency platform on which he ran for the chairmanship and arguing the full document would be a “distraction” from the 2026 midterms. The IMEU Policy Project reported that DNC aides acknowledged in a closed-door meeting that the report concluded the Biden-Harris administration’s approach to the genocide in Gaza cost Kamala Harris significant support.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Greg Bovino Calls Minneapolis Protestors ‘Cannon Fodder’ in New Interview
Josh Kovensky, Kate Riga, Khaya Himmelman and Emine Yücel, May 02, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
...Bovino expressed no remorse for federal agents’ killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Though he and the interviewers mentioned Good by name several times, Pretti did not come up. Instead, Bovino said that Minneapolis got off easy, blaming the disaster in the city on murky conspiracy theories.
“Minneapolis, we didn’t hit them hard. And when you don’t hit them hard, guess what? That empowers…those funding streams, those individuals, those leaders of those organizations. It empowers them. That’s what happened in Minneapolis,” he said. “If you want to know the ground truth and the secret to Minneapolis is, we didn’t treat Minneapolis like we did the other cities that we were in. That softer approach started creeping in in Minneapolis. And that’s definitely not the way you treat an anarchist or a rioter.” ....
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Industry’s Court in a Stolen Republic
Mike Brock, May 02, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
On April 18, 2026, the New York Times published the most consequential breach of Supreme Court confidentiality since the Dobbs draft leak — and, I would argue, a more consequential one. Adam Liptak and Jodi Kantor obtained internal memos that the justices wrote to one another during the five days in February 2016 when the Court was deciding whether to block Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The memos, written in the institutional formality the Court uses to insist on its own dignity, document the reasoning that produced what Stephen Vladeck has called the modern shadow docket. They also document something more specific. They document the capture of the Court of the United States by the fossil fuel industry.
In a piece of memoranda that none of us were ever meant to see, The Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts, wrote to his colleagues that a 2 percent decrease in coal production over a single year constituted irreparable harm requiring unprecedented emergency intervention. He cited a $480 billion industry-cost figure that his own footnote conceded was likely at the high end of a possible cost range, and used it anyway. He invoked the principle that capital expenditures already incurred could not be undone....
[TW: A blaring example of how John Locke's blasphemous fetish for the "protection of private property" is destructive of the Constitutional mandate to govern justly. This is the same philosophical error the Confederate oligarchy committed in their attempt to preserve "their property" of human slaves.
[And I include the adjective "blasphemous" to point to how the principles of political economy in the philosophy of civic republicanism must be based on the understanding that it is human life that is sacred, and all considerations of law and government must be made in service to that ideal. Not tribal identity. Not cultural heritage. Certainly not property rights. Not even the preservation of institutions. Because all individual humans are equal: (John 14:1-12:) "Philip said to him, "Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us." Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? " The divine is in every individual. The role and purpose of government must be directed to that ideal, and creating the conditions for every individual to flourish and contribute positively to the human story - not just the rich, the powerful, and the privileged. In fact, the philosophy of civic republicanism understands and warns that the rich, the powerful, and the privileged tend to deform society, government, and the economy in ways that benefit only themselves, resulting in harms to many other individuals -- exactly as John Roberts has done in this case. ]
... The Brennan Center‘s Alicia Bannon, writing on April 24, helpfully named the structural feature that the leak makes irrefutable. In 2016, the Roberts Court applied the irreparable harm standard with maximum scrutiny to a Democratic regulation that would have imposed costs on the fossil fuel industry. Since January 2025, the same Court has granted Trump-administration emergency relief twenty times out of twenty-five attempts, with what Bannon documents as no apparent irreparable harm to government other than generalized harm from delay. No costs costed. No harms weighed. Just the granting.
This asymmetry is a function of a clear corruption of interests. It cannot be merely dismissed as the ordinary noise of a divided court producing different outcomes in different configurations. It is a one-way valve. Maximum scrutiny applied to regulatory action that threatens fossil fuel economics. Zero scrutiny applied to executive action that serves it. These internal memoranda show that plainly to any dispassionate observer.
This is what captured means in its precise philosophical-legal sense. The institution operates on a standard that systematically advantages a specific industry against the public interest, and the standard is durable across cases and across years. The Justices are not bribed in the cartoon sense. They are something worse than bribed. They have internalized the industry’s perspective so thoroughly that they have ceased to recognize it as a perspective at all. The fossil fuel industry’s economic concerns are harms. Documented, weighed, treated as load-bearing in the institution’s reasoning....
The individual-justice-level entanglements are documented through ProPublica‘s investigative record. Clarence Thomas accepted, across decades, what ProPublica characterized as luxury travel from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow virtually every year. Crow purchased Thomas’s mother’s home and adjacent properties in 2014 for $133,363, undisclosed by Thomas. Samuel Alito accepted a 2008 fishing trip to Alaska on a private jet that could have cost $100,000 one way if chartered separately, organized by Leonard Leo, with the lodge stay paid for by another major conservative donor. The trip was undisclosed. Singer, the donor who flew Alito on the jet, then had his hedge fund Elliott Management appear before the Court at least ten times, with Alito voting in his favor in a 2014 Argentina case that netted Singer’s fund $2.4 billion. Alito did not recuse from any Singer matter.
Singer’s Elliott Management currently holds Suncor Energy as its second-largest position at $2 billion, representing 11 percent of its portfolio. Suncor is the same company whose climate-tort case is now on the Supreme Court’s docket, scheduled for the October 2026 sitting. The Federalist Society has hosted public events on the case under titles invoking federalism and judicial power. The American Petroleum Institute has filed an amicus brief. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has filed an amicus brief. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and 102 members of Congress have filed amicus briefs. The Trump Department of Justice has filed a brief urging the Court to intervene. Twenty-six Republican attorneys general — funded by RAGA, funded by Concord Fund, funded by the broader Leo network, funded by the oil industry — have filed amicus briefs.
The industry that funded the network that produced the Justices is now asking those Justices, through that network, for permanent immunity from state climate liability. This is, to put it mildly, an arrangement....
Christopher Armitage, May 02, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
... And then there is the fifth path. The zero path. The path where things simply work themselves out. We have a free and fair enough election, the country swings hard against the regime, a new president takes office with a working congressional majority, the courts get rebalanced, the fired civil servants come back, and we settle into something resembling Hungary's current trajectory rather than collapse or permanent GOP rule.
Look at the polling. Trump's approval rating sits at thirty-four percent in the latest Pew survey, right at his baseline. His floor has never budged.³ The FiftyPlusOne polling average has him at thirty-seven percent approve against fifty-nine percent disapprove.⁴ A landslide rejection is not looking likely with the current numbers.
A third of the country approves of all this. A third of the country is sealed off from reality by the autocrats who built the seal. Half the states are run by the people who would have to certify their own removal. The institutional machinery required for a Hungarian-scale correction, impeachment of the entire cabinet, conviction of Supreme Court justices, override of a presidential veto, amendment of the Constitution itself, demands supermajorities that do not exist on any timeline that matters, inside a judiciary doing everything it can to keep elections tilted kn favor of Republicans.
If we are betting on path zero, we are unwitting controlled opposition. Truly. That is the state-approved plan, gang. That is the kind of opposition Trump and the GOP and the oligarchs approve and allow.
What that gets us is not democratic recovery. It is steady-state fascism with a permanent opposition party that exists to lose most elections respectably, son some here and there, and reassure its donors that next time will be different....
More Thoughts on the Court’s Dire Corruption and the Necessity of Reform
Josh Marshall, May 01, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
...One of the few silver linings of the corrupt Court deciding to get rid of the Voting Rights Act (which, let’s be clear, is the legislative embodiment of the Civil Rights Movement and Second Reconstruction) is that it has pushed a whole additional echelon of people into the Court reform camp. Even those who really would prefer to crawl over broken glass than fiddle with the structure of the Court see now that there’s simply no alternative. The alternative is simply to accept the indefinite rule of a corrupt Court making war on the Constitution (the foundational pact which is the basis of all power and legitimacy in the United States), overruling democratic self-government and allowing only it’s own political party to enjoy real political power. And all in the cause of a vacant and meaningless institutionalism....
You Can Have Democratic Self-Government or the Corrupt Court — Not Both
Josh Marshall, April 30, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
... While the corrupt majority has consistently advanced and enforced an ideological vision of how the country should be run it has another simpler brief: not allowing Democrats to govern when they are in power. When Republicans are in power the powers of presidency are almost limitless; when it’s Democrats the office is feeble and hemmed in by a cobweb of invented doctrines. We had the ironic benefit of two Trump presidencies sandwiching a Biden presidency to make this principle of action crystal clear. Quite simply, the corrupt majority ensures that only Republicans actually get the fruits of political victories.
In our thinned out political discourse people often use the term “corruption” to refer only to venal corruption – bribes, conflicts of interest mostly involving money, kept Justices like Clarence Thomas. That is neither the only nor the most significant form of corruption. In most cases venal corruption is significantly self-correcting. It gets exposed and prosecuted. The more general meaning of corruption is when a form of rot takes over an office or institution because of systemic and ingrained abuses of power. That is the case with the Supreme Court....
Power, democracy, and clarity - What does the end of the Voting Rights Act mean?
Don Moynihan, May 01, 2026 [Can We Still Govern?]
I like this graph.
I’ve used it in articles, classes and presentations to the public. It shows how registration rates between Black and White voters varied in Louisiana since Reconstruction. In a single image, it tells the story of political power and discrimination. Black voters had power, briefly, then it was taken from them. A series of policies that were more or less explicit in their discriminatory purpose worked as intended, disenfranchising Black voters, and some poor White voters along the way....
Jordan Zakarin, Apr 30, 2026 [Progress Report]
...Foiled in his attempts to kill the landmark civil rights law in the early 1980s, when he was an attorney in the Reagan Department of Justice, Roberts spent the next 44 years methodically working to return the nation back to the Jim Crow era. Roberts’s story is the story of the modern conservative legal movement, an extremist sect that worked its way to the pinnacle of power with the help of deep-pocketed benefactors whose money has warped American culture and launched a new civil war.
Roberts’s patience helped fool the media and many Democrats into believing that he’s some sort of moderate, but investigative reporters and legal experts like David Daley had him clocked from the start. Daley is the author of the book Antidemocratic, published last year, which chronicles Roberts’s rise and ideological crusade, and I spoke with him after the Callais ruling to understand how the hell we got here, what comes next, and how we might be able to fight our way out....
‘Sweeping and Dangerous’: US Appeals Court Blocks Mailing of Abortion Pills
Jessica Corbett, May 01, 2026 [CommonDreams]
