Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 07, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
Does Iran Have a Nuclear Way to Stop the War?
Thomas Neuburger, June 04, 2026 [God's Spies]
I’m writing about a striking but unverified report by journalist Pepe Escobar:
Iran wants to end the war now, and is willing to detonate a nuclear device on Iranian soil to do it.
Is this statement true? I don’t know, but the answer could come rather soon. Would it work if they carried it out? I think, absolutely it would. If Iran said, “FAFO. We’re now North Korea,” Israel would know they face their own demise if they fight Iran now. Time for the new reality to finally take hold....
The First Real Legal Challenge To Trump’s Iran War
David Sirota, June 03, 2026 [The Lever]
For the first time since the start of the Iran war, Congress has attempted to circumvent President Donald Trump and end the conflict without his approval. In the process, lawmakers took a step toward creating conditions for a first-of-its-kind legal showdown clarifying the legislative branch’s constitutional authorities under the long-standing War Powers Resolution.
On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled U.S. House passed a measure ordering the president to “remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Notably, the legislation was a so-called “concurrent resolution,” which is only required to pass both the House and Senate — and is not subject to presidential veto. Under the text of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, only a concurrent resolution is required to end a war — though the authority of that text remains in dispute.
As recounted in a new episode of The Lever’s podcast Master Plan, this particular power has never been tested at the Supreme Court....
Dean Obeidallah, June 03, 2026
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Mullin Says DHS Would Obey Courts If They Were Not “Politicized”
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2026]
...cWhen questioning Mullin directly, [Senator Chris] Murphy asked, “Can you commit to us that if a court judges something ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is doing, something DHS is doing as illegal or unconstitutional, [and] tells you to stop, that you will comply with the court order?”
Mullin refused to answer directly, saying, “I will tell you that we will never break the constitution, and we’re not going to break the law, but we’re going to enforce the nation’s laws. We’re gonna enforce the laws that you guys passed, and that we implement.”
Murphy responded, “But that doesn’t sound like the same thing as committing that you will obey a court order…. I mean, I think it’s an easy thing to say. Will you or will you not implement court orders?”
“If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that,” Mullin said. “But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law.”
“So you’ll pick and choose which court orders you obey based upon whether you believe that appointee to have a political agenda?” Murphy said.
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Mullin responded.
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana’s line of questioning took an entirely different tone, essentially praising DHS and ICE. Kennedy claimed in his questions that former President Joe Biden “ignored the immigration laws” with the “encouragement” of some members of Congress, to which Mullin agreed.
Kennedy said that Democrats “believe in open borders,” to which Mullin added that it’s difficult to understand why Democrats “would allow that many people to come in and turn our streets into lawless cities and lawless towns.”
In reality, Biden deported some 4 million people from the U.S. during his tenure, and followed in the footsteps of Donald Trump’s first presidency rather than breaking from it. He also increased funding for ICE and helped expand ICE programs.....
Team Trump Under ‘Maximum’ Pressure to Jail More of His Foes
Asawin Suebsaeng, Jun 04, 2026 [Zeteo]
...In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we take a look at other parts of the U.S. government that Trump and his White House are coaxing with a very simple message: the boss will be monumentally livid at you if you don’t get very serious – very soon – about jailing his political enemies....
Two months ago, Donald Trump fired then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, because she wasn’t corrupt or zealously authoritarian enough for his liking. With her fall rose the acting AG, Todd Blanche, yet another of Trump’s former personal lawyers turned federalized hatchetmen. Off the bat, the Trump White House, including the president himself, made something clear to Blanche in private discussions, according to people familiar with the matter.
[Washington Post, via Drop Site Daily: June 5, 2026]
A former senior Social Security Administration official has disclosed in a whistleblower complaint to Senate investigators that DOGE officials sought to have 2.7 million living people, including U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, added to the agency’s Death Master File as part of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement strategy, the Washington Post reported Thursday. Jeremiah Schofield, who spent 25 years at the agency, said he refused to implement the plan after sampling 25 names from the list and finding all were alive, and that a DOGE official confirmed on a speakerphone call that the goal was to force immigrants to self-deport or show up at Social Security offices where they could be arrested. The Social Security Administration said the plan was never carried out, though the Post previously reported that a smaller version—marking 6,100 immigrants as dead—was implemented last year.
Brad Reed, June 03, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The American Economic Liberties Project and Groundwork Collaborative on Wednesday released a joint report detailing how President Donald Trump’s unprecedented corruption is padding his own pockets at the expense of US taxpayers.
The report—titled “The Price of Corruption: How Trump’s Pay-to-Play Administration is Driving Up Costs for Working Families”—explains how Trump isn’t just using the presidency to enrich himself, but leaving ordinary Americans to foot the bill for his corrupt dealings....
US Attorney Corruption — Let’s Take It National!!
Josh Marshall, June 04, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
I’ve been bringing you updates on the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago, the current U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros and the expanding grand jury misconduct corruption scandal enveloping the office. Of course, this is not limited to Chicago. It’s highly likely, though defense attorneys haven’t yet been able to pry free evidence, that the Broadview Six indictment came down under pressure from Washington, whether that was from the White House, Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security. The deeper corruption of the DOJ is a story me and my colleagues have been reporting on for the last year and a half — cover-ups, retaliation against political adversaries, various flavors of corrupt and criminal conduct.
So it’s everywhere. It’s starts at the top and it trickles down everywhere. But in most cases we’re talking about corruption and misconduct directed from above, from Trump and his top fluffers. But the DOJ is a big, big institution. Lots of people. There are 93 U.S. Attorneys Offices. So there are many flavors of corruption. And I wanted to share with you a slightly different kind. This is courtesy of TPM Reader LS who shared this article from Bloomberg Law (which David also flagged in Morning Memo today). It’s about Sigal Chattah, the acting U.S. Attorney in Nevada’s single U.S. Attorney’s office. It’s a wild, wild article. Totally bonkers stuff I was surprised I hadn’t heard about before. But it kind of makes sense since it’s hard to get attention for wild levels of corruption and misconduct and simply absurd behavior in a semi-out-of-the-way U.S. Attorneys office when we’re seeing examples of the same every day at Main Justice....
Main Justice Fingerprints on Grand Jury Corruption
Josh Marshall, June 05, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
Hegseth strikes female and Black Navy officers from promotion list
[New York Times, Jun 02, 2026]
Trump Strips Job Protections for Nearly 8,000 Federal Policy Staff
[TeleSur, via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2026]
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday eliminating labor protections for nearly 8,000 federal employees who participate in developing and implementing public policy.... The Administration had estimated that up to 50,000 employees could be affected by this policy in the future.
Video: Police Tussle With Diabetes Experts at ADA Meeting
[MedPage Today, via Naked Capitalism 06-06-2026]
Trump Shovels $4 Billion Directly to Elon Musk, Who Spent a Fortune Getting Him Elected
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2026]
Stephen Prager, June 05, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Trump Can Tear Down Statue of Liberty, Says Trump Lawyer
Josh Marshall, June 05, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
In a hearing today about the president’s bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House and plans to build a vast ballroom, a judge asked if the president could also bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and be subject to no legal challenge. The DOJ lawyer, Yaakov Roth, said that yes, President Trump could decide tomorrow to bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and no one could stop him.
Strategic Political Economy
Aurelien, via Naked Capitalism 06-03-2026]
... I began this essay by talking about the probable stresses of the next few years, which are more likely to be economic and social than military, and I made the point that we cannot expect any useful lead from governments that despise their own populations. The question, then, is whether there will remain enough of sense of solidarity and community among ordinary people to make up for the uselessness and negativity of governments. I fear not, and in that spirit let’s remind ourselves of just how much damage neoliberal governments have actually done to the kind of solidarity I described earlier. The aim of neoliberalism, after all, is to reduce human beings to the unique status of interchangeable consumers, with no bonds of family, community, history, culture or language that might undermine their homogeneity, and make the markets that constitute their entire existence less efficient than they might be. And the western elite likes to congratulate itself that wherever it goes, history and national cultures have largely been suppressed, national identities have been scrambled, you find the same shops, hotels and restaurants everywhere, everyone watches the same TV and cinema, and everybody speaks English. If the West is not yet a perfectly featureless and obstacle-free social and cultural terrain, it is approaching that status. And for forty years now, the gospel of radical individualism and “freedom” has triumphed everywhere.
Which is fine until something goes wrong. And things do go wrong, and suddenly economic efficiency turns out not to be the only important criterion, and you realise that society still has to actually function as well....
And the way to political power these days is precisely through the denial of the very existence of an integrated society, and by splitting a nation into warring identities isolated from each other and holding different truths....
The Final Delusion -“Capital Becoming Itself.”
Fabio Vighi [Savage Minds, via Naked Capitalism 06-03-2026]
[The Chronicle of Higher Education, via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2026]
... On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise....
‘An equal and habitable world is possible’: academics set out sweeping vision for planetary survival
Jonathan Watts, 4 Jun 2026 [Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 06-05-2026]
Humanity can raise living standards, reduce inequality and keep global heating within a 2C rise, according to a sweeping vision for planetary survival.
The report by the World Inequality Lab (WIL) aims to be the most comprehensive attempt yet to navigate the polycrisis that is pushing the world toward climate breakdown, political extremism and ever greater economic and social tension.
It offers a set of bold policy proposals, including hefty wealth taxes on billionaires, sharp reductions in working hours, a change in diets and a shift of investment from materially intense sectors, such as industry and mining, to education and health....
“There’s a huge cultural, intellectual, political battle that is going on. And we all have a role to play,” said Thomas Piketty, a co-director of the WIL and a professor at the Paris School of Economics.
“The ideology which we see with [Donald] Trump and all the little Trumps that we have all across Europe and all across the world is simply not going to deliver. At the end of the day we’ll have to come to this kind of cooperative redistribution of resources and power because the alternative will simply lead to disastrous outcomes both on the environment, on the climate, but also on social grounds....
Global power shift
[Tom’s Hardware, via Naked Capitalism 05-31-2026]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Molly Crabapple's 'Here Where We Live Is Our Country'
Cory Doctorow, June 1, 2026 [Pluralistic]
Molly Crabapple's Here Where We Live Is Our Country is one of the most important, timely and salient works of history I've ever read. It's a history of the Jewish Labor Bund, a socialist, internationalist organization that once dominated Jewish political identity:
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were hundreds of thousands of Bund members, both in the Pale of Settlement (the rural regions of the Russian empire that the Tsar confined most Jews to) and in diasporic centers like New York City. The Bund played an important role in the Russian Revolution and in the resistance to the rise of European fascism, and fought valiantly in the antifascist underground guerrilla bands in Nazi-occupied territories.
Despite this faded prominence, the Bund is all but unknown today. I was only vaguely aware of it, even though I attended seven years' worth of Yiddish classes at the Workmen's Circle, a Bund-originated socialist fraternal organization, and was bar-mitzvahed at a Workmen's Circle hall. It wasn't until I read about the Bund in Naomi Klein's essential 2023 book Doppelganger that I first caught a glimmer of its significance....
Where the Bund called for universalism and solidarity with all workers to keep Jews safe in every place where Jews lived, Zionists dreamed of a Jewish homeland, a stronghold to which Jews could retreat from the world. Where the Bund fought antisemites who would banish or exterminate Jews, Zionist leaders were willing to align themselves with antisemites, finding common cause in the idea that European Jewry should abandon Europe in favor of Palestine....
Oligarchy
The PayPal Mafia, the architecture of power and the Rothschild connection
Margherita Furlan [via Naked Capitalism 06-06-2026]
The link between these key figures is no coincidence: it is organic. [Elon] Musk and [Peter] Thiel co-founded PayPal. The network that emerged from this – known as the PayPal Mafia – now holds key positions in the Trump administration: David Sacks is in charge of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies; Vice President J.D. Vance’s political career was launched by a $15 million donation from Thiel; Michael Kratsios, Thiel’s former chief of staff, is an adviser to Trump. Thiel also founded, with Vivek Ramaswamy, a financial firm explicitly designed to challenge the responsible investment model promoted by BlackRock.
Documents relating to the Epstein case, made public by the US Congress in 2026, revealed that Thiel’s Valar Ventures fund accepted $40 million from Jeffrey Epstein and that Thiel corresponded with Epstein for five years prior to his death.
The inclusion of the Rothschild dynasty in this investigation is not driven by conspiracy theories. It stems from an analytical necessity. The Rothschilds represent four things simultaneously.
First: the historical model....
Second: the current operational presence....
Third: the link with BlackRock....
Fourth: the link with Israel....
The Rothschilds do not “control the world”. But they represent the source code of the system that BlackRock has industrialised, that Palantir has digitised, and that the Israeli ecosystem has militarised. To ignore them would be like studying a programme without knowing the language in which it is written. To understand the system, we must stop thinking of it as a conspiracy and start thinking of it as an architecture. A four-storey building, where each floor needs the others to stand, where the tenants of one floor are often the owners of another, and where those on the outside—that is, citizens and their elected governments—have no keys to any of the entrances....
If the first level is the body and the second is the brain, the third is the blood that nourishes them. The money that finances the construction of satellites, the development of software, the operation of data centres, the acquisition of strategic companies, and the restructuring of sovereign debt. Here there are three names, known in the world of finance as the “Big Three”: BlackRock with its $14 trillion in assets under management, Vanguard with around $9 trillion, and State Street with nearly $4.5 trillion. Together, these three funds hold significant stakes in almost every major listed company on the planet. According to various academic studies, the “Big Three” are the largest or among the top three shareholders in over 90% of the companies in the S&P 500 index, which comprises the 500 largest US companies. But their holdings do not stop at the United States: they are present in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. In Italy, as we have documented, BlackRock alone holds over €17 billion in stakes in the main listed companies.
These funds do not govern in the sense that a President or Prime Minister governs. They do not issue orders, sign decrees or command armies. Their power is different and, in some ways, more profound: they shape the gravitational field within which all other players operate. When BlackRock decides to overweight a sector in its portfolios, billions of Dollars flow in that direction and the sector grows. When it decides to underweight it, the flow reverses and the sector contracts. When it publishes its sovereign risk index and the assessment of a country is negative, the cost of that country’s debt rises, because the market follows the lead of the world’s largest investor. There is no need to ring ministers. There is no need to bribe anyone. All it takes is to move capital, and the rest follows. The historical template for this model of power is the Rothschild dynasty, which in the nineteenth century invented the fundamental principle of modern finance: whoever controls information before others do controls the markets, and whoever controls the markets influences governments without needing to govern....
Ken Klippenstein. “Oil execs building corporate militias, fearing “Bastille” moment over gas prices.
Cory Doctorow: Hell is other people – so billionaires are using AI to replace them
[The Nerve, via Naked Capitalism 06-04-2026]
Your retirement savings are about to make Elon Musk a trillionaire
[Oligarch Watch, via Naked Capitalism 06-03-2026]
Elon Musk’s Plan to Make You Invest in SpaceX
Ryan Cooper, May 20, 2026 [The American Prospect]
... The NASDAQ stock exchange used to require a company to have at least 10 percent of its stock publicly traded, and see it traded for at least three months, before being able to join. Those rules are now gone; SpaceX will be eligible after just 15 trading days and with less than 5 percent of its stock available to the public. The S&P 500 reform now under discussion is removing the requirement that companies be profitable (as SpaceX is not, as will be seen below)—but only for the largest 100 companies.
“Historically, the function of IPOs has been to allow insiders to cash out,” said economist J.W. Mason, co-author of the recent book Against Money (for which, full disclosure, I provided a blurb). Thanks to these rule changes, a large fraction of the bag holders will be passive investors—which is to say, basically everyone saving for retirement. “It will be impossible to not own them … This will be really helpful for demand,” one adviser to the deal told the Financial Times....
[TW: So, who, exactly, is Elon Musk? Here's where one dark rabbit hole leads....]
Want to Know the Connection Between Elon Musk, Social Credit and Technocracy Inc?
Matthew Ehret, Jun 03, 2026
In this week’s episode of Breaking Free of Psyops, you will be plunged into the strange layers behind the cardboard cutout called Elon Musk.
You will discover how the occult orders of the 19th century shaped WWI and the many fascist organizations within the USA created after 1919 which include, such organizations as Technocracy Inc, The Fabian Society of Canada and the occult, eugenics-driven Social Credit Party of British Major C.H. Douglas… and you may be surprised to discover that each one of those organizations mentioned above was led by Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman between 1933-1949. If you make it that far in the film, then you will not be surprised to discover how Haldeman’s dystopic ideas for a New World Order appear to have continued to influence Elon during his entire adult life.
We also examine the witch covens that appear to surround Elon Musk (which include, but are not limited to his mother Maye Musk, and two mothers of his children)… and the dark forces within the Straussian deep state that have used both Elon and Peter Thiel to create civilian front groups for modern 21st century techno-feudal systems of control....
Felonomics
[New York Times, via Drop Site Daily, June 2, 2026]
A new Trump administration rule defines “medically frail” so narrowly that people with cancer, HIV/AIDS, and end-stage renal disease would not automatically be exempt from Medicaid work requirements unless their condition significantly impairs their ability to work. The change will cost millions of sick Americans their coverage, advocates say, when the requirements take effect next year. The Congressional Budget Office had already estimated that roughly five million people would lose Medicaid under the work requirement introduced last year, including many who work but cannot manage the paperwork burden.
The aluminium shock hitting the world economy
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2026]
Letters from an American, June 4, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, June 05, 2026
And now New World screwworm, a parasitic fly larva that had been eradicated in the U.S. since the 1960s, is back. In March 2025 the Trump administration cut funding for disease control and prevention, including that of New World screwworm. Today, news broke that the New World screwworm has been found in Texas for the first time since 1966. The screwworm burrows into the living flesh of animals—most maggots feast on dead flesh—and can kill them. Screwworms are a serious threat to livestock and can hurt food production.
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2026]
Historic cattle shortages push US beef prices to record highs
[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-02-2026]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
How To Lie With Charts and Graphs
[Un-Diplomatic, via Naked Capitalism 06-06-2026]
Health care crisis
Trump’s New Medicaid Rule ‘Designed to Ensure People Lose Healthcare,’ Critics Warn
Jake Johnson, June 02, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Corporations and the Crisis of Care
Robert Kuttner, June 1, 2026 [The American Prospect]
The U.S. suffers from a mass exodus of primary care doctors, as medical practice is dictated by corporate masters at the expense of physicians and patients.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Jeffrey Epstein, the Russian Mob, & the Hidden Assets of the Maxwells (w/ Moe Tkacik)
Chris Hedges, June 04, 2026
Maureen Tkacik uncovers Epstein’s role in the billionaire cabal’s global financial network by exploring where the hidden assets of the NY Daily News ended up after Robert Maxwell's mysterious death.
[TW: I don't know how many years ago I began including this heading, "They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals." But Hedges' interview of Tkacik is exactly what I had in mind.
[Also, some of you have noted I have an antipathy toward marxism. There IS a reason. Back in the 1980s, when I was a community organizer trying to stop NAFTA, I sometimes encountered members of CPUSA and SLPA. We would exchange polemics. Mine included the factual details of the criminal connections of the "business interests" pushing NAFTA -- including Leon Black and his firm Apollo Global Management, Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black, Nelson Peltz, Robert Kravis, and others, and the organized crime money being laundered by HSBC, Citi, and other big banks, into their leveraged buy-outs and other mergers and acquisitions then in the process of seizing control of entire companies and industries. (Admittedly, at the time, I knew nothing about the Jeffrey Epstein angle).
[When Rupert Murdoch founded Fox TV, he did it with Diller as his CEO. Prior to that, Diller had been CEO of Paramount Pictures — then part of the Gulf & Western multinational conglomerate that was one of the first “legitimate” fronts for organized crime money in the 1960s. So, when Hollywood doge Lew Wasserman died in 2002, it was Diller who organized the memorial service. In his biography of Wasserman in New York Review of books a year later, Larry McMurtry nimbly and gingerly shied away from mentioning Wasserman’s ties to organized crime, but the title said more than enough: “The Don of Dons.” Wasserman’s beginning in the entertainment industry was traced by investigative reporter Gus Russo to the Moe Dalitz mob in Cleveland. Wasserman’s friend and partner, Jules Stein, was affiliated with Al Capone in Chicago. Stein’s and Wasserman’s Music Corporation of America (MCA) had a monopoly on juke boxes, that was enforced by the Cleveland and Chicago mobs, who then used MCA to establish themselves in Hollywood. In 1952, MCA was granted a waiver by the Screen Actors Guild to produce as many television shows as MCA wanted. The waiver was granted by the SGA president who had been basically installed by Wasserman, and whose name was Ronald Reagan. MCA was repeatedly investigated by anti-trust investigators, but somehow every investigation was called off before getting near prosecution. In 1980, MCA’s problem of repeatedly violating anti-trust law was solved when Reagan become President of USA, and all government anti-trust activity was entirely shut down.
[The marxists invariably were not interested in these factual details. They had no interest in the outright criminality of economic elites. They insisted it was merely a reflection of class war, and there were no solutions within the system as it existed, no matters how many laws - including RICO - were on the books. I concluded that marxists and socialists were as blindly intolerant of reality as any conservative or libertarian ideologue.]
A Billionaire Explains Why American Business Now Feels like the Mafia
Matt Stoller, June 05, 2026 [BIG]
In 1981, a consultant named Elmer Smalling, an expert in pay-TV systems, was negotiating on behalf of Jefferson City, Missouri, to see about better prices for residents. Across the table was an executive for a giant corporation named TCI, which had 25% of the U.S. cable market and was known for the hard-charging tactics of its CEO, John Malone. The negotiations were not going well, because the city was thinking of taking away the franchise and going with someone else. Paul Alden, one of Malone’s subordinates, lived up to that reputation.
“We know where you live, where your office is and who you owe money to,” he told Smalling. ”We are having your house watched and we are going to use this information to destroy you. You made a big mistake messing with T.C.I. We are the largest cable company around [.] We are going to see that you are ruined professionally.”
A few years later, Malone did it again. Frustrated at regulation, he mused publicly about shooting Bill Clinton’s Federal Communications Chair, Reed Hundt, in order to deregulate the industry, and speed up the deployment of advanced telecommunications networks. At the time, this joke about murdering his overseeing was quite controversial; Malone had to apologize....
One of the things you start to hear a lot when you write about monopoly is some variant of the comment, “Wow, that seems like the mob.” The arbitrary coercion that is now a part of commerce was not always normal; it certainly wasn’t routine in the 1950s, when the mob, with its control of gambling, was very distinct from legitimate business.
But when did this transition happen? And who organized it? Part of the story is the Chicago School academics who took over policy, the Robert Bork shift in antitrust frameworks towards the efficiency of capital. But there were also men in business who orchestrated it in how they wrote contracts, how they hired people to string wires, and how they reorganized the American media. They used the new legal frameworks to amass vast wealth and power, and reinforce what Bork was doing.
John Malone is a leader of these men, whose likes include Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Craig McCaw, Sumner Redstone, and Ted Turner. This group bridged the era of middle class control of politics to today’s oligarchy. And they built their fortunes in the media and cable systems, which were transforming in the 1970s from a New Deal model to the deregulated framework of today. They are the predecessors of today’s tech oligarchs, the Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk’s, who were born after the Bork revolution had won. Malone walked, so Zuckerberg could run....
While Malone normally eschews publicity, that day he was on CNBC because he was doing us a favor. He was releasing his autobiography, Born to Be Wired: Lessons from a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the Internet, and Growing Formula One, Discovery, Sirius XM, and the Atlanta Braves.
And this book, while not honest, is as close as I’ve ever seen to getting to the core of how the billionaires who took over American society really think. Malone’s book helped me understand the generation of media billionaires, before the tech oligarchs, who had to contend with the dying embers of New Deal regulations. And they knew a world where it wasn’t ok to do what they were trying to do, and yet they did it anyway, with energy, creativity, and a malevolent zeal to make the world safe for capital.
I don’t normally do book reviews for BIG. But this time, I’m making an exception. Because Malone has given us an explanation of what we are really up against....
[TW: It used to be widely understood a century and more ago, that corporations had other functions besides mere profit making. In fact, at the beginning of the United States, and up until the Civil War, corporate charters were issued for very specific purposes -- such as to build roads, canals, bridges, ports, railroads -- and sometimes the purposes had to be accomplished in very specific time frames or the charter of incorporation would lapse and the corporation would cease having a legal existence. Up until the 1860s, it was not unusual for a state to revoke a corporate charter if the corporation did not fulfill the purpose for which it was incorporated. For example, the Sunbury and Erie Railroad, chartered by Pennsylvania in 1837, was never able to actually begin construction, and after the state had given it an extension of time, the company was dissolved by state government fiat and its property given to the Pennsylvania Railroad. (Sunbury is located near the confluence of the north and west branches of the Susquehanna River.)
[In 1832, the Franklin Railroad received an unusual dual charter from Maryland and Pennsylvania, to construct a railroad from Chambersburg 27 miles south to Hagerstown. It failed soon after it opened, but was operated by the bankruptcy receiver until 1852, when the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania determined that the thin-flat, bar-rail on which the horse-drawn cars rode had become unsafe to operate on, and ordered that the company either disband, or relay the road with heavy T-rail to allow the running of steam locomotives. In other words, corporate charters were issued to achieve some specific purpose that would advance the general good. Limits on what corporations could do were common.
[In the Sixteenth Annual Report of the Fitchburg Rail Road Company, date January 1858, we find on page 10
“The managers of railroads need not now have the fear, which was seriously entertained a few years since, of excessive profits — at least they need have no such fear during the life of the present generation, for as large as their profits may be they will need all, in our opinion, to give reasonable returns to their shareholders, and keep their roads in good order.”
[Fear of excessive profits?! Can you imagine any CEO, COO, CFO, director, or fund manager of today discussing seriously the danger of “excessive profits”? Just compare it to the Malone described by Stoller, above. Clearly, the capitalism of today is a far different, more voracious beast than the capitalism of 1858. But if hundreds of local citizens had invested their capital with a company, the officers of that company would be violating the simple dictates of republicanism to care for one's community: if they made excessive profits, that was a clear sign that they were exploiting the resources of the community; that they were engaged in some other act or other of crude anti-social economic extraction, and would be personally shunned in both polite and common society by fellow citizens who understood better than we do today that a supposed “fiduciary duty” to maximize profits was absolutely hostile to principles of civic republicanism.]
The Economic Royalists. And their discontents
Mike Brock, June 02, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
The libertarian right has three rhetorical moves it uses to keep the American trust-doctrine off the table, and each of the three has been working for forty years.
The first move is the Marxism charge. Anyone who proposes that a corporation is a creature of public law, established by a public charter, accountable to public conditions, and revocable for public cause, is told that they are smuggling Marxism into the American political conversation....
The third move is the most important, the least examined, and the one that does the actual work of recruiting the people who staff the project. The third move is Atlas Shrugged.
The libertarian right will put a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in your hand at the moment of your professional formation. They will give it to you as a graduation present, as a hedge-fund onboarding gift, as a startup-orientation reading assignment, as the most influential book of my life on the listicle the firm publishes for its new analysts. The book has been distributed by the apparatus for sixty-five years, in editions running into the tens of millions, and the people who staff the contemporary American oligarchy have, in case after case after case, named it as the formative text of their political imagination. Peter Thiel cites it. Travis Kalanick cited it. Mark Cuban cites it. The Koch family funded the Atlas Society for decades. Paul Ryan made his entire congressional staff read it. The Ayn Rand Institute has been an operating intellectual node of the libertarian apparatus since 1985. The novel is the catechism. The novel is what the people building the kingdoms read in order to understand what they are building and why they are right to build it.
What the novel actually says, stripped of its eleven hundred pages of melodramatic scaffolding, is this. The world is divided into two kinds of human beings. The first kind is the producer — the engineer, the industrialist, the inventor, the financier, the railroad magnate, the steel manufacturer, the philosopher who provides the producers with their moral framework. The producer is the engine of civilization. The producer creates wealth that did not exist before. The producer is rare, valuable, and irreplaceable. The producer is, in the moral framework the novel is constructing, the only kind of human being whose existence is morally legitimate.
The second kind is the moocher and the looter....
The function of the Rand catechism, in the lives of the people who hold it, is to convert what would otherwise be the moral problem of being an extractive elite into the moral satisfaction of being an unjustly subjugated natural ruler....
FDR did not call them socialists. FDR did not call them communists. FDR called them economic royalists, and the choice of word was deliberate and devastating. The Revolution had been fought against royalism. The colonists’ grievance was not against capitalism, which did not yet exist as a coherent system, but against a hereditary and chartered class that had captured political authority and was using it to extract from the productive population. The 1776 fight was a fight against royalism. The 1936 fight, FDR said, was the same fight in modern dress. He read the passage that should still be read in every high-school civics class and is read in essentially none of them.
"Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital — all undreamed of by the fathers — the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.
"It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."
The doctrine FDR was reaching back to had been universal at the founding and was, by 1936, almost forgotten. It was the doctrine of the corporation as a trust.
A corporation, as the founders understood it and as American law understood it for the first century of the republic, was not a private entity that the state was somehow obliged to leave alone. A corporation was a privilege granted by a state legislature, for a specific public purpose, for a limited duration, under specific conditions, revocable if the conditions were violated. The legal name for this was the charter, and the charter was understood as a trust. The corporation existed because the public had granted it permission to exist. The permission carried obligations. The obligations were enforceable. The charter could be revoked.
This was not Marxism. The doctrine predated Marx by generations. Hamilton, who is the canonical American defender of corporate enterprise, defended the Bank of the United States precisely on the grounds that its charter would be granted by Congress for the public benefit. Jefferson, who opposed Hamilton on almost every operational question, agreed entirely on this point. Madison’s Federalist 44 treats corporate charters as squarely within legislative authority. John Marshall, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward in 1819, affirmed that a charter was a contract — but in doing so he confirmed that it was a legislatively granted contract, not an inherent right of the corporators....
Elon Musk is the cleanest contemporary instance. He has bought a city in Texas and is incorporating it as a municipality under his personal control, with his employees as its residents and his corporate authority as its governance. He runs Starlink as a sovereign communications network and has personally turned it on and off in active war zones based on his private foreign-policy preferences. He has installed himself inside the federal government via the Department of Government Efficiency while simultaneously running the largest private space program in human history under contracts with the same federal government, an arrangement of self-dealing that would have been illegal under the regulatory regimes the Progressive Era and the New Deal constructed and that proceeds in 2026 because those regimes have been dismantled....
Peter Thiel is the philosophical version of the same project. He has been explicit, in print since his 2009 Cato Unbound essay, that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, and the seventeen years since then have been a sustained operational program premised on that belief. He has funded Curtis Yarvin, who has been the most candid postliberal in American intellectual life — the proposal is the patchwork, the world divided into competing corporate sovereignties, each ruled by a CEO-monarch, citizens reduced to customers who can exit but cannot vote....
The Bitcoin maximalist project is the financial infrastructure for the same vision. Bitcoin in its maximalist form is not a currency. Bitcoin in its maximalist form is a sovereign-wealth instrument for a class of people who intend to hold wealth outside the jurisdiction of any state....
Henry A. Giroux, May 30, 2026 [LA Progressive]
Trump’s ever-expanding regime of corruption is no longer simply hidden financial misconduct but a public display of sociopathic avarice designed to normalize greed, lawlessness, unconstrained power, and the collapse of civic accountability. It reflects a politics of moral nihilism in which fascism no longer appears as a distant threat, but as the future already taking shape.
As a badge of honor, Trump embraces corruption not simply as a mode of governance, but as a spectacle designed to legitimate greed, cruelty, and unchecked power. It functions as what Dominic Wetzel has called the “pornification of the American dream,” a culture in which excess, lawlessness, and predation are celebrated as signs of success and strength. In Trump’s America, corruption metastasizes into a theater of cruelty and violence, saturating political life with the values of fear, spectacle, and disposability. It feeds a broader architecture of domination rooted in toxic hierarchies of race, class, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism, while turning lawlessness and untethered aggression into forms of political entertainment.
Corruption, in this sense, is more than a symptom of institutional decay, moral depravity, or political vulgarity. It becomes one of the central pedagogical and political mechanisms through which fascist politics takes hold, eroding democratic values while legitimating a culture organized around brutality, humiliation, and civic abandonment. In this formulation, corruption functions as a kind of fascist staging ground, creating the conditions that nourish what Jonathan Crary calls in Scorched Earth an “implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration.”
The Wild, Strange Case Todd Blanche Can’t Seem to Escape
[Vanity Fair, via The Big Picture, June 02, 2026]
Vanity Fair on the case that keeps following the President’s lawyer-turned-deputy-AG. The kind of slow-burn legal exposure that doesn’t show up in cable coverage until it does. A fake Mossad agent. Twin grifters. The nation’s top lawman. A head-spinning legal drama has the attorney general fighting off accusations of forgery, malpractice, and more.
Henry Burke, June 4, 2026 [The New Republic]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Myths vs. facts about the minimum wage - An FAQ on the economics of increasing wage floors
Sebastian Martinez Hickey, June 1, 2026 [Economic Policy Institute]
Does raising the minimum wage increase unemployment?
In brief: No. High-quality economic research finds increasing the minimum wage does not significantly impact employment.
In detail: The 90% of high-quality economic studies show that increasing the minimum wage boosts wages for low-wage workers without meaningfully increasing unemployment. These studies use statistical tools and empirical methods to measure what happens to workers before and after a minimum wage increase, controlling for other factors that can impact employment. The consistency of these findings across time, place, and level of increase is powerful evidence that increasing the minimum wage creates a healthier low-wage labor market.
An increase in the minimum wage raises the cost of labor for businesses by definition, but the economy can absorb these changes through channels of adjustment including decreased turnover, modest price increases (see Question 2), lower profits, and the reallocation of workers to more productive firms. Even if a minimum wage increase leads businesses to adjust their staffing levels, what workers are likely to experience are decreases in hours worked or increased time between jobs, not categorical unemployment. Higher hourly earnings can more than offset these reductions, leaving many workers with greater total income even if they are working fewer hours.
Will raising the minimum wage cause inflation?
In brief: No. Increasing the minimum wage does not meaningfully increase prices....
The World Bank and the Origins of Chinese State Capitalism
Kevin Byrne Keller, June 5 2026 [JustMoney.org]
This article reconsiders the legacy of the World Bank, one of the world’s most powerful international economic organizations. Scholars typically claim that the Bank helped create and maintain a US-centered neoliberal international economic order. This article demonstrates that it also undermined that very same order. It uncovers the history of how the World Bank supported the astonishing rise of Chinese state-owned enterprises—and, more broadly, Chinese state capitalism. This article describes the work of the World Bank in China in the 1980s and 1990s. During this time, the Bank supported Chinese leaders in reforming—but not privatizing—China’s state-owned enterprises. Much of this work took the form of advising and knowledge production. Across various high-profile reports and conferences, the World Bank helped the Chinese government explore different methods of revitalizing the state-owned sector. This work was not a fringe part of the Bank’s global programming. For much of 1990s, China was the single largest recipient of World Bank funding. By developing this historical account, the article deepens our understanding not only of the World Bank, but also of global neoliberalism. It draws out three principal insights. Fist, the article reveals that although neoliberalism was a global regime—in that it reached much of the world—it was never a universal one. Second, the article observes that the World Bank did not act straightforwardly as an agent for the United States, despite the considerable control that the United States held over the institution. Finally, the article suggests that by investigating the work of international organizations in China in the final decades of the twentieth century, scholars can find new linkages between two major historical developments of recent decades: the decline of neoliberalism and the global rise of state capitalism.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
One Company May Know Everything About You
David Dayen, June 01, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Monopoly Round-Up: After SpaceX Goes Public, Does the Stock Market Finally Fall?
Matt Stoller, May 31, 2026
Elon Musk's SpaceX IPO is a very scary moment for the stock market. And AI is getting repriced in an ugly way as corporate America finally has to start paying for the tools.
PHILLY COPS ADMIT THAT THEY’RE TRACKING “FIRST AMENDMENT ACTIVITY” CRITICAL OF AI
Matt Sledge, Sam Biddle , June 1, 2026 [The Intercept]
Palantir. IT’S WORSE Than You Think
[Double Down News, via Naked Capitalism 06-06-2026]
Criticizing the everything machine
Cory Doctorow, June 6, 2026 [Pluralistic]
... I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."
Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:
https://peoples-things.ghost.io/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype/
AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.
What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/the-ai-will-continue/#until-morale-improves ....
Cory Doctorow, June 5, 2026 [Pluralistic]
... Computers are like the genies of legend, bloody-minded literalists who will do exactly what you say, in the way that is perversely furthest from what you mean. To get a computer to do anything, you must first understand it to a degree that far exceeds the understanding needed to explain something to any other human, even a small child.
To take just one example: yesterday, I was on a plane, and the seatback video started cycling through its video-on-demand offerings. All of the movie titles that began with "the" were rewritten to put "the" at the end of the title (for example, "The Sting" was written as "Sting, The"). It's obvious why the system's designer had done this: we expect to find movies whose titles begin with "The" alphabetized under their second word ("The Sting" should appear between "Star Wars" and "Story of a Love Affair"; not between "The Godfather" and "The Untouchables").
I remember when I learned this from my elementary school's teacher-librarian, when I was seven and my class got a tutorial on the school library's card catalog. The librarian explained this principle to us in a matter of minutes, as part of a longer set of instructions, and still, it stuck with me forever.
But here we are, 48 years later, and we still haven't standardized a way to get computers to grasp this foundational principle of alphabetization. Many different databases handle this, to be sure, but it's so inconsistent across so many platforms that someone at the head-end of the video distribution system that feeds American Airlines' VOD system decided, "Fuck it, I'm just gonna put the 'The' at the end of these titles."
Computers are stupid, in other words, which means that the people who program them have to have smarts enough for both of them. Unfortunately for our entire species and civilization, the software industry has historically valued skill at writing efficient and reliable software over writing software that adequately reflects reality. There is an entire genre of lists that illustrate the problem with this; the "falsehoods programmers believe" lists:
Collapse of independent news media
In a world of Bari Weisses, be a Scott Pelley! The oligarch control of media!
Dean Obeidallah, Jun 04, 2026
We are living through an intense time of right-wing oligarchs seeking to take control of U.S. news media. Their goal is to use these outlets to peddle propaganda in support of their agenda be it tax cuts, less regulations or a DOJ that allows mergers so less competition. To do that, though, the oligarchs need to not only buy the large media outlets, they also need to then install people who will help them peddle their propaganda—and eliminate any who stand in their way.
That is why Bari Weiss is the head of CBS News and long time 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley is out....
Climate and environmental crises
Arctic ocean passes ‘irreversible’ chemical tipping point
[Oceanographic Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 06-01-2026]
Trump Administration to Dismantle Ocean Monitoring System Critical to Climate and Ocean Research
[The Inertia, via Naked Capitalism 06-03-2026]
Democrats' political malpractice
The Billionaires Have Two Parties: The Great Plains Has One
Les Leopold, June 01, 2026
...During the Reagan era (from his election in 1980 and up through the early 1990s) Great Plains Democrats resurrected the populist traditions of the late 19th-century People’s Party, the progressives of the early 20th century, and the Nonpartisan league a few years later. The core ideology of this tradition focused on protecting family farmers and workers from the rapaciousness of big corporations and banks. The political opponents of the Reagan Revolution followed in their path and enough of them were in Congress in 1983 to form the Congressional Populist Caucus.
These 14 congresspersons adopted the populist moniker and fought against corporatized free trade deals, the high Federal Reserve interest rates, plant closings, anti-union legislation, and farm foreclosures. And they did so in alliance with, and in support of, dozens of community groups including abortion and gay rights organizations.But in 1990, a powerful segment of the Democratic establishment created the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and made a firm decision to embrace corporations, agribusiness, free trade, and Wall Street deregulation, while moving away from labor unions and family farmers. In the 1992 presidential primaries, Bill Clinton was the Democratic Leadership Council’s representative, while Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa represented the progressive populists. As we know, Clinton won.
In When the Democrats Lost the Heartland Corey Haala shows that this turn to neoliberalism was not the inevitable result of technological advances, nor was it predetermined by the iron laws of capitalism. Rather, it was a victory by one interest group within the Democratic Party over another, and the consequences were felt immediately.
After the centrists won, they starved the Great Plains Democrats of funds and legislative victories, leaving them with little to offer their constituents—the populist-oriented farmers and workers struggling to survive against corporate power....
When Obama Gave Up On The Public Option
David Sirota and Andrew Perez, JUne 5, 2026 [The Lever]
Newly obtained records show the former president once snarkily rejected calls to bypass Senate roadblocks to deliver public health insurance — the same barriers he now condemns.
Resistance
Hawaii Is Overthrowing Citizens United
[The Lever, June 4, 2026]
Hawaii just enacted a groundbreaking law challenging Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that unleashed unlimited corporate spending in elections. It’s a major victory against big money’s grip on democracy — but powerful interests are already gearing up for a legal showdown.
On today’s Lever Time, David Sirota speaks with Hawaii state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, one of the law’s architects, about how the measure works, why Hawaii is leading the fight against Citizens United, and why reformers believe they finally have a path to victory.
Engelhardt, A Personal TomDispatch Farewell (of Sorts)
TomDispatch, June 4, 2026 [via Naked Capitalism 06-06-2026]
[Yves Smith: "All good things must come to an end, and sadly that includes TomDispatch (although as you will see, many of its authors will continue to hold forth at The Intercept)"]
Tom Engelhardt [TomDispatch]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The corruption of the [North Carolina] State Board of Elections
Thomas Mills, June 04, 2026 [PoliticsNC]
State Auditor Dave Boliek is weaponizing the State Board of Elections to make voting more difficult for young people....
According to Republican members of the Jackson County Board of Elections, Boliek’s office pressured them to vote to remove an early voting site from Western Carolina University. Republicans control the board with a three-two majority. One GOP member, Jay Pavey, said, “I’ve been told that if I don’t vote a particular way, that they will do whatever they have to do to remove me from the board.” Jackson County Board Chair Bill Thompson admitted that he was told to eliminate the student voting site by Boliek’s office. Another member, Wes Hanemeyer, resigned saying, “If third parties feel they can demand that I take a completely illogical path, that means they are convinced they have control.”
Tellingly, the North Carolina Republican Party applauded Boliek, not the members of the Jackson County GOP.
Republicans gained control of the state board of elections after the legislature voted to strip the agency from the governor’s office and give it to the Auditor. They tried that before but the Supreme Court stopped them. The new court with a GOP majority, led by Chief Justice Paul Newby, an unabashed partisan, reversed the ruling and allowed the transfer. Ever since, Boliek has packed the SBOE with partisan operatives instead of election professionals....
The South Rises Again
The Return of the Dixiecrat South
Jacob S. Hacker, Zoltan Hajnal, G. Agustin Markarian and Mackenzie Lockhart, June 3, 2026 [The American Prospect]
In the pre-1960s South, which Supreme Court Republicans have just brought back from the dead, Black citizens have no voice in federal lawmaking....
What makes the difference in districts with large Black populations? The answer is simple: They elect Democrats. Black Americans see their preferences reflected in their representative’s votes about 72 percent of the time when represented by a Democrat, but only 39 percent of the time when represented by a Republican. In other words, Black constituents lose a third more often on salient policy debates when the letter after a member of Congress’s name is an R rather than a D.
Black Americans are most affected by Callais, because of their concentration in the South and because of the grim history that helps explain that concentration. However, we find the same pattern for Latino and Asian American voters. Latino voters win on policy 66 percent of the time when represented by a Democrat compared with 45 percent when represented by a Republican. For Asian American voters, the win rates are 67 percent vs. 47 percent. For white constituents, by contrast, the gap is modest. And, in fact, they also do better when Democrats represent them—about three percentage points better, on average (58 percent vs. 55 percent).
This partisan effect is not entirely about Black, Latino, and Asian voters being more strongly Democratic, though that’s an important part of it. We find smaller but still significant effects when we take into account each voter’s party identification. When represented by a Republican, for example, Black Republicans are more poorly represented than are white Republicans. Indeed, even in so-called split delegations in the Senate, where one senator is a Democrat and the other a Republican, Democrats better represent voters of color, despite the fact that both senators are representing the same electorate overall....
For voters of color, then, who represents them is not just a matter of “identity politics.” It has direct, measurable consequences for whether their policy preferences are reflected in Washington. Cohen’s 19 years in Congress were 19 years in the 72 percent column for Black Memphians. The new Republican districts will put them in the 39 percent column.
This district-level story adds up. When we examine overall policy outcomes—whether voters of color get more of what they want from government—the partisan gap is stark. When Democrats control the presidency or Congress, and especially when they control both, Black, Latino, and Asian voters win on policy at least as often as white voters. When Republicans are in control, Black voters lose seven to nine percentage points more often than their white counterparts. Latino and Asian voters face similar gaps under Republican control, losing four to seven percentage points more often than white voters....
Hamilton Nolan, June 01, 2026 [How Things Work]
Civic republicanism
NASA in your house: 10 inventions that revolutionized everyday life
The American Facts, Jun 4, 2026
[TW: "...to Promote the General Welfare...."]
Mike Brock, May 31, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
... The American Founders did not write we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal because they had achieved a perfect union. They had not. The Constitution they wrote contained the three-fifths compromise, permitted the international slave trade for twenty years, gave us the Electoral College and the Senate’s small-state bias and a hundred other features any honest critic can list. They knew it was imperfect. They wrote, in the Preamble’s first sentence, that the purpose of the document was to form a more perfect Union. Not a perfect one. A more perfect one. The verb was comparative. The verb conceded that the union they were founding was already imperfect and required a labor across generations to be made less so....
That labor is the relay I described two pieces back. It is the inheritance the dead handed us and that we are required, by the fact of having received it, to hand forward in better condition than we received it. The labor is the substance of citizenship....
The labor has had enemies in every generation. In the generation of the founders, the enemies were the Tories who wanted to remain a colony and the slavers who wanted to remain slavers. In the generation of Lincoln, the enemies were the Confederates and the Copperheads. In the generation of the Reconstruction, the enemies were the Klan and the Redeemers. In the generation of the Progressives, the enemies were the trusts and the Pinkertons. In the generation of the New Deal, the enemies were the America Firsters and the German-American Bund. In the generation of the Civil Rights Movement, the enemies were the segregationists and the Bull Connors. In our generation the enemies are postliberals on one flank and campists on the other, and the donors who fund both flanks from the same petro-AI rentier coalition that has been buying our democracy on the installment plan since the day the Soviet Union collapsed.
The labor has had enemies. The labor has also had stewards. In every generation the stewards have been the people who refused both flanks and kept walking the middle road, which is to say, kept walking the road of the Preamble. Frederick Douglass kept walking. Lincoln kept walking. The grand-children of the abolitionists who founded the NAACP kept walking. Eleanor Roosevelt kept walking. John Lewis kept walking across the bridge at Selma while the segregationists came at him from one flank and the Black nationalist critique of nonviolence came at him from the other, and he kept walking because the road he was walking was older than either flank, and the destination he was walking toward was older too. The destination was a more perfect union. He believed, as Lincoln had believed, that the words on the parchment meant what they said and could be made, by labor, to mean it more truly with each generation....
This is the relay. This is what we have been handed. This is what the operators on both flanks have been trying, in our generation, to convince us is no longer worth carrying.
The postliberals say the union cannot be perfected because the Constitution is exhausted. They say the experiment has failed. They quote Patrick Deneen and they read Curtis Yarvin and they say what J. D. Vance said to James Pogue: that the regime is decadent, that the answer is a national CEO, or what’s called a dictator, that the architecture must be replaced. They mean what they say. They have the donor list to back it up. They have, by now, the executive branch. They are not pretending. The piece I wrote yesterday on the war on terror named the operators behind them. The piece I wrote two days ago on the cover stories named the apparatus.
The campists say the union cannot be perfected because the union is the problem. They say American constitutionalism is a fig leaf for American empire and that the only honest politics is the politics of supporting whichever rival empire is currently against us. They mean what they say. They have the funding pipeline I documented this morning to back it up. They have the YouTube channels and the Substacks and the conference invitations and the tote bags reading Communications as Solidarity. They are not pretending either. The Singham network is real. The Tenet Media indictment is real. The Russophile Congress representative credential is real.
Both flanks have given up on the Preamble. Both flanks have given up on the verb to form. Both flanks have decided that the more-perfect-union project is over, either because the founders’ design is now a prison or because the founders’ design was always a fraud....
The middle road is the road of the people who have not given up on the verb.
It is the road of the people who can hold, simultaneously, that American empire has done immense damage and must be opposed in every place it does damage, and that the American constitutional order is one of the few inheritances on the planet under which an immigrant child can grow up to be a senator, a Black sharecropper’s granddaughter can grow up to be a vice president, a Catholic Pope can write an encyclical on the dignity of the person and have it read on the floor of the legislature of a republic founded by Protestants who did not trust Catholics. It is the road of the people who can hold that the Founders were imperfect men whose imperfections were written into the document, and that the document also contained the keys for its own correction — the amendment process, the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, the suffrage extensions, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the long unfolding of we the people from a phrase that originally meant white male property-holders to a phrase that now means, in law if not yet in fact, all of us.
The middle road is the road of the people who refuse to confuse the imperfection of the inheritance with the impossibility of the labor. The road of the people who refuse to let the operators on either flank persuade them that the verb to form has been retired....
There is a religious dimension to this that I cannot avoid and will not pretend to.
Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, issued on May 15 of this year and formally promulgated on May 25, is the most serious answer I have read to the project Peter Thiel laid out in his Palazzo Orsini Antichrist lectures in Rome in March. Thiel’s lectures argued, more or less openly, that the katechon — the restrainer that holds back the Antichrist in Saint Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians — must in our moment be a strong man who will suspend the normal order to prevent the worse strong man from arriving. The argument is two thousand years old. Augustine refuted it. Constantine partially refuted it by accident. Every emperor who has tried it since has produced exactly the worse strong man the argument promised to prevent.
Leo’s answer in Magnifica Humanitas is the older answer....
The tedious power of storytelling (02 Jun 2026) must-we-pretend
Cory Doctorow, June 2, 2026 [Pluralistic]
[TW: Complements Brock's article, above]
Business Ought Never Be Politics. The country is for people.
Mike Brock, May 31, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
...Thomas Jefferson, in his correspondence with Madison and Adams over decades, was explicit about what would destroy the American experiment if it were not constantly fought against. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. The aristocracy of our monied corporations. The phrase is from 1816. The thing he was warning against was the thing that has now happened. The dare he predicted is the dare we have lost.
James Madison, in Federalist 10, gave the most analytically careful statement of the problem in the founding literature. The latent causes of faction are sown in the nature of man, and the most enduring source of faction is the various and unequal distribution of property. Madison did not write Federalist 10 to celebrate factions. He wrote it to explain how the structure of the constitution would attempt to prevent the most dangerous faction — the faction of concentrated economic interest — from capturing the federal government. The structure of the constitution is an answer to the question of how to keep concentrated capital from converting itself into political dominion. The answer Madison proposed — separation of powers, federalism, the extended republic, the multiplicity of competing interests — was the answer of someone who took the problem with full seriousness and who knew the answer would have to be defended in every generation if it was going to hold.
Theodore Roosevelt, in his Malefactors of Great Wealth speech in 1907, gave the canonical Progressive Era statement. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. TR was not a socialist. TR was a Republican president who had been a cowboy and a hunter and a colonel and a trust-buster. TR understood that the survival of the American constitutional order required the active maintenance of the boundary between concentrated capital and political authority, and that the maintenance required state power capable of breaking up the trusts when the trusts grew large enough to threaten self-government. The Republican party of 1907 understood this. The Republican party of 1907 is not the Republican party of 2026.
Louis Brandeis, in Other People’s Money and in his Supreme Court opinions and in his lifelong campaign against what he called the curse of bigness, made the operational case. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. The sentence is the cleanest statement in the American tradition of the doctrine I am defending in this piece. Brandeis did not say that we may have democracy or we may have markets. He did not say that we may have democracy or we may have capitalism. He said democracy is incompatible with concentrated wealth, and he said it because concentrated wealth will, by its nature and not by any individual malice, convert itself into political power until the political authority of the people has been displaced. Brandeis’s career was the operational answer to Madison’s analytical question. The answer was antitrust enforcement, securities regulation, banking regulation, labor law, the progressive income tax, the estate tax. The answer was the wall. The wall that Brandeis and the Progressives built and that the New Deal reinforced and that the Great Society completed was the wall that prevented the American republic from becoming what every prior commercial republic in human history had become, which was an oligarchy with constitutional forms.
The wall was torn down. The tearing down took forty years and it was conducted by a political project whose participants understood at every step what they were doing and what the consequences would be.
The project’s intellectual origins are documentable. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman built the academic argument that the regulatory state was a slippery slope to totalitarianism. The argument was wrong on its premises and catastrophic in its application but it provided cover for what would otherwise have been a transparent class project. The Powell Memo of 1971, written by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell on behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, laid out the operational plan. American business needed to fund think tanks, capture law schools, train a generation of judges, build an alternative media ecosystem, and recapture the federal government from the New Deal coalition that had been running it for forty years. The plan was executed. The funding came from the same families and corporate interests that would benefit from the wall coming down. The Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, the Bradley Foundation, the Koch network. The think tanks were built — Heritage, Cato, AEI, the Federalist Society. The law schools were captured, one chair at a time. The judges were trained. The media was built. The government was recaptured.....
