Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 14, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
‘Sounds a Lot Like a Nuclear Threat’: Trump Floats ‘Ultimate Alternative’ If Iran Talks Collapse
Jake Johnson, June 13, 2026 [CommonDreams]
President Donald Trump claimed Saturday that the US and Iran are on track to sign a diplomatic agreement this weekend, but added that “we have the ultimate alternative” if the process doesn’t “work out.”
“The ‘ultimate alternative’ sounds a lot like a nuclear threat,” Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, wrote in response to the president’s Truth Social post. “Not the first time Trump has hinted at it.”
Trump not violating any laws
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law' Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’ Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein File
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, June 10, 2026 [New York Times]
On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files....
Mike Brock, Jun 10, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have a book coming out. The book is called Time Change, and Simon & Schuster has put substantial weight behind it, and the New York Times Magazine has run the set-piece excerpt this morning. The piece is framed, with the careful gentleness of the trade, as an inside look at the White House freakout over the Epstein files. The frame is not what the piece is.
What the piece is is a scene. The scene is the John F. Kennedy Conference Room inside the White House Situation Room complex, on the evening of July 17, 2025, at approximately six in the evening. The Vice President of the United States is in the chair. Around the table are the Chief of Staff, the Counsel, the Press Secretary, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, the Communications Director, the Deputy Attorney General, a personal attorney to the President, another personal attorney to the President, and the Deputy Chief of Staff for Legislative, Political, and Public Affairs. On speakerphone — on speakerphone, the detail to which I will return — are the Attorney General of the United States and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The President is not in the room. The President is not in the building.
The Vice President says, this is a significant issue. He is described by people who were present as visibly anxious. He is, according to the reporting, advocating internally for the full release of all Epstein-related files held by the Justice Department, and for a congressional inquiry. The Chief of Staff has told colleagues, in some venue or other that Haberman and Swan have access to, that the Vice President has shown tendencies toward conspiracy theories. Another senior official has told the reporters that the Vice President has been aggressively pursuing the Epstein issue since the memo’s release.
That is the scene. That is what we are looking at.
I have written, in these pages, that the man at the center of this administration is evil, and that the orbit around him has chosen, every day, to be where it is. I asked, in that piece, why anybody around him is tolerating the insanity. I am writing this piece because today’s excerpt is the beginning of an answer, and the answer is not what some readers wanted to hear. The answer is that some of them are, in fact, no longer tolerating it. They are positioning. They are leaking. They are sitting for interviews. They are, in private rooms, telling Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan things that they know will appear in books published by Simon & Schuster and excerpted in the New York Times Magazine. They are, in other words, beginning the work of constructing the record by which they will, later, explain what they were doing in the room....
Mike Brock, June 08, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
... Why is anybody around him tolerating this insanity?
The question is not rhetorical. I want it asked out loud, by name, in the rooms where it matters, by the people who go home at night and tell themselves they are the adults in the room. I want it asked of the Cabinet members who have signed on to be the cabinet of a man whose pathology is not a secret and has never been a secret. I want it asked of the aides who walk down the hallway with their phones in their hands and pretend they did not hear what they just heard. I want it asked of the Senate Republicans who have voted, vote after vote, to let this man put his name and his face and his will on the institutions of the United States. I want it asked of the donors who have written the checks. I want it asked of the lawyers who have drafted the briefs. I want it asked of the press secretaries who have stood at the podium and said the words they were told to say. I want it asked of every single one of them, and I want them to have to answer it, and I want the answer to be on the record.
There is no good answer. There is only the answer of careerism, and the answer of cowardice, and the answer of the ambient corruption of being in the orbit of a man whose pathology you have to pretend not to see. The aides who tell their friends he is not really like that. The Cabinet members who tell themselves they are the bulwark. The Senate Republicans who tell themselves they are the moderating influence. The donors who tell themselves they are funding tax policy. The legal team that tells itself it is doing the work of the law. Each of these is a lie....
Trump asking (anti)Republicans in Congress to void first-term impeachments
Joyce Vance, June 12, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
...there’s a 1984, “Let’s rewrite history” moment tonight. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has a new gambit to rewrite history. He is “pushing lawmakers to pass a resolution aimed at voiding his first-term impeachments.”....
‘Abolish ICE,’ Summer Lee Says After Haitian Immigrant Daphy Michel’s Death Ruled a Homicide
Jessica Corbett, June 12, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The U.S. Took Over Venezuela’s Oil Industry. Where Has All the Money Gone?
[Council on Foreign Relations, via Letters from an American, June 11, 2026, Heather Cox Richardson]
... Based on tanker-tracking data from Bloomberg and reports on discounts applied to Venezuelan crude, the estimated value of U.S.-controlled oil exports has increased from $600 million in January (about 380,000 barrels per day) to about $3.7 billion in April alone (about 1.1 million barrels per day). The largest recipients of Venezuelan oil since January 3 have been the United States (43 percent), India (26 percent), and Spain (8 percent).
The Trump administration has shared some details with Congress. Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified in January that $300 million had flowed through a “short-term” account in Qatar and been disbursed to Venezuela, while another $200 million was “still sitting” in the account. He indicated the administration would conduct a retroactive audit on the funds that moved through the Qatar account. The following month, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said during a press interview that the full $500 million had been transferred to Venezuela and that the administration would use U.S. Treasury accounts going forward.
Alarm Grows Over Vought Plan to Give Trump Cronies Control of Federal Grant Money
Jake Johnson, June 13, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Letters from an America, June 13, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jun 14, 2026
Last night, while workers were putting up scaffolding at the Kennedy Center, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters held a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial in advance of the UFC cage matches to be held at the White House on Trump’s 80th birthday on Sunday. Trump sent the United States Army Herald Trumpets, the U.S. Army ensemble chiefly responsible for playing the entrance and exit fanfares for the President of the United States, to open the event.
The fighters walked from Lincoln’s statue down the steps of the memorial through the Armed Forces Full Honor Cordon, a pathway formed between two groups made up of sixteen service members in dress uniforms. This is the U.S. military’s highest ceremonial formation, usually reserved for heads of state, foreign dignitaries, senior officials, and funerals for military heroes.
Strategic Political Economy
Brett Wilkins, June 11, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Eighty-eight corporations that paid no federal income tax last year spent roughly $852 million on US campaign contributions and lobbying during recent election cycles, a report published Thursday revealed.
The report, “The Current Price of Zero,” was authored by Eileen O’Grady, a researcher at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. The publication draws upon an analysis published in April by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) showing that at least 88 of the nation’s largest companies paid no federal corporate income tax in fiscal year 2025, despite reporting combined US pretax income of around $105 billion.
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
'He Didn’t Carry a Weapon': Israel Is Killing Lebanon's Medics at an Unprecedented Rate
Ali awada, June 10, 2026 [Zeteo]
The United States is Building a Military Base in Gaza. However Bad You Think It is, It's Worse.
Shaun King, June 13, 2026 [The North Star]
... According to an Israel Hayom report by Danny Zaken, the U.S. military has begun building a large base near the Gaza border, not far from the Re’im military camp. The report says the base is intended to serve as a combined military and civilian headquarters for organizations and forces expected to operate in the area under what it describes as the Trump plan....
... if the first major infrastructure of “peace” is a military base, then we should ask what kind of peace is actually being planned....
This becomes even more disturbing when we place the new report beside what was already reported earlier this year. In February, The Guardian reported that Trump officials were planning a 5,000-person military base inside Gaza, based on Board of Peace contracting records reviewed by the outlet. The proposed compound, according to The Guardian, would spread across more than 350 acres and serve as a military operating base for a future International Stabilization Force....
What the Wounds Are Telling Us [De Volkskrant, via Naked Capitalism 06-08-2026]
[TW: Brutal and ugly. Force yourself to read through it entirely.]
Doctors in Gaza observed a disturbing pattern: children with a single gunshot wound to the head or chest, a sign that they had been deliberately targeted. This emerges from research by de Volkskrant, which spoke with the doctors who are among the last international eyewitnesses.... Over the past few months, de Volkskrant spoke with seventeen doctors and one nurse from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. Since October 2023, they have worked in six hospitals and four clinics across Gaza, often returning once or even twice. Most of them have extensive experience working in crisis zones such as Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Ukraine. At the paper’s request, they handed over hundreds of photos and videos of patients, X-rays, medical notes, and diary entries. They talked for hours. They laid bare what they saw in their operating rooms. And they all faced the same question: what are the wounds telling us about the war? ....
Russia / Ukraine
[Meduz, via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2026]
Zelensky & Putin Both Mention How a U.S.-Backed Drone Swarm Targeted Putin’s Home and Family
Matt Bivens [via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2026]
[Events in Ukraine, via Naked Capitalism 06-10-2026]
... The Russians have found ways of partially replacing Starlink, but it remains a platform without parallel. When connected via Starlink, drones are immune to enemy jamming. They can also fly much lower to the ground, making them very hard to intercept.
One area where Starlink is particularly invaluable is at sea. Drone advisor to Ukraine’s minister of defense Sergey Bezkrestnov wrote on May 10 how the disconnection of Starlink ruined Russia’s long-term and increasingly successful project to develop Unmanned Sea Vehicles (USV)....
Russia has been developing its own alternative to Starlink since 2020, called ‘Rassvet’, or dawn. On March 23 of this year, after a number of experimental trials beginning in 2023, the first set of 16 actually functioning satellites were launched into space....
The most obvious problem with Rassvet is its scale. The project aims to launch more satellites into orbit each year, reaching 156 devices in 2026, 292 in 2027( allowing for the full launch of commercial services), and 318 in 2028. There are meant to be 900 by 2035. Starlink, meanwhile, has 10,000, ensuring constant connection at any location on earth.
With only 16 satellites, Russian forces will receive two to three 15-20-minute windows each day when they can connect to Rassvet. That’s Militarnyi’s calculation, with Bezkrestnov having a lower estimate of one 6-10 minute window. According to Bezkrestnov, 250 will need to be in orbit for constant connection.
If things go to plan, there will be more than enough Rassvet satellites by the end of 2027....
Oligarchy
‘This Is Oligarchy’: Nearly 100 Billionaires Are Funding Susan Collins’ Reelection Bid
Jake Johnson, June 12, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Felonomics
U.S. airline fuel costs surge 78% [Drop Site Daily, June 9, 2026]
U.S. airlines spent nearly $6.5 billion on jet fuel in April—up 78 percent from $3.6 billion a year earlier despite consuming slightly less fuel, according to Bureau of Transportation Statistics data released Monday. The International Air Transport Association now forecasts global airline net profits will fall to $23 billion in 2026, down from a prior estimate of $41 billion, as jet fuel prices averaging $152 a barrel push the industry’s total fuel bill to roughly $350 billion, costs which have prompted American Airlines, Lufthansa, Air Canada, and other major airlines to cancel routes and cut schedules.
Paul Krugman [via Naked Capitalism 06-13-2026]
Letters from an American, June 9, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, June 09, 2026
An investigation by Tom Bergin, Michelle Conlin, Koh Gui Qing, and Tom Wilson of Reuters today shows that the Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion in their crypto currency licensing adventures since Trump began his second term. It also shows that more than a million people who invested in their enterprises have suffered at least $2.3 billion in losses.
The journalists report that the investors they interviewed believed that Trump’s position as president and “what they perceived as his business acumen” guaranteed they would make money. “Some said they still hold on to the hope that Trump will make things right. Others expressed regret, anger and embarrassment.”
Letters from an American, June 6, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, June 07, 2026
Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) notes that the $70 billion in tax money Republicans just gave to ICE and Border Patrol could provide free childcare for 1.3 million children through September 2028, cover the annual cost of groceries for about 10.7 million U.S. households, provide a year of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to 31 million Americans, expand the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits for at least a year, cancel about 31.5% of Americans’ medical debt, and end homelessness for about eight years.
Trump DOJ killed criminal Clean Water Act investigation into Sen. Jim Justice’s coal empire
[Drop Site Daily, June 9, 2026]
The Trump administration shut down a federal criminal investigation into Sen. Jim Justice’s West Virginia coal empire earlier this year after prosecutors said they had a strong case and had already begun gathering evidence, including subpoenaing records and approaching former employees, ProPublica reported Monday. Authorities were investigating potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by companies operated by Sen. Justice’s son, Jay—part of a longer term effort to curtail serial pollution offenses by the family’s Southern Coal company. The Office of the Deputy Attorney General under Todd Blanche ordered prosecutors to stand down before they could fight the company’s legal challenge to the subpoenas, with the DOJ telling ProPublica the probe was “a politically motivated prosecution” inconsistent with the administration’s priorities. Read ProPublica’s full report on the DOJ’s aborted investigation here.
[Drop Site Daily, June 9, 2026]
Donald Trump Jr. secretly acquired a stake in America First Refining, a struggling Texas oil refinery startup that subsequently received a nine-figure investment from India’s Reliance Industries—owned by the Ambani family, whose patriarch had been publicly targeted by the Trump administration over Russian oil purchases just months earlier—according to a new investigation from ProPublica. The investment coincided with a series of U.S. policy wins for Reliance, including a dramatic tariff reduction on India, a license to purchase Venezuelan oil, and a sanctions waiver to buy Russian crude. Read more about the Trump-Ambani connection here.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Congress Just Snuck In Uber Immunity
Luke Goldstein & Freddy Brewster, June 9, 2026 [The Lever]
A must-pass congressional funding package for the nation’s roads, bridges, and public infrastructure includes an industry-friendly carveout that would give ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft legal immunity from car crashes and injuries, according to a review of the bill text by The Lever.
Drivers would be held individually responsible, rather than the apps, unless the platforms were found to be “grossly negligent” or engaged in “criminal wrongdoing,” a much higher bar for bringing lawsuits....
Inevitable Failures: How the Privatization Machine Manufactures Budget Crises
Christopher Armitage, June 07, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
...The problem I’ve encountered in that conversation and in others is that an entire generation of public officials has been educated inside a framework that cannot see the most obvious solution to the problems they face every day....
The framework is simple and almost everyone in American politics accepts it without question: government collects taxes, then decides how to spend them. The conservative version says collect less and spend less. The liberal version says collect more and spend more. But both versions agree on the underlying premise that government is a cost center. A thing that consumes money. The only debate allowed is how much.
Almost no one in mainstream politics is asking the obvious follow-up question: what if the government generated its own revenue? ....
Public enterprise stays off the table for a reason, and it has nothing to do with effectiveness. Nationwide and for decades, major policy schools, think tanks, and donor networks have been training officials to think of government as just a cost center that should hand tax dollars to private enterprise whenever possible....
David Dayen, June 11, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Ryan Cooper, June 10, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Health care crisis
The U.S. Ebola Response Is a Harbinger of Worse Things to Come [MedPage Today, via Naked Capitalism 06-08-2026]
Predatory finance
What Would It Look Like If the AI Bubble Popped?
Matt Stoller, June 11, 2026 [BIG]
... How significant could such a shock be? Dean Baker, who called the 2008 housing crash, has an “AI bubble monitor” where he lays out the scale of what’s happening. The value of the stock market today, close to $80 trillion, is roughly twice what it was at the peak of the tech bubble. That’s 2.5 times the size of the U.S. economy. A fall back to long-term average would cut, according to Baker, $300,000 per household of paper wealth from balance sheets. Others, like AI Now’s Sarah Myers West, are drawing similar conclusions.
Now, just because the stock market is very high doesn’t mean it’s a bubble; the labor share of income is much lower than it was in 2000, meaning what used to go to workers is instead going to capital. While that’s not good for society, it actually is a good non-bubble explanation of why stocks are in nose bleed territory. Several economists recently wrote a paper to that effect, showing that stock market values are relatively constant if you account for the fact that corporations are investing less and paying their workers less, remitting what they would have put into equipment and labor to dividends and buybacks. In terms of free cash flow, which is cash to investors, they argue, the market is valued the same as it was in previous periods.
Or at least it was - now data centers are eating up all that cash flow.
But whether or not cash flow justifies valuations, we shouldn’t overthink this dynamic. A bubble popping is not some odd event. Stock market drawdowns of 50% or more are historically common, though not understood as such today in our heavily financialized economy. For instance, the April swoon that caused Trump to reverse his tariff policy was a decline of just 25%. This decline ended up putting so much political pressure on Trump that he flipped his entire administration policy....
When I wrote my book Goliath, I noticed that the two ingredients in every financial crisis in the 20th and 21st century, from the 1920s bubble to the REIT shocks of the 1970s to the 2008 crisis, were (a) Citibank and (b) Florida real estate. And that’s because most financial shocks occur when there’s a lot of gambling with borrowed money....
Hundreds of Billions in Loans Didn’t Make a Dent in Global Poverty
[WSJ, via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2026] Brings to mind Thomas Frank’s “Nor a Lender Be” from 2016.
Disrupting mainstream economics
Debate Ammunition: Why neoliberals fear MMT
Richard J Murphy, June 11 2026 [Funding the Future]
Wealth is not the biggest problem we face: inequality of power is
Richard J Murphy, June 10 2026 [Funding the Future]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
The Rise of the Desperation Wage
Michael Huggins, June 11, 2026 [LA Progressive]
By tracking behavior, work patterns, and financial need, gig economy companies are using personal data to determine how little they can pay workers and still get the job done.
Recent reporting has confirmed what many working people already feel every day: companies are using personal data to decide the lowest wage someone will accept. What working people call exploitation, Silicon Valley calls innovation.
The seven largest gig platforms in the United States — Amazon Flex, DoorDash, Favor, Instacart, Lyft, Shipt, and Uber — are using data that tracks how long its users stay on an app, what jobs they accept, and how urgently they need income. This algorithm calculates what the employers can pay to get the job done at the lowest rate individuals will accept....
A $500 billion reminder of how the duopoly wins the internet
[Digital Content Next, via Naked Capitalism 06-08-2026]
ICYMI Google and Meta now control half of the global advertising market.
Google's new remote attestation scheme is every bit as terrible as its old remote attestation scheme
Cory Doctorow, June 12, 2026 [Pluralistic]
... But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket's manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer's "dish partners"? What if your toaster refused to toast "unauthorized bread"?
... once a company owns the market – once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers – they could cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it.
That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of. Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases:
https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/google-loses-the-adtech-monopolization
This thrice-convicted monopolist bribed Apple – more than $20b/year – to stay out of the search market:
They cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case
They cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-prevails-landmark-antitrust-case-against-google
Wyoming’s Data-Center Boom Meets the ‘Man Camp’ Backlash
[WSJ, via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2026] Apparently affordable housing can get built quickly.
Breaking: Google liable for hallucinations
Gary Marcus [via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2026]
Visa plugs its payment network into ChatGPT, letting AI agents shop and pay for users
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2026]
Climate and environmental crises
Trump administration dismantles critical ocean-floor observation network
[Oceanographic Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 06-07-2026]
Tom Engelhardt [via Naked Capitalism 06-13-2026: "His first post on his new Substack"]
Solar beats coal in the US electricity mix for the first month ever
[Electrek, via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2026]
Democrats' political malpractice
New Documents Detail Nine-Figure, Silicon Valley–Funded Abundance Movement
Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, June 12, 2026 [The American Prospect]
According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: “Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.” Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.” ....
Rosen and his allies have no need for small-dollar donations or mass-membership politics: They come to do political battle with $260 million annually (yes, each year!) from billionaire benefactors, one document asserts. This “Abundance Capital Stack” is being deployed to organize in all 50 states and consists of a $120 million annual commitment from ex-hedge fund manager and current Meta board member John Arnold, $40 million from Facebook/Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, and $100 million from Steve Ballmer, the L.A. Clippers owner and former Microsoft executive....
In addition, the network has received significant donations from Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former Republican mayor of New York City, and Chris Larsen, co-founder of cryptocurrency firm Ripple. Larsen has been a major donor to Democrats in the past, but his company donated nearly $5 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration and received significant regulatory relief from the Trump-controlled SEC just months later. Ripple has also donated millions to Trump’s ballroom project and has benefited from the president promising to include the company’s XRP coin in his promised “crypto reserve.”....
The first document, a funding pitch for abundance organizing in California for prospective high-net-worth donors, was obtained by Bay Area political watchdog The Phoenix Project and provided to the Prospect. The second document, obtained from a link embedded in the first, is Rosen and his co-founder Misha Chellam’s attempt to lay out the Abundance Network’s view of modern American political history. The memos are undated, but The Phoenix Project obtained one of them in February and Rosen told me they were both from 2025. Both are available to read below....
California Democrat fast-tracks bill to strip telecom oversight from state utility regulator
[Drop Site Daily, June 9, 2026]
California Assemblywoman Tasha Boerner, a Democrat with significant support from the telecom industry, is advancing Assembly Constitutional Amendment 9, which would strip the California Public Utilities Commission of its constitutional authority to regulate telecommunications and ensure affordability. Critics say the bill, which passed the state Assembly 67-1 on May 18 and now goes to the senate, would dismantle one of the country’s most consumer-oriented telecom regulatory bodies, shifting oversight to the state legislature and a broadband office that does not yet exist. A full piece on this bill is available from The American Prospect, here.
Graham Platner and Stock Market Democrats
Matt Stoller, June 9, 2026 [BIG]
...In the early 2020s, debates on the right were what mattered, because there was a fight over how Donald Trump would govern. A party out of power has flexibility to fight over ideas, without the responsibility to govern. The monopolists and proponents of the status quo on security architecture by and large won that debate, and Trump’s second term is the result.
Now the battle is happening among Democrats, and market power is an important subtext. I’ve written about this dynamic before, when I discussed the Democratic Party’s cult of powerlessness, how split Democrats are when it comes to oligarchy, and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s shocking win last year. Right now, as odd as it seems, this debate is happening through the veil of Graham Platner....
Like Mamdani, Platner does not see a world dominated by American finance as a safe place, or worth preserving. And that is a frightening prospect to most political and economic elites, whose positions of prestige and wealth are dependent on this particular architecture, and whose last real challenge was during the Great Financial Crisis....
But if you look at the money in this race, another possible way to understand the situation is to see scandal and electability as a fulcrum to discuss ideology. Today, with AI data centers and foreign wars deeply disliked, it would be extremely unpopular to explicitly articulate a pro-oligarchy and pro-Iran war posture. It’s much easier to allege a sordid scandal. As with Mamdani’s alleged anti-semitism, those topics become the way we have a discussion about the social order.
The money involved in the race gives us a hint of what this debate is about. For instance, the biggest donor to Susan Collins is a hedge fund billionaire named Ken Griffin, who gave her $2.5 million. Griffin became a Collins supporter in 2017, after she single-handedly rescued a tax break that lets hedge funds and private equity firms pay less in taxes. She’s also a big recipient of AIPAC money, and a billionaire-associated SuperPAC has already reserved $23 million in ad spending for her. These are not criticisms of Collins, but simply observations that her constituency is the existing political and economic elite....
The political chatter is deeply connected to this dynamic, because it is a re-run of the fights during the Obama era. The difference is that this time, a post-financial crisis generation has come into adulthood, and they want a crackdown on oligarchy, to the chagrin of the establishment....
Why VA Labor Movement Missed the Warning Signs on Governor Spanberger
[Payday Report, via Naked Capitalism 06-11-2026] We didn’t.
Resistance
Chris Hedges, June 08, 2026
Chris Hedges and Eunice Wong, June 12, 2026
... Accommodating capitalists and their institutions, even with high taxation, regulation, strong labor laws and a prohibition of monopolies, means living amid a hostile force. It is a matter of time before this hostile force organizes to dismantle the social democratic state as happened in Sweden, Britain and Salvador Allende’s Chile.
Liberalism, which Rosa Luxemburg called by its more appropriate name — “opportunism” — is an integral component of capitalism. Liberalism ameliorates capitalism’s excesses. But capitalism, Luxemburg argued, is an enemy that can never be appeased. Liberal reforms blunt resistance, but later, when things grow quiet, are revoked. The last century of labor struggles in the United States provides a case study of Luxemburg’s observation....
Two Simple Steps Toward De-MAGAfication
Ryan Cooper, June 9, 2026 [The American Prospect]
...A recent article in the Journal of Democracy discussed the problems Donald Tusk’s government in Poland is having trying to clean up a similar authoritarian mess left by the prior Law and Justice party, deeming it a “post-illiberal trilemma.” The government sought “quick, effective, and unimpeachably legal solutions to illiberalism,” the authors write, but “it could often fulfill at best only two of these three conditions at once … A key legacy of illiberalism turns out to be a series of institutional traps that are difficult to counteract in the short term without resorting to the same methods that established them in the first place. Inaction leaves the damage unrepaired and demobilizes supporters, while effective action may involve capitulation to the illiberal playbook.” ....
... If judicial review is not to be abolished entirely, as is the case in most other democracies, I’ve come to favor a reform idea recently proposed by Justin Briley in Liberal Currents. He would double the number of circuits and district courts—thus alleviating the severe backlog of cases at those levels—and have the Supreme Court drawn from the entire federal judiciary at random for each individual case....
Christopher Armitage, June 13, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
No public official has been convicted for the crimes against Epstein’s victims, the deals and payments that protected him and his associates, or the ongoing coverup. The only American ever convicted in the entire case is Ghislaine Maxwell. The prosecutors who signed the deals, the deputies he paid, the supervisors who approved his work release, and the officials deciding right now which pages the public sees all kept their careers. We are watching a coverup succeed, for now.
The evidence to change that is already in government files: the court rulings, the inspector general report, the grand jury transcripts, the released emails. All that’s missing is a body with the power to use that evidence and the willingness to prosecute. This article describes that body, a commission of inquiry, built on the clearest precedent we have for holding officials criminally responsible for what they did in office: the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the court the Allies built after World War II to try Nazi officials.
The commission’s mandate would cover every official, at any level of government, whose conduct falls into four categories: committing crimes against Epstein’s victims; protecting Epstein and the people around him from prosecution; accepting money or anything else of value from Epstein in connection with their official duties; hiding any of this conduct afterward. The span runs from the first Palm Beach police report in 2005 to the present, and every claim that follows comes with its receipt linked in the text....
The American Reformation: My New Book, Available Now
Christopher Armitage, June 12, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
The entire legal framework for how states and citizens can break authoritarian capture is in one place now, and the PDF is free.
The free PDF can be found by clicking on this sentence.
The physical book is available for purchase by clicking on this sentence.
The founders built the United States as a country of many governments. Power was spread across the states, the cities, and the counties, so that no single center could ever seize the whole. They built it this way for many reasons, and one of the most important was defense: a republic where authority is divided cannot be captured all at once, because there is no single throne to take.
That design still works today, and most people have never been shown how to use it.
A state can decline to enforce a federal directive it judges unlawful. It can build its own institutions, its own banks, its own public systems, beyond the reach of a hostile federal government. Your state can prosecute a federal official who breaks state law, and no presidential pardon can undo a state conviction. Cities, counties, prosecutors, and ordinary citizens each hold a piece of this power. All of it has deep precedent, used by Americans across the political spectrum, in every era, to protect the people from tyranny.
[TW: "Look, there's a pest in this tree. Let's exterminate it before it threatens this entire forest." An unhelpful and demoralizing reply: "Nah. It is the nature of this forest to play host to pests. There's really nothing in this forest worth saving."]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Cory Doctorow, June 11, 2026 [Pluralistic]
... That's where the "National Customer Rage Survey" comes in. It's been surveying a panel of 1,000 representative consumers every three years for a decade, continuing a research project that started in 1976. The survey measures respondents' attitudes towards the businesses they deal with, and as of 2025, it's fair to say, customers are pissed:
https://customercaremc.com/2025-national-customer-rage-study/
We're experiencing more problems with the products and services we use. Those problems are more severe, they make us angrier, and they produce lingering stress. More and more, we are seeking revenge on the businesses that piss us off.
So it's not just me, an old man yelling at the cloud. The world is getting shittier.
The latest Customer Rage Survey inspired The Guardian's Heather Timmons to launch a new investigative series looking at how fucked up everything is. Her inaugural installment is very good, and it's drawn a massive reader response:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/04/us-consumer-rage-prices-economy ....
... I collect definitions of "conservatism," and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin's book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – "conservative"? What binds all these views together?
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/22/all-day-suckers/#i-love-the-poorly-educated
Robin's answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.
That's why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That's why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO....
‘Straight-Up Intimidation Tactics’: Kash Patel’s FBI Raids Ohio Voting Rights Organization
Brad Reed, June 12, 2026 [CommonDreams]
MS NOW reported on late Thursday that FBI agents searched the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, an organization that helps register voters.
In addition to raiding the group’s offices, sources tell MS NOW that “agents also fanned out across the state, showing up at the homes of the group’s leaders and staff members, carrying some subpoenas and seeking information and electronic devices.”
MS NOW’s sources also expressed concern that the raid was not a legitimate law enforcement operation but “part of the Trump administration’s efforts to sow doubt and distrust in voting integrity in key swing states ahead of the midterm elections.”
The Black Mold Of Republican Lies
Brian Beutler, June 12, 2026 [Off Message]
... Texas Republicans are running an A.I. generated ad that depicts James Talarico wearing a dress, singing a song about how much he loves transing children. To the extent that this is an appeal to voters, it works on the lizard-brain level: They want men to feel emasculated for supporting Talarico, and maybe to fool some thin margin of Texans into believing the footage is real.
The immorality is part of the appeal in their minds: Who do you want to elect: those of us on the front foot? Or our back-footed opponents? We do and take what we want; they can’t stop us; they don’t even really try.
And they’re right about that last part. Your description may depend on how favorably disposed you are to Democratic strategic thinking, but in both cases, the Democratic response has mostly been to play it cool, avoid direct confrontation, change the topic....
... There’s little reasoned thinking left on the professional right, no more shame, and certainly no more interest in right and wrong. The White House situation room is no longer a place where national leaders weigh life and death against the national interest, but a place where they draw up plans to conceal the president’s involvement in a child sex scandal. The degradation is so complete, it should be obvious even to people paid to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt. If any members of the mainstream press are still under the impression that the parties are roughly mirror images of one another, they are beyond the reach of earnest argument....
One of the sub-asymmetries in our asymmetrically polarized politics is that Republicans exploit media aggressively, at every juncture, to smear, savage, and blame their opponents, while Democrats tend to steer away from collective character attacks. Their partisan appeals are rooted in policy and ideology, rather than in blunt assessments of the character of their organized opposition. To use less fancy language, Republicans say Democrats are shitty people; Democrats don’t return the favor.
To take just one example from this week: Pull up another browser window and Google something like “Republicans Biden screwworm.” Scan the headlines. Click through a few links.
What Republicans allege in these stories is biophysically impossible. The life-cycle of a screwworm is many times shorter than Donald Trump’s 509 days in office. But that is how Republicans roll....
[TW: An unhelpful response: "Yeah, just another proof that the system needs to be extirpated, because the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."]
Fintan O’Toole, June 9, 2026
...In March 2012 it was announced that Hilton was leaving Downing Street for a one-year sabbatical at Stanford, but it was widely known that he was not coming back. He did return to Britain in 2016 to campaign with Boris Johnson for Brexit—the ultimate in “throwing the pieces all over the floor.” Essentially, however, Hilton’s political career in England was over. His wife Rachel Whetstone (herself a member of the original Smith Square brat pack) had become a powerful figure in the California tech world, first as head of public policy and communications at Google and then in a similar role at Uber. Hilton now remade himself again, this time in the American media-political complex....
By [2017] Hilton was flying each weekend from his $12.5 million home in Silicon Valley to Los Angeles to host a Fox News show called The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton....
Civic republicanism
RIP Gordon S. Wood, historian of the American republic
[TW: One of our leading historians of the early American republic passed away earlier this week, after being struck by a vehicle. Gordon S. Wood, 92, was a professor emeritus at Brown University, and the author of several important and prize-winning books and articles on the origins and creation of the United States as a self-governing republic.
[In his 1991 book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood wrote that the American Revolution was not merely a revolt against taxation, but a repudiation of the entire elitist worldview represented by the British monarchy and aristocracy. The book was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History.
[Wood’s 1969 book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 won the 1970 Bancroft Prize, and has been ranked by historians as “among the most important books ever written about the American Revolutionary period and the formation of the American Republic.”
[Chapter 5 of The Creation of the American Republic, simply entitled “Republicanism” is available online and is one of the most useful and concise explanations of the founding ideology of civic republicanism.
[Wood appears a number of times in Ken Burns’ new PBS series, “The American Revolution.”
[Wood contributed a number of articles and book reviews to The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, as well as numerous scholarly journals such as The William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, The American Antiquarian, and The Journal of American History.
[Wood was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. President Obama awarded him a National Humanities Medal in 2011 “for scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.”]
The best tribute to Wood so far:
The Historian Who Explained the True Meaning of the Revolution to Americans, by Andy Craig [theunpopulist.net]
Here are a few snippets, but it is well worth clicking through and reading completely.
...He was his generation’s foremost scholar of the American Revolution and the early Republic, and for decades he pressed a single argument with alacrity. The argument was this: the American Revolution was the most radical event in American history, and the men who made it neither intended nor controlled the radicalism they unleashed.
The real revolution, John Adams insisted in old age, was not the war. It was the thing that came before the war: a change in the principles, sentiments, and affections of the people, a revolution in the American mind that the fighting only ratified. Wood made studying that change his life’s work. Then he asked the harder question Adams did not: What happens once such ideas are loose in the world, and their authors can no longer call them back? ....
The Radicalism of the American Revolution won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and it is the book that fixed his reputation outside the academy. Its claim was deceptively simple and, to many readers, counterintuitive. The Revolution, Wood declared, was “the most radical and far-reaching event in American history.”
More transforming, in its way, than anything that came after, because everything that came after was always in its shadow. It was radical not because it spilled blood in the streets or redistributed estates—it did neither on the scale of the French Revolution—but because it dissolved and replaced old ways of thinking about society.
Colonial America was still a monarchical world, as Wood termed it. It ran on hierarchy, patronage, dependency, and deference. The Southern colonies were of course run by the aristocratic planter class, but even the Mid-Atlantic and New England colonies were firmly under the control of their own small elites. Ordinary men understood themselves as bound upward to patrons and downward to dependents, and they pulled off their hats to their superiors because that was simply how the world was arranged.
The Revolution broke that. It set loose ideas of equality, freedom, and independence that could not afterward be confined to the men who first spoke them. Within a generation the webs of deference had frayed, the language of liberty had escaped its authors, and a raucous, commercial, increasingly egalitarian, and fundamentally liberal democracy had grown up in place of the genteel elite republic the Founders imagined.
The change announced itself in small things, and Wood had a gift for the small things. “Mister,” an honorific once reserved for men of rank, came loose from class and spread to every man as ordinary courtesy. And Americans grew so averse to calling anyone “master,” with its taint of servitude, that they borrowed a word from the Dutch and took to calling the man they worked for their “boss.” ....
A tribute to Gordon S. Wood (1933-2026), historian of the American Revolution
Tom Mackaman, David North, June 10, 2026 [World Socialist Web Site]
...In conversation, Wood wore his immense learning lightly. Yet the range of that learning could astonish. He seemed to carry the entire world of eighteenth-century America in his head, moving without effort from the constitutional debates of 1787 to the etiquette of patronage and “politeness” in colonial society, from the marginalia of Adams and the correspondence of Jefferson to the land speculation of Aaron Burr, paper money schemes and tavern politics of the backcountry.
Wood had read, it seemed, everything—the pamphlets, the newspapers, the sermons, the diaries, the account books—and retained it all, not as inert antiquarian detail, but as the living texture of a vanished world that he could summon at will, and that he never ceased to find fascinating....
Reclaiming the Pursuit of Happiness Conor Gallagher, June 8, 2026 [Naked Capitalism]
... The Declaration’s main author, Thomas Jefferson, lamented the democracy-undermining existence of poverty. Natural rights are violated, Jefferson wrote, when some residents struggle and others prosper. So he insisted that the government has a duty to act to remedy the injustice, including through aggressively progressive taxation. Other founders agreed. Alexander Hamilton explained that the General Welfare Clause in Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution (“The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect taxes… to provide for the General Welfare of the United States”) creates a government that addresses unmet economic needs.
Hamilton’s fellow Constitution framer James Madison called for the new nation to enact laws that would “reduce extreme wealth toward a state of mediocrity, raise extreme indigence toward a state of comfort.” For 18th century politicians, this type of government intervention was not hypothetical. Colonial governments instituted price controls on food and aggressively regulated gristmills to keep the cost of bread affordable for all.
The founder with the most pronounced vision of economic rights was Thomas Paine, author of the seismic pamphlet Common Sense and a driving force behind the American Revolution and the new government it birthed. Paine called for the redistribution of wealth via progressive taxation and for direct government anti-poverty interventions like old-age pensions, support for families with young children, full employment, and a basic income. “It is not charity but a right—not bounty but justice that I am pleading for,” he said.
The Meaning of the “Pursuit of Happiness”
Beyond the founders’ own words, it is clear from historical context that a 1776 commitment to protecting the unalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness” includes ensuring that subsistence needs are met. Law professor and dean Linda Keller’s comprehensive review of political thought and contemporary use of this critical phrase during the 18th century led her to conclude that basic economic rights are deeply rooted in the nation’s foundation. “Its inclusion was not merely a rhetorical flourish, but rather the pursuit of happiness established an ‘unalienable right’ that includes an economic dimension,” Keller writes. “In particular, there are minimum needs that must be met in order to pursue happiness, for instance food, shelter, and clothing. Thus the government must provide the conditions to enable individuals to pursue happiness.” ....
Wake Up America: All Humans Are Created Equal!
Robert C. Koehler, Jun 14, 2026 [Common Dreams]
...The words’ lasting significance isn’t due to the deep truths they pull from humanity’s philosophical depths, but rather, Scott notes, the opposite: “Its writers said so much more than they meant. The genius of the document lies not in the original, local intentions that might be excavated from it, but in the meanings that later generations have projected onto it.”
The promises in the words weren’t fulfilled on the spot, but oh so slowly—and only partially—over the last two and a half centuries, as people such as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and so many others used the words, again and again, to challenge the reality of their particular present moment.
“For Lincoln and King, the Declaration functions as both a sacred text and an unfulfilled promise,” Scott writes. “The conditions that it holds to be self-evident in that second sentence did not, at the time it was written, exist in any known reality. Whether they subsequently did or ever could is the subject of debates that have more or less defined our politics ever since, but the ringing confidence of the statement has not diminished.”
And the words still pulsate. As I read Scott’s essay, for the first time I saw the Declaration not merely as a gold-covered lie meant to be plunked in front of the White House as a symbol of American greatness—to be endlessly glorified and endlessly ignored—but a moral fact and, praise be, a tool of the present moment! This country is still being created—out of the same chaos and greed, the same structural racism, the same ignorance and cruelty—that was present in 1776, and you and I and everyone else are the ones creating it....
[TW: The past few weeks, a handful of people I linked to have discussed the meaning of "a more perfect Union," asserting the work of making the republic better is never done, but is an ongoing responsibility of every citizen in every generation.
But what of those, such as marxists, who believe the entire system, from the very beginning, was just another iteration of class domination? Was Gordon Wood wrong about the historical importance of the American Revolution? Were Lincoln and King wrong? Or is the above interpretation of Lincoln and King wrong?
Was there indeed no change in how exploitative the economy was from the 1930s to today? Did the "Reagan revolution" not have an impact? If it did, what was it if not to roll back the gains made for the working class in the New Deal, and the gains made for minorities in the Great Society? Where those gains a chimera, or a temporary pretense to hide the brutality of the system until such time as the forces of capital could gather enough strength to renew its assault on the working class? And does it make no difference that the system - for whatever twisted reason - had, during and since the New Deal - criminalized much of the behavior and actions of capital resurgent, but those crimes were no longer prosecuted, or had been "deregulated"? Was elite impunity always a feature, and not a bug? If a feature, then why were actual bankers prosecuted and jailed for the savings and loan frauds of the 1980s? Or MCI, or Enron, are so many other frauds that once were prosecuted but no longer are?
[I see the individual trees, AND I see the forest. And I do not believe that any single diseased and pest infested tree should be ignored because, as a commenter argued last week, when it comes to diseased and pest infested trees "that’s the way things work in forests.”]
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