Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 28, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Trump administration begins mass layoffs at ODNI
Drop Site Daily, June 23, 2026
The Trump administration has begun mass layoffs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with hundreds of employees expected to lose their jobs, CNN reported Monday.
Acting ODNI Director Bill Pulte, whom President Donald Trump tasked with downsizing the agency, is overseeing cuts expected to hit the National Counterterrorism Center and National Counterintelligence and Security Center, with as many as 400 employees at the counterterrorism center reportedly targeted.
War on voting
The Real Reason Trump Never Stops Talking About Voter Fraud
Jamelle Bouie, June 17, 2026 [New York Times]
... To say, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that there was systematic voter fraud is to lie. And Trump, again, was lying. But he was also making a specific political claim. If there were no shenanigans but there was still “fraud” because the election was “rigged,” then it’s clear that the meaning of fraud has less to do with any particular set of rules and procedures than it does with the more elemental aspects of American political life. And it doesn’t take much work to decipher the president’s conception of “fraud.”
There was a reason, to put it differently, that Trump centered his crusade on ferreting out “illegal votes”; there was a reason he focused on cities with large Black populations like Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia; and there was a reason that when his supporters fought their way into the Capitol, they unfurled Confederate flags to mark their achievement.The president’s convoluted and false claims about “fraud” were little more than a smoke screen for a more basic claim about who belongs to the community — about who counts as a voter and who counts as a citizen. To say that Democratic victories in Pennsylvania or Georgia were the product of fraud in Philadelphia or Atlanta was to say, in short, that the wrong people were voting. And in the same way that Trump’s “birtherism” wasn’t really about whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, his crusade to “stop the steal” wasn’t about the nation’s election procedures. It was a declaration that the only real voters were his own....
“Voter fraud” is not about fraud. It is about who votes and how. It is about the breadth and scope of the political community. It is, as with most MAGA obsessions, about who can call themselves Americans — entitled to govern as equals — and who are mere subjects. Trump’s obsession with voter fraud is just another expression of the reactionary populist belief that the people who inhabit a place are not equivalent to the people, who are entitled to rule.We should treat this contretemps in Los Angeles, as silly as it is, as a dress rehearsal for what will probably happen in November, if and when Republicans lose control of Congress. Any result short of victory for Trump and his allies will be denounced as “fraud.” Not because there is anything wrong with the system, but because, as they see it, this is their country and theirs alone.
Brad Reed, June 25, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Letters from an American, June 24, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jun 25, 2026
... this morning at 9:49, Trump suddenly announced he will not sign the bill into law until Congress passes the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE or SAVE America Act, that he keeps pushing....
Then, at 10:26, he posted: “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
That language is important. Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has used official emergency declarations at an unprecedented rate in order to claim emergency powers under which he can ignore laws. Although the Republicans hold a majority in both the House and the Senate, meaning Trump could work with Congress to pass legislation, he and his advisors appear to be applying the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt.
Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who himself almost certainly has not read Schmitt—asserted this view in August of last year when he said: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”
Alex Kaplan of Media Matters notes that since Trump took office in 2025, his loyalists have urged him simply to declare a national emergency in order to justify dictating new voting and election rules to the states.
The U.S. Constitution gives to the states the authority to conduct elections, but the Trump administration wants state voter lists, at least in part so it can run them through a tool designed to find noncitizens who might have applied for benefits for which they’re ineligible. That system, known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements and, confusingly, also abbreviated as SAVE, is not designed for voter rolls, and as Liz Dye explained today in Public Notice, it explicitly did not cover U.S. citizens.
But, Dye explains, between last April and last August, employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Department of Homeland Security, and the Social Security Administration linked the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements to the master file from Social Security, called NUMIDENT. Then they reprogrammed SAVE to upload voter rolls for mass citizenship screening.
Certain Republican-dominated states, like Texas, handed over their voter rolls. An investigation by Jen Fifield of ProPublica and Zach Despart of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in February showed that when used to try to identify noncitizen voters, the system had an error rate of at least 14%, misidentifying legal voters as illegal ones.
In addition to the system’s inaccuracy, the uploading of the files, Dye notes, was “a gross violation of the Privacy Act of 1974,” which prohibits the government from repurposing an individual’s data for a new use without notice and without providing for 30 days of public comment....
Marc Elias: The Stakes in November - The famed election lawyer sizes up where we stand
Win McCormack, June 26, 2026 [The New Republic]
War
Negotiating Without Leverage And With Lies - What We Are Seeing Is Astonishing For The USA
Phillips P. OBrien, June 24, 2026 [via Letters from an American, June 24, 2026]
... Personally, I have never seen the US in such a position of weakness.
Because the US has no significant leverage over Iran, the Trump administration (as it has been for months, it needs to be said) will simply have to dissemble about non-existent Iranian concessions to try and make it seem that they have not been completely routed. And that is the second part of this update. The US government has reached the stage where the default assumption must be that it is lying when it comes to Iran making any concessions. For months the Administration has been claiming that Iran was agreeing to this concession or that concession—and none of these claims has been true. Now that the US has even less leverage, the lies will probably get larger.
We are witnessing the most extraordinary negotiating moment in the history of US foreign relations, and that alone makes it worthy of note....
Simplicius [via Naked Capitalism 06-22-2026]
The underlying report: How Iran Devastated an American Naval Base—and Caused a U.S. Recalculation
[Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2026]
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
The Prairieland Sentences Are a National Emergency
Melissa Gira Grant, June 25, 2026 [The New Republic]
A federal court has punished Texas ICE demonstrators with decades in prison. This is dark news, not just for them but for anyone who may want to register political dissent.
Seth Stern, Jeremy Busby, June 26 2026 [The Intercept]
Hussein Askary@HusseinAskary
You will only read it here! President Trump has quitely and without any news reporting renewed Executive Order 13303, which puts all Iraqi oil revenues under his control. There has not been a single news item or White House press release since Trump signed the renewal in early May, 2026.When Iraq sells oil to foreign companies, including the largest buyers, the Chinese, they deposit the money in a bank account in the New York Federal Reserve branch, not in an Iraqi bank. That account is controlled by the U.S. President and U.S. Treasury. EO 13303 was first signed by President George W. Bush in May 2003 after the illegal invasion of Iraq. All American presidents have since then ritually renewed it in May of every year under the guise of "national security emergency". The details of how this was done and why it is not legal have been explained by myself in different media. The Iraqi government has not dared to challenge this political and economic crime to the extent that Trump in March this year said that he did not want Nouri Al-Maliki (winner of elections last October) to become the new prime minister of Iraq. And the Iraqis obeyed. I explain some of the details in this previous interview: youtube.com/watch?v=5s96Cp
Strategic Political Economy
Meet the megadonors pouring more than $1.3 billion into the 2026 election
The top donors in American politics have poured more than $1.3 billion so far this cycle into influencing the country’s politics, according to a Washington Post analysis of Federal Election Commission data.The donors lean Republican and cash could prove critical for the GOP to maintain control of Congress in November. In the first half of 2026, Republican-leaning donors gave $880 million, compared to $290 million from Democratic-leaning givers and $200 million from bipartisan and special interest groups.But most of the money, regardless of affiliation, was given to super PACs that can legally accept unlimited sums....
Global power shift
TABLE: Understanding Trump’s Iran Deal: A Quick Guide
Molly Ploofkins [via The Big Picture, June 21, 2026]
China plans postwar aid for Iran, with eye on energy supply
[Nikkei, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2026]
The Paradigm’s Changing: China’s Suggestion
Karl Sanchez [via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2026]
...with the publication of the White Paper, an introduction can be made to:
China’s principles, proposals and actions in global governance, foster broader consensus within the international community, ensure more effective responses to global challenges, and build a more just and equitable global governance system.
The White Paper provides us another opportunity to learn what China’s governing group thinks about the global situation and what their policy approaches based on that thinking are so we not only learn but can better predict China’s stance on other non-related issues. In fact, that’s what all China’s White Papers provide and are must reads for anyone serious about learning about contemporary China. That archive is here....
DARPA needs new powerful batteries for the Department of War. But China just built them
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 06-23-2026]
Oligarchy
Techno-oligarchy and privatization of sovereignty: the new phase of capitalism
[rebelion-org, via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2026]
... We are facing a new economic elite with enormous economic power and influence, extending far beyond the known boundaries of private enterprise. These are major players in the technology sector who control digital platforms, artificial intelligence, powerful communication networks, and certain productive sectors such as the automotive and aerospace industries. They provide information on completed projects in which the administration is directly involved due to the lobbying activities of these magnates. One of the top figures recruited from Wall Street in all these processes involving the Pentagon is George K. Kollitides II, director of the Economic Defense Unit. This is a new institution whose objective is to integrate economic, financial, and industrial elements into U.S. national security. This financier comes from the private sector, having been a top executive at Cerberus Capital Management, and his mission is to mobilize strategic investments to strengthen the U.S. industrial base.
The causal chain being driven is this: the Pentagon drafts the clauses, techno-oligarchs manage the investment funds, Palantir scrutinizes the situation, Nvidia supplies information and data, and the Treasury completes the bureaucracy. Economic history provides inspiration: a 2010 study by T. Roy at the London School of Economics ( Rethinking the Origins of British India: State Formation and Military-Fiscal Undertakings in an Eighteenth Century World Region , Working Papers, 142/10) already outlines this scheme of combining economic, financial, and industrial power in a national security strategy, with the British East India Company playing a leading role, operating from the 18th century until its dissolution in 1874. Some analysts have invoked this analogy. It is the use of private capital and financial expertise to support lucrative state objectives. a hybrid between State and market (on all this, see E. Morozov, “Faced with Beijing, Washington has a plan”, Le Monde Diplomatique , June 2026)....
Elon Musk, Trillionaire Politics, and the Rise of Techno-Fascism
Henry A. Giroux, June 23, 2026 [LA Progressive]
Musk's rise is not a triumph of individual initiative or entrepreneurial genius. It is the product of a social order in which public resources, state subsidies, collective labor, and technological infrastructures are privatized and redirected toward the enrichment of a tiny oligarchic elite. He despises the social contract because it places obligations on wealth and imposes democratic limits on power. As Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff note in Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, in its place, Musk advances a far-right vision that fuses state power with technological control, elevates algorithmic governance over democratic accountability, and normalizes racialized exclusion as a principle of social order. Musk's political project promises freedom while producing new forms of dependence, claiming to democratize technology even as it concentrates unprecedented power in private hands.
Elon Musk and the trillionaire class test democracy’s limits
[Salon, via Naked Capitalism 06-21-2026]
Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers
Cory Doctorow, June 27, 2026 [Pluralistic]
... in the UK, Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers keeps finding new, ice cream grade depths of absurdity to plumb. The whistleblower in question is, of course, Sarah Wynn-Williams, author of the internationally bestselling memoir Careless People, which details the criminality she witnesses during her years as the head of Facebook's international relations team:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf
Careless People is full of revelations about the gross institutional misconduct of Facebook, including its knowing encouragement of a genocide in Myanmar. But it's also full of stories about the severe personal failings of Facebook's executive team, especially Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan and Mark Zuckerberg.
These three come off as the most colossal of assholes, cruel, petty and predatory. Sandberg comes across as a sexual abuser who dreams of trafficking in poor people's organs. Kaplan is an oaf whose plan to provide paid internet access to refugee camps falls apart once he learns that refugees in camps don't have any money (he also takes points off of Wynn-Williams' workplace evaluation for being "unresponsive" over a period when she was in a near-death coma). Worst of all, though, is Zuckerberg, whose sins range from cheating at Settlers of Catan to endangering the Colombian peace process after a 50-year civil war because he refused to get out of bed before noon. Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook and the power to censor content they disliked, as part of a failed bid to get permission to offer a Facebook service in China.
It's a terrible company, with awful products, run by the worst people. Wynn-Williams' conditions of employment required her to sign a contract that bound her to silence (nondisclosure), forbade her from speaking ill of the company (nondisparagement), and denied her access to the legal system in all her dealings with Meta (binding arbitration).
Together, these three clauses – routinely used by Meta to silence would-be whistleblowers – meant that after Wynn-Williams's book was published, Meta got its arbitrator – a lawyer who is paid by Meta to adjudicate contractual disputes instead of an actual judge – to order her to never promote or even speak about her book.
The arbitrator awarded Meta $50,000 for each criticism that Wynn-Williams levied, quickly coming to a total of over $11,000,000. This vastly exceeds the assets and lifetime earning potential of Wynn-Williams and her husband (a reporter with the Financial Times). If this bill ever truly comes due, they will be wiped out....
when she was booked to speak – about a subject other than her book – at the Hay Festival on a stage with Tim Wu and Carole Cadwalladr, Meta sent a legal threat to the festival and Wynn-Williams, claiming that if by speaking about anything in public, she would violate the arbitrator's order. Accordingly, Wynn-Williams maintained total silence and a blank facial expression for an hour on stage, saying not one word, while Wu and Cadwalladr carried on a discussion. Careless People was withdrawn from the festival bookshop on the days she appeared there:
Nevertheless, Meta has informed Wynn-Williams that her silent, motionless appearance on a stage constitutes a further breach of her "agreement" and that they are going to seek even more damages from her. This act of anti-ice cream thuggery has pushed Wynn-Williams over the edge and now she's sued to invalidate her contract:
Her lawyers have posted their documents related to the suit, including a 285-page declaration by Wynn-Williams explaining the great lengths she's gone to in order to comply with Meta's demands, and the company's absolute intransigence and arbitrary menace:
https://katzbanks.com/sarah-wynn-williams-meta-lawsuit-documents/ ....
Apocalypse Early Warning System
[Apocalypse Early Warning System, via The Big Picture, June 21, 2026]
In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks this indicator in realtime. The current emergency level is reported on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being an indicator of a likely imminent apocalypse. Kyle McDonald’s running tracker of civilizational risk indicators — climate, financial stress, geopolitical tail risks — in one place. Bracing and useful.
Felonomics
US manufacturing jobs fall at fastest rate since the pandemic
[Financial Times, via The Big Picture, June 25, 2026]
US army bases to host critical minerals plants in onshoring push
[Mining.com, via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2026]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Report: The States Where Corporate Landlords Own the Most Housing
[Governing, via Naked Capitalism 06-22-2026]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Exec Sentenced for Embezzling Millions From CFA Institute
[Chief Investment Officer, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2026]
[CFA = Chartered Financial Analyst.]
How Jeffrey Epstein’s Israeli Network Shaped Congo’s Deadly Mineral Trade
Murtaza Hussain and Ryan Grim, June 24, 2026 [DropSite]
Leaked documents reveal how military contractors linked to Israeli intelligence secretly trained a special operations strike force in mineral-rich eastern Congo.
Restoring balance to the economy
What Amish Country Can Teach us About The Future of Rail
[The Transit Guy, via Naked Capitalism 06-22-2026]
...Lancaster has the second-highest rail ridership of the 14 Amtrak stations in Pennsylvania, beating out much larger cities like Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. It sees 1,255 riders a day, averaging 44 riders per train served. In fact, of the top 25 Amtrak stations in the country, Lancaster ranks fifth per capita.
What’s happening in Lancaster isn’t a happy accident. It’s a repeatable formula for regional success I hypothesize as the “Lancaster Model”. For a city to replicate these numbers, it must meet four specific criteria:
The Four Criteria
- Satellite Geography: Located 50–100 miles from a Tier-1 metro (the “Sun”).
- Frequency Floor: Must be frequent enough to be useful (>10 round trips daily). No “peak-only” service.
- The Connected Urban Anchor: The station must be in a walkable, gridded core, not a highway island.
- The Speed Rule: The train must beat or be equal to the car. This requires electrification and high-level platforms to minimize “speed sinks” like slow acceleration and long dwell times....
The United States Can Afford to Modernize Itself. Capital Simply Refuses to Pay
William Murphy [via Naked Capitalism 06-27-2026]
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
The best accidents in science: 20 discoveries that changed the world without meaning to
[Quartz, via Naked Capitalism 06-21-2026]
Egypt Targets 60% Renewable Electricity by 2040
Felicity Bradstock, June 28, 2026 [oilprice.com]
... While Egypt continues to rely heavily on fossil fuels, that could soon change thanks to high levels of private investment in green energy, supported by favourable national policies.
Egypt has significant potential to develop its solar and wind energy sectors, thanks to its favourable geographical conditions, with abundant land, including arid deserts, sunny weather, and high wind speeds. The North African country has some of the highest solar irradiance levels in the world, with between 2,000 and 3,200 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per square meter annually.... The government aims to generate 42 per cent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and increase this to 60 per cent by 2040....
Egypt has already developed several large-scale renewable energy projects, including the 1.8GW Benban Solar Park, which is set for expansion. Meanwhile, AMEA Power’s additional 2 GW project with 900 MWh of battery storage and a 500 MW facility at the Abydos Kom Ombo Solar PV Park are under development....
Disrupting mainstream economics
Objectively Yours - Alan Greenspan's Legacy
John Ganz, June 26, 2026 [Unpopular Front]
...Greenspan was certainly polished and respectable, but, as every obituary notes, he was part of Ayn Rand’s inner circle. Rand essentially ran a libertarian cult that inculcated its members in a philosophy of extreme selfishness. While Rand had many famous fallings out with disciples, their relationship endured and she attended his swearing in as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors the Oval Office in 1974.
It would be grossly inaccurate to say all of Greenspan’s policies were simply downstream from Rand’s “Objectivist” doctrine. On the contrary, he was flexible on questions of dogma. For a Rand publication in 1966, he was writing in favor of the Gold Standard, which seems to be every crank’s favorite monetary idea. “Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard,” he concludes. Of course, you can’t really be a gold bug at the Fed—part of your job is to ensure the liquidity the economy needs not to collapse during a crisis. So, he dropped that part of the Randian doctrine, but he never stopped advocating for laissez-faire principles....
Surely, in his career, he must have encountered the work of Hyman Minsky, who argued that the combination of the Fed’s infusions and deregulation was creating the equivalent of a financial hydrogen bomb. But that would’ve had to involve admitting that the market could be irrational and that was the one thing central view that could not be abandoned. The other problem with Rand cult’s ideology was the essential elitism: the business elite, the 1% if you will, got there from being superior, from being more rational, they were productive and virtuous, and therefore they deserved the Fed’s help. They could be trusted with it because they would always act with their superior self-interest as their guide. When it’s broken down to its essentials, this is not a worldview that should have ever been given serious consideration, no matter the short term success its adherents might demonstrate. It’s a glib and arrogant series of bromides....
Robert Reich, June 22, 2026
But the truth must be told: If any single person was responsible for the financial crisis of 2008, it was Greenspan. That crisis — the worst collapse since 1929, which led to the worst recession in decades, in which millions of Americans lost their jobs, their savings, and even their homes — resulted from the deregulation of Wall Street that Greenspan advocated.
Disrupting mainstream politics
Liberal Elites Promote ‘Abundance,’ But Democratic Voters Want Socialism
[American Conservative, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2026]
[TW: Like Klein and Thompson, they simply cannot see that the fight is about pushing back and ultimately limiting the power of oligarchs in order to preserve our experiment in republican self government.]
[Pew Research Center, June 10, 2026]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Companies That Embraced AI Are Now Rotting Away in a Very Specific Way
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 06-21-2026]
The phenomenon, dubbed “knowledge decay,” describes the deterioration of information over time, marked by workers forgetting skills and organizations relying on outdated processes. In the context of AI, it can be a dangerous downward spiral that starts with workers using AI to produce low-quality work, which wastes colleagues’ time, erodes trust, and gradually sloppifies organizational knowledge into worthless soup.
Multiply that by entire departments, and a business’s outputs start to crumble as well, as the Harvard Business Review explains.
How Many Barrels of Oil Do AI Data Centers Consume on a Daily Basis?
James Stafford, June 22, 2026 [OilPrice.com]
Data centers pulled about 415 terawatt-hours off the world's grids in 2024, according to the IEA.
Run that through the same conversion, and you get roughly 670,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, every day, just to keep the servers humming.
By 2030 the agency expects that to more than double to 945 terawatt-hours, the equivalent of about 1.5 million barrels of oil equivalent a day…
YouTube Lays Claim to Another Crown: The World’s Largest Media Company
[The Hollywood Reporter, via The Big Picture, June 25, 2026]
YouTube had more than $60 billion in revenue in 2025, parent company Alphabet reported last month. Now, the influential financial research firm MoffettNathanson runs the numbers and comes to the conclusion that YouTube’s estimated $62 billion in 2025 will have allowed it to pass The Walt Disney Co.’s media business, which generated $60.9 billion last year (excluding Disney’s lucrative experiences division).
[reclaimthenet.org, June 21, 2026]
Thomas Neuburger, June 25, 2026 [God's Spies]
Thomas Neuburger, June 16, 2026 [God's Spies]
Collapse of independent news media
Mark Hertsgaard, June 20, 2026 [The New Republic]
The publisher of The New York Times recently made an extraordinary speech about AI, journalism, and the public square that’s received surprisingly little public reaction. What makes A.G. Sulzberger’s speech extraordinary is that it was unabashedly crusading, and crusading is a stance New York Times publishers have rarely if ever adopted over the newspaper’s 175-year history. What makes the scant reaction surprising is that the speech’s audience—fellow leaders of some of the world’s most powerful news organizations—have a commercial self-interest in the crusade Sulzberger is advocating for. What’s more, the accusations Sulzberger made, the plainspoken language he used, the alleged villains he called out by name—Google, Meta, OpenAI—are the stuff of high drama....
Paramount+ blocks FPF ad about Trump-Ellison censorship threat
[Freedom of the Press Foundation, via Naked Capitalism 06-21-2026]
Climate and environmental crises
Beyond Denial - How Oil Execs Shaped a Landmark Climate Study
Maddie Stone, Drilled; additional reporting by Amy Westervelt, Drilled, and Katie Worth, June 25, 2026 [ProPublica]
Reporting Highlights
- Conflicted Funds: BP sponsored an elite Princeton research center to address the climate problem without getting off fossil fuels, handpicking scientists aligned with their interests.
- A Paradigm-Setting Paper: Princeton scientists who wrote a climate paper criticized as making solutions seem “easy” coordinated with the oil company’s executives and showed them multiple drafts.
- Oversold Solutions: Researchers depicted technology to capture carbon and store it underground as being proven and in use at industrial scale, a characterization that stretched the facts.
The Climate Deception Dossiers
June 27, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]
For nearly three decades, many of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies have knowingly worked to deceive the public about the realities and risks of climate change.
Their deceptive tactics are now highlighted in this set of seven “deception dossiers”—collections of internal company and trade association documents that have either been leaked to the public, come to light through lawsuits, or been disclosed through Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests.
Each collection provides an illuminating inside look at this coordinated campaign of deception, an effort underwritten by ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP, Shell, Peabody Energy, and other members of the fossil fuel industry....
Source documents (PDFs)
- Email from Former Exxon Employee Lenny Bernstein
- Deception Dossier #1: Dr. Wei-Hock Soon’s Smithsonian Contracts
- Deception Dossier #2: American Petroleum Institute’s “Roadmap” Memo
- Deception Dossier #3: Western States Petroleum Association’s Deception Campaign
- Deception Dossier #4: Forged Letters from the Coal Industry to Members of Congress
- Deception Dossier #5: Coal’s “Information Council on the Environment” Sham
- Deception Dossier #6: Deception by the American Legislative Exchange Council
- Deception Dossier #7: The Global Climate Coalition’s 1995 Primer on Climate Change Science
- Deception Dossiers: All Documents
High-Resolution Graphics (JPGs)
- Deception Dossier #1: Dr. Wei-Hock Soon’s Smithsonian Contracts
- Deception Dossier #2: American Petroleum Institute’s “Roadmap” Memo
- Deception Dossier #3: Western States Petroleum Association’s Deception Campaign
- Deception Dossier #4: Forged Letters from the Coal Industry to Members of Congress
- Deception Dossier #5: Coal’s “Information Council on the Environment” Sham
- Deception Dossier #6: Deception by the American Legislative Exchange Council
- Deception Dossier #7: The Global Climate Coalition’s 1995 Primer on Climate Change Science
Three everyday oils are driving a global biodiversity crisis
[Earth, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2026]
Democrats' political malpractice
Political earthquake in NYC: Here's what it means
Jordan Zakarin, June 24, 2026 [Progress Report]
- Democratic voters are pissed at an establishment that lost touch with its base
- The base of the Democratic Party is changing demographically
- Party leaders, at least as of last night, still don’t really understand either shift
Prem Thakker and Team Zeteo, Jun 27, 2026
The Mamdani-backed lefty trio talks with Zeteo's Prem Thakker about universal programs, aid to Israel, AI data centers, and how they plan to shake up DC. Oh, and they also respond to their haters.
How Wall Street Tried Replacing the Civil Rights Movement With Human Resources
Matt Stoller, June 21, 2026 [BIG]
... During the “seven mystic years” between 1866 and 1873, as Dubois called them, the North wrestled with how to reintegrate Southern rebels into the Union, while recognizing that “black folk were men.”
A few years later, this vision lay in tatters. Why? The answer is Wall Street. During the war, the financial district in lower Manhattan had emerged as a gateway to move capital into huge projects, with government financing flourishing. And afterwards, it was a period of booming investment in railroads. But in 1873, Ulysses S. Grant’s administration sought to put the U.S. back on the gold standard, a form of brutal fiscal and monetary austerity.
The giant bubble of railroad financing through Wall Street popped, and America slid into a depression. There was no central bank, no deposit insurance, and corporations were regulated by states, so this downturn was one of the worst collapses in global history, which in the U.S. was known as the Panic of 1873. It fostered wage cuts en masse, and bitter battles as railroads threatened entire cities. Southern states, already economically destitute, defaulted on their bonds, which were owned by capitalists in the North. The multi-racial leadership groups attempting to build schools and welfare states were booted out, in some cases simply murdered, by white supremacist redeemers.
As Dubois noted:
Then came in 1873-76 sudden and complete disillusion not at Negroes but at the world-at business, at work, at religion, at art. A bitter protest of Southern property reenforced Northern reaction ; and while after long years the American world recovered in most matters, it has never yet quite understood why it could ever have thought that black men were altogether human.
The broad disillusionment of a financial crisis and a resulting failure to restore an egalitarian commercial republic eroded faith in equality as a principle....
Taxing Billionaires Is the Easiest Way Democrats Could Gain Voter Trust
Tiffany Muller and Igor Volsky, June 23, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
... This growing wave of progressive populists understand that raising taxes on billionaires is overwhelmingly popular — 77% of voters support doing so, including 71% of Independents and 65% of Republicans....
INSIDE LABOUR TOGETHER’S SECRET BATTLE AGAINST JEREMY CORBYN
[Declassified UK, via Naked Capitalism 06-26-2026]
McSweeney went on to be Keir Starmer’s chief of staff while Simons became a cabinet minister until he resigned following revelations that he had hired a reputation management firm to “proactively undermine” journalistic investigations into Labour Together, McSweeney and Sir Keir Starmer....
Internal documents detail how Labour Together under McSweeney’s watch (2017-20) conducted polling of the Labour membership to monitor its views on the incidence of antisemitism in the party.
This polling allowed McSweeney and his allies to track responses to the antisemitism narrative that they were simultaneously helping to sustain by placing arguably alarmist stories in the media.
The documents further detail how The Canary media outlet was highly trusted among Labour members and identified as a political challenge because it defended Corbyn amid antisemitism accusations.
The Canary was subsequently targeted by the McSweeney-linked Stop Funding Fake News campaign with an advertiser boycott, which helped to diminish its revenue....
Cory Doctorow, June 22, 2026 [Pluralistic]
... Contrast Lula's muscular, deliverism-based politics that seeks to improve the lives of working people in tangible, immediate ways with the catastrophic series of blunders that Keir Starmer's Labour has delivered. Despite having won a majority so large it would have made Saddam Hussein blush (not because Labour was popular, but because the outgoing Conservatives were universally loathed), Starmer has refused to lift a finger to improve Britons' lives. Instead, he's abetted genocide, criminalized protest, proposed ending jury trials, imposed austerity, handed the NHS over to Palantir and all the remaining potable water and electrical capacity in the country over to American most unprofitable AI giants.
Starmer's insistence that we can't have nice things is bad politics, because (and it's weird that this has to be said) a government that makes people's lives worse is less popular than a government that makes people's lives better:
https://www.whatwelo.st/p/everyone-hates-tech-but-nobody-knows
Now, the right is incapable of making working people's lives better, because broad improvements to the vast majority necessarily come at the expense of the tiny minority of morbidly wealthy hoarders whom the right serves....
Resistance
A New Era of State Legislative Opposition Has Arrived - Four New Laws That Can Fight Fascism
Christopher Armitage, June 22, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
We’ve released substantially expanded, more robust versions of our model legislation. Read them if you want, and share if you think more people should see it. If you want to exercise some serious influence on public policy, you can get them in front of your state representatives. Email, call, text, mail, book meetings, leave it on their car windshield, fold it into a paper airplane and toss it to their staff; all great options.
Look up your representatives at openstates.org, then talk their ear off and advocate for the policies that can change everything.
The four bills are the Fiscal Sovereignty and Election Protection Act, the Bribe Is a Bribe Act, the Child Sex Trafficking Investigation and Accountability Act, and the Corporate Welfare Accountability Act. If you want to see the 125-page academic working paper behind these laws, you can read Oppositional Federalism on SSRN.
Christopher Armitage, June 23, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Nearly every nonviolent campaign that reached the active, sustained participation of roughly three and a half percent of a population achieved its objective, a pattern Chenoweth and Stephan found across 323 campaigns between 1900 and 2006. The exception, Bahrain, exceeded the threshold and failed, and most successful campaigns never reached it at all.
Reaching three and a half percent, then, is not what determines whether a campaign succeeds. In later work, Chenoweth found two things. Nonviolent campaigns succeed less often than they once did: their success rate was highest in the 1990s and has fallen most sharply since 2010. And they have shrunk, drawing in a smaller share of the population than they used to.
Two of my favorite ideas come from outside Chenoweth’s work, and laying them over those findings is the part I find fascinating. The first is the Pareto principle: across many settings, a small share of participants does most of the work. The second is the network effect: each person who joins makes joining safer and more worthwhile for the next, because larger numbers lower the risk to everyone and raise the odds that the movement succeeds....
This is the pattern behind the fall of East Germany. Susanne Lohmann, in “The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989 to 1991,” World Politics 1994, tracked 42 Monday demonstrations across five cycles and showed the cascade in real time. The earliest protesters were high-grievance radicals who turned out when repression was most likely. Their visible turnout showed everyone else how much opposition existed, which lowered the cost for moderates to join, until the regime lost its viability.
The formal collective-action backbone is Marwell and Oliver, The Critical Mass in Collective Action, 1993, the standard work showing a critical mass of early contributors triggers wider participation when the payoff curve accelerates. And for a modern empirical version on real protest data, Barberá et al, “The Critical Periphery in the Growth of Social Protests,” PLOS One 2015, shows the committed core generates the signal and the periphery spreads it. Across all three, the same pattern matters more than the exact figure, three and a half percent included: a committed minority that persists can draw in a much larger population once it passes a critical point.
A count of participants also understates opposition. Timur Kuran described why a government can appear stable until shortly before it falls: where people fear the state, many conceal their actual views, so observable support exceeds the genuine level. Once enough people reveal those views, the concealment ends quickly, and a population that appeared compliant proves to have opposed the government for years, which is part of why such collapses are difficult to predict.
Concealed opinion is one element. The outcome also depends on the people who carry out the government’s orders. The factor most strongly associated with success in Chenoweth and Stephan’s data is defection. A government’s orders are executed by specific actors: soldiers, police, civil servants, judges, broadcasters, and the firms on which the economy depends. Security-force defections appeared in more than half of the successful campaigns and made a campaign forty-six times more likely to succeed than a comparable campaign without them....
101 Former Judges Ask the New York Bar to Investigate Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche
Joyce Vance, June 24, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
Today, 101 former judges filed a complaint, asking the New York State Bar Attorney Grievance Commission to “initiate an investigation into Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (Registration No. 4192456) for violation of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct.” The judges are joined by Democracy Defenders Fund and Lawyers Defending American Democracy....
Fighting the Corporate Duopoly at the Ballot Box (w/ Kshama Sawant)
Chris Hedges, June 24, 2026
Kshama Sawant’s revolutionary socialist campaign for Congress shows us how we can turn the weight of the class war back against the billionaires and their political representatives.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
The MAGA stars freaked out by their own movement
[Vox, via The Big Picture, June 25, 2026]
Vox on the conservative-media stars who built the audience and are now alarmed by what it’s becoming. The base often outpaces its leaders. The right’s leading lights are looking for anyone to blame for the right’s growing extremism — except themselves.
Massie is the poster child for a particular kind of conservative now emerging in Trump’s second term: influential Trump allies who have sounded the alarm about the right’s direction, but who steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that their own actions in the Trump era may have had something to do with it.The examples are mounting. Joe Rogan, who regularly sells his audience on conspiratorial mistrust of official narratives, is now denouncing conspiracy theories about the assassination attempts on Trump. The pundit Ben Shapiro has gone to war against right-wing podcaster Candace Owens, who he now calls an antisemitic crank — while barely acknowledging that he himself played an instrumental role in Owens’s rise. You can even see this happening with Trump himself, who has spent his presidency battling rumors about an elite pedophile network run by Jeffrey Epstein that he helped stoke earlier, and which arose from a MAGA movement he trained to see conspiracy at every turn.
Jessica Corbett, June 26, 2026 [CommonDreams]
After a series of electoral victories for democratic socialists and legal blows to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian agenda this week, the Republican on Friday ranted to a Christian conference that progressives—whom he called “hardcore, godless communists”—are “the most serious threat to our country since its existence, in my opinion, 250 years ago.”
Trump previewed his nearly 50-minute speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s policy conference....
Trump’s Most Sinister Legacy: He’s Brought Out the Worst in America
Ralph Nader, June 27, 2026 [Common Dreams]
[A thorough list of particulars.]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Josh Kovensky, June 25, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
... Within four hours, this case was decided.
That’s a wild level of speed in a decision that saw no adversary. No person or entity opposed the lawsuit or had the chance to do so. The case was filed in a single-judge division, where Judge Reed O’Connor, a reliable administration ally, sits. In less than five hours, he issued a ruling that purported to permanently block the DOJ — under any future administration — from issuing the rule while also annulling it.
Timestamps show that the complaint was filed against the DOJ at 1:51 p.m. At 2:59 p.m., the DOJ and Texas filed a motion jointly asking the court to order what Paxton’s complaint sought. At 6:29 p.m., 278 minutes from the time the case was filed, Judge O’Connor, chief judge in the Northern District of Texas, gave the DOJ and Paxton much of what they asked for....
How John Roberts Court Made Bribery Legal - U.S. Code 666 and the John Robert's Court
Christopher Armitage, June 26, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Civic republicanism
Elon Musk Confirms Ancient Concerns About the Superrich
David Lay Williams [New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 06-24-2026]
Dr. Williams is a professor of political science who studies the role of economic inequality in the history of political thought.......But of all the numbers I’ve seen, the one that struck me most forcefully was a calculation in The Times that Mr. Musk’s net worth is five million times as large as that of the average American family.As a historian of political thought, I immediately thought of Plato, the first Western philosopher to really grapple with economic inequality. In his “Laws,” through the character of the Athenian Stranger, Plato contended that in a thriving republic, if anyone acquired more than four times the wealth of the poorest citizens, he should donate the surplus to the city. Not five million times the wealth of the typical family — four times the wealth of the poorest....For Plato, the source of inequality was a disease of the soul that the Greeks called pleonexia — a kind of insatiable greed. In Plato’s “Gorgias,” Socrates likened this condition to a leaky jug: No matter how much water one pours into it, it will demand more. For some, the desire for money extends only so far as is necessary to cover their needs; for others, the desire is infinite. Plato likened those insatiable souls to slaves who are ruled by their desires.Someone consumed with his unquenchable desires comes to love himself far beyond what he can feel for the rest of humanity. He was, for Plato, “a poor judge of what is just and good and noble,” because he would always treat his desires as more valuable even than the truth. As a consequence, Plato wrote, “it is impossible that those who become very rich also become good.”Plato’s fears about insatiable greed have been vindicated by Mr. Musk, who has already set his sights on $10 trillion. He has confirmed Plato’s concerns about the moral failures of the superrich by characterizing empathy as “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” With his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, he put the U.S. Agency for International Development program “into the wood chipper,” as he gleefully put it, contributing to the deaths of an estimated 600,000 people. Such carnage is a predictable outcome of a society that has chosen to place no upper limits on wealth....David Lay Williams is a professor of political science at DePaul University and the author of “The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx.”
“It’s a pretty terrifying time to be a political historian,” Freeman told us in our latest conversation.
“The people who were framing and founding the government believed that what made this government different from a monarchy was the degree to which it was grounded in public opinion,” she added. “But now, the president is openly profiting off the office while destroying and misusing the physical White House as though he owns it, even though it belongs to us. I am angry, because what we’re watching right now isn’t what a president is supposed to be.“ ....
Speaking as an early American historian who spent decades immersed in what the founding generation thought about political power — specifically about executive power — this presidency is entirely out of bounds and beyond anything the founding folk could have conceived of. I’m not an originalist, and I don’t think every single thing they said and did in the founding era needs to be duplicated now, but this is a lot.
What they created in that moment were living documents in a living system. Our system is grounded on checks and balances — the entire system — and right now we have a Congress, with a Republican majority, that isn’t really standing up to do its duties. We have a Supreme Court that’s pretty much in line with the executive.
And then we have an executive and an administration that seem to believe they possess all of the power now. If there’s one thing that the founding folk made clear, particularly the framers of the Constitution, it was a lack of trust in a single individual having a massive amount of power....
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