Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 19, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War on voting
Letters from an American, July 11, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jul y12, 2026
Meanwhile, on Friday a Pentagon official told Rebecca Turco of WJLA 7News in Washington, D.C., that National Guard troops will stay activated in Washington through Inauguration Day 2029 “until law and order are fully restored in our Nation’s Capital.”
“So,” Bill Kristol of The Bulwark commented. “[M]ilitary troops under the direct control of Trump and Hegseth will be on the streets of our nation’s capital for the rest of Trump’s term. The rationale—they’re here to help with a crime emergency—is laughable. But of course the real reason is ominous.”
Miller Labels Leftists a “Cancer” That World Must “Root Out” in Fascistic Speech
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 07-17-2026]
Representatives from 67 countries gathered in the U.S. on Thursday for a meeting called Rubio on the supposed “Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” In addition to Rubio and Miller, several U.S. officials spoke, including figures like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The remarks from top officials quickly made clear that the meeting’s purpose was to put forth a global offensive against people with left-wing beliefs....
Letters from an American, July 17, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jul 18, 2026
Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover.
As Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy “immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”
Posobiec is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He is known for courting controversy by promoting what Maya Oppenheim of the The Independent in 2018 called “wholly erroneous and debunked conspiracy theories,” including the infamous 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.
In Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to “progressives.” “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans,” the authors write, because they “oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”
Miller’s Ministerial: The Most Dangerous Speech Wasn’t Trump
Jim Stewartson, July 17, 2026 [MindWar]
While everyone focused on elections, Stephen Miller was putting the architecture in place to ensure they never matter....
... a few hours before Trump’s dud of a speech, Stephen Miller gave a “ministerial” to an international audience at the State Department that was nothing short of Third Reich plagiarism. If this had just been a rally speech, it would be extremely disturbing, but it went along with a simultaneously released document entitled “Trump Administration Unleashes Global Campaign to Crush Radical Left Terrorism.”
Put together, Miller’s speech and official policy document enshrine an overtly fascist, transnational program to persecute nearly anyone the regime wants in the name of “leftist terrorism.”
Here is a key section of Miller’s speech which is textbook dehumanization—the precise language Joseph Goebbels used to target Jews, communists, and Bolsheviks.
Miller draws a picture of the in-group as “morally superior,” ordered,” “beautiful,” and “normal.” The out-group on the other hand, identified as “leftists,” is “abnormal,” “scarred,” and “deformed.”....
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Dr. John Gartner: Trump is “the most pure incarnation of evil that I have ever encountered" (video)
Dean Obeidallah, July 18, 2026
... Dr. Gartner explained that he meant that very much from a clinical point of view, explaining that Dr. Erich Fromm had studied Hitler and coined the term “the essence of evil.” Fromm explained that “evil” from this perspective is not a supernatural force but a severe psychological pathology.
And when you see what Fromm said next you will see Donald Trump. Fromm explained this essence of evil was marked by a dangerous combination of extreme self-absorption, sadism, destructiveness, and a lack of empathy or conscience. It was also Fromm who created the term “malignant narcissism”—which many apply to Trump today.
But it’s the “evil” part of this that really stuck with me. As Dr. Gartner noted, Trump is a sadist who “gets pleasure from chaos, and destruction, and fear, and damage, and death.” He continued on, stating, “Every indication is that when Trump first started bombing Iran, he was gleeful and talking about, you want to see the fun and showing people the videos of the blowing up targets and talking about it like he was having fun.” ....
After Killings, Homan Says There Will Be ‘More Bloodshed’ Unless Dems ‘Shut Their Mouth’ About ICE
Stephen Prager, July 16, 2026 [CommonDreams]
... Instead of trigger-happy agents, he said that anti-ICE “rhetoric” from Democrats was to blame for the recent killings.
“It all goes back to the Dems who want to continually attack ICE and tell people to evade them and tell people don’t comply, tell people to resist, and tell people ICE isn’t a real law enforcement agency,” Homan said.
“You and I talked about this a year-and-a-half ago, Laura,” he continued. “I said, if the hateful rhetoric didn’t stop, there would be bloodshed.”
“I’m saying it right now,” Homan said. “There’s still going to be more bloodshed unless they shut their mouth and let ICE enforce the laws that they enacted.”
Trump’s $1.4 billion crypto disclosure
[Citation Needed) via The Big Picture, July 12, 2026]
The White House insists there’s no conflict of interest as Trump reports $1.4 billion in income from an industry he’s deregulated. Molly White digs into the president’s financial disclosure and finds the conflicts of interest are no longer theoretical — they’re on the form.
Russell Vought is Using the Plumbing of Fiscal Federalism to Create a New Patronage System
Phillip Rocco, July 13, 2026 [Notes on the Crises]
... To date, OMB's proposed rule (blandly titled “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance”) has mostly attracted attention for its potential to both stall and politicize scientific research (if you’re reading this piece before midnight Monday, you can still contribute a comment letter opposing this proposed rule’s impact on science, with the help of standardized language, here). This is no small thing. But focusing on the Trump administration's attack on science does not do justice to the scope of OMB Director Russell Vought’s ambitions here. In addition to going after scientific research, the proposed rule represents the most significant threat to the intergovernmental grant system in American history—the more than $1 trillion that flows out annually to states, cities, counties, towns, villages, tribes, and territorial governments. This is the often-invisible plumbing that delivers countless public goods ranging from health care and housing to transportation and public safety. The rule’s consequences for that system cut far more deeply and reach further than has generally been reported on....
THE MYSTERY MONEY POWERING TRUMP’S SECOND TERM
[WSJ, via Naked Capitalism 07-16-2026]
Recording Shows UAW Federal Monitor Pressured Union President Over Israel
Ryan Grim, July 17, 2026 [Drop Site]
Trump quietly clears the road for Musk’s robotaxis
[Oligarch Watch, via Naked Capitalism 07-16-2026]
Pentagon Blocks Release of F-35 Report
Robert Brooks, July 16, 2026 [americanmachinist.com]
The Pentagon is blocking release of a June Government Accountability Office report on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, indicating that the report contains “Controlled Unclassified Information.” CUI is designation used by federal officials to characterize information created or possessed by the government that requires safeguarding or limited public access.
No details about the specific CUI have been offered by the Pentagon. The unreleased, June 25 report is titled, “F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Update on Production and Modernization Efforts.”
War
A Robot Army Remakes Ground Warfare in Ukraine
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, July 14, 2026]
They began as supply mules. Now ground robots evacuate the wounded, hold trenches and even do the killing. Ground robots are remaking warfare in Ukraine — the drone war has officially come down to earth.
See How Ukraine Is Taking Out Russia’s Refineries
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, July 14, 2026]
Ukraine is targeting Russian energy infrastructure with its growing fleet of long-range drones and missiles, causing fuel shortages in one of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers and embarrassing President Vladimir Putin. The long-range strikes on Russia win rare praise for Ukraine from Trump. The Journal’s visual dive into Ukraine’s campaign against Russia’s refineries — degrading Moscow’s war economy one strike at a time.
Strategic Political Economy
Storm clouds gather over America’s financial supremacy
[Economist, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2026]
... the new geopolitical reality of global finance. As America pursues what Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, recently described as “economic statecraft in the 21st century”, in which global access to the dollar and the American economy is “no longer unconditional”, and other countries try to respond in kind, the global financial system is splintering into regional and national systems. This is happening first in payments—and presents a headache for Visa and Mastercard, the industry’s American duopoly.
In January Aurore Lalucq, the chair of the European Parliament’s economic- and monetary-affairs group, cautioned that a hostile America could easily cut off the continent’s access to payments infrastructure. “You won’t be able to say you weren’t warned,” she said, arguing that Europe must build its own alternatives. Weeks later a group of British bank bosses reportedly met in London to discuss building a British rival to Visa and Mastercard.“It’s important for all of us [to] have digital payment under our control,” said Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank in a radio interview earlier this year....
The World Is Cutting Ties With America. It’s Already Costing Us.
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, July 14, 2026]
The world is quietly rerouting trade, alliances, and trust around America — and the bill is already arriving.
How World Bank and IMF loans are reshaping policymaking in Africa
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2026]
Global power shift
China is becoming the auto industry’s innovation lab
[The Street, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2026]
The Great Nicobar Project: India’s Indian Ocean Power Play
[Geopolitical Monitor, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2026]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
The Israel Commissar Coming To The Pentagon
Spencer Ackerman, 15 July 2026 [Forever Wars]
... Both the Quincy Institute's Steven Simon and an unbylined analysis by A New Policy, the redoubt of former State Department political-military official Josh Paul, identify and itemize just how deep this integration goes. Israeli defense firms will be eligible for licensing agreements that grant them intellectual-property control over systems made by U.S. weapons manufactures that are their nominal competitors. Its envisioned collaborative-research initiatives and co-production arrangements place Israeli defense firms and universities directly into the supply chains of the U.S. military. A New Policy correctly observes that such a decision will "significantly enhanc[e] Israeli leverage" over U.S. defense decisionmaking. If you watched China blunt Donald Trump's trade war by limiting exports of metals and minerals that the U.S. military relies upon, you have a sense of how this leverage can operate.
But the truly unique transformation accomplished by the NDAA provision occurs through the creation of what it calls an Executive Agent for U.S.-Israel technological integration. Unlike with any other U.S. ally, there will be a new senior official within the Pentagon whose job it is to accelerate, deepen and, if history is any guide, expand collaboration between the two defense establishments. This Executive Agent will be able to overrule existing Pentagon officials and institutions with equity in the military's vast array of research, procurement and production programs....
Russia / Ukraine
The first American autonomous ground vehicles are fighting in Ukraine
[Techcrunch, via The Big Picture, July 13, 2026]
Forterra, a U.S. builder of autonomous vehicles, revealed today that more than 100 of its self-driving ATVs have been deployed in conflict zones in Ukraine for the past nine months, in what the company believes is the largest deployment of autonomous ground vehicles in combat by any U.S. defense tech company.
Ukraine’s Killer Robots Show How War Is Changing
[The Conversation, via The Big Picture, July 13, 2026]
Autonomous weapons are no longer theoretical. Ukraine’s battlefield is the live proving ground for AI-driven combat systems that will define the next generation of warfare.
Oligarchy
The political economy of billionaire derangement
Henry Farrell, July 15, 2026 [Programmable Mutter]
Felonomics
How Donald Trump Created the Worst Diarrhea Outbreak This Century
Ryan Cooper, July 16, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Eleanor Davis-Diver, July 15, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Wall Street Wants Your Baby - Trump Accounts disguise corporate power as opportunity.
Economic Liberties, Jul 15, 2026 [The Economic Populist]
Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a child born this year gets $1,000 locked in stocks until 2044, the year they turn 18. But the same law that created the Trump accounts also cut Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, support many families with children need right now. The government cut cash benefits and replaced them with an asset program whose customers are delivered to Wall Street at birth. That same child may lose health coverage or food at the table in 2026.
In the first weekend, families opened millions of accounts. I do not blame a single parent who signs up. If the government offers your child $1,000, take every dollar. My argument is with the design and what it is for.
Every baby born from 2025 through 2028 gets the $1,000, deposited in U.S. stock index funds; families can add up to $5,000 a year. Nothing can be touched until the child turns 18. The president wants every child to hold a stake in the stock market from birth, and he has personally solicited deposits from the country’s richest men. The program was designed by a hedge fund manager whose group lobbied for its inclusion. Michael Dell pledged $6.25 billion. SpaceX says it will put a share of its stock into an account for each of more than two million kids.
Assets create constituencies, and this program is designed to create one. Senator Cruz says so himself: the point is to give the next generation skin in the Wall Street game.
Notice who the design serves. Every child gets the same $1,000, whether their parents are hedge fund partners or home health aides. But the accounts accept top-ups of $5,000 a year, so the real compounding goes to families with an additional $4,000 a year to spare. A child whose parents max out the account likely reaches 18 with a six-figure sum; a child whose parents cannot spare a dime gets the seed. If you actually wanted to give every child a stake, you would give the most to the kids who start with the least.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Richard Murphy, July 19, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Predatory finance
Revealed: The Seven Secret Federal Reserve Books I Won Through FOIA
Nathan Tankus, February 6, 2024 [Notes on the Crises]
...Those of you who have been reading my recent output will know that I’ve been increasingly fixated on Howard Hackley. He was a longtime Federal Reserve lawyer who became General Counsel for the Federal Reserve Board, back in 1957. He stayed in that position until 1967, at which time he transitioned to an “assistant” to the Board. (He also served as legal counsel for the Federal Open Market Committee until his retirement in mid-1973.) In other words, he shepherded the Federal Reserve into the modern era. Far from a marginal figure, Hackley made many of the legal determinations that define the Fed as an institution today. Yet he hasn’t received anything like his due attention. When did he write these monographs? What did they say? ....
Hackley 1969. Recommendations for Changes in the Federal Reserve Act
Hackley 1969. Recommendations for Changes in the Federal Reserve Act, Appendix A – Proposed Draft Bill to Revise the Federal Act
Hackley 1969. Should the Stock of the Federal Reserve Banks Be Retired?
Hackley 1970. Should Requirements with Respect to the Selection of Reserve Bank Directors Be Changed?
Hackley 1970. Should the Composition of the Board of Governors be Changed?
Hackley 1970. The Federal Reserve Advisory Council
Hackley 1971. Should the Federal Open Market Committee Be Abolished or Changed?
Hackley 1972. The Status of the Federal Reserve System in the Federal Government
Nathan Tankus, July 14, 2026 [Notes on the Crises]
... More generally, the Federal Reserve has denied access to an enormous number of documents that define the scope of its “emergency” powers. The public- including congress- only learned of part of the scope of the Federal Reserve’s powers when they were used to dramatic effect in 2008 and then again in 2020. Through painstaking work I’ve only been able to assemble a small portion of the legal memos which make up the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s “Doomsday Book”, a collection which collates various memos that define the Federal Reserve’s claimed legal powers. The Federal Reserve also hides documents from FOIA by housing them at Federal Reserve Banks who, absurdly, are interpreted as not being subject to FOIA. The extreme reliance on this “disclosure dodge” was inadvertently confirmed to me when I was accidentally sent their FOIA processing documents which includes a section for “confirming” that a Federal Reserve bank has the requested records and thus the document is not subject to FOIA....
[TW: It may be difficult to believe now, but there was a very strong pro-democracy populist presence in Texas. The Farmers Alliance began here in the 1870s in Lampasas County, eventually giving rise to the Omaha Platform and the People's Party. These groups picked up and carried the tradition of free-currency monetarism (see the section on Mathew Carey and The American Museum, in the "republicanism" section below.) It was this left populist tradition in which the political careers of Gonzalez, and Lyndon B. Johnson, were formed.]
Molly Ivins, December 8, 2000 [Texas Observer]
... What you have to remember about a 22-hour filibuster, still the record, is that it requires more than enormous physical stamina. You have to have 22 hours worth of knowledge in your head–and having heard many a shorter filibuster, I can testify that many people do not. They just don’t know enough to talk that long, not to mention talking that long at such a level of historical, constitutional, legal and judicial knowledge, in addition to the extraordinary passion for justice that animated the whole. Henry B. read widely his whole life and spoke four languages. That he was dismissed on the floor of the Texas Senate as a “lousy Mexican” was just a tiny part of the contempt and hatred that he experienced because of his skin color. Henry B.’s filibuster finally killed all but two or three of the whole hateful package....
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
How the Tech Lords Hacked the Firm
Quinn Slobodian,July 15, 2026 [Project Syndicate]
A handful of tech oligarchs have figured out how to tap public markets without submitting to shareholder oversight. The recent SpaceX IPO represents the culmination of this process, granting Elon Musk near-total authority and revealing how thoroughly the mechanisms meant to hold corporate leaders accountable have been weakened.
One of the most impressive feats of the current generation of tech oligarchs is that they have hacked not just computers or software, but the institutional form of the 20th-century firm itself.
Disrupting mainstream economics
Noah Smith's Review of Power and Progress is Very, Very Bad
Henry Farrell, Jul 17, 2026 [Programmable Mutter]
... So here’s my own “timely repost”: an edited and very slightly updated remix of relevant bits from the two very long pieces that I wrote in response to his earlier review and the podcast he did with Brad doubling down on his position. The TLDR of a very long post is that Silicon Valley billionaires do, actually, have power to shape political debate and get people to fawn over them, that Acemoglu and Johnson’s book is very valuable on this very important topic, that economists actually should adopt some form of their view as a default position, and that Noah himself should not be digging himself deeper, but trying to dig himself out, by admitting how badly he got things wrong back then....
[TW: I just acquired this past week a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith's 1983 book, The Anatomy of Power.]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
20 things your phone knows about you that you never told it
[Quartz, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2026]
Your phone infers your financial situation through the combination of your location history, your app portfolio, your purchase behavior (if you use a mobile payment system), and the specific timing patterns of your phone use. The inference is not precise — the phone does not know your account balance — but it is directionally accurate and commercially valuable.
The location-based inference is the most reliable: your GPS history reveals the stores you shop at (discount grocery chains versus Whole Foods, dollar stores versus boutique retail), the restaurants you eat at, the neighborhoods you live and work in, and the specific commercial environments you frequent. Each of these location signals carries an income correlation that, in aggregate, produces a reasonably accurate estimate of your household income tier.
The app portfolio inference adds specificity: the presence of payday loan apps, rent-to-own apps, or buy-now-pay-later apps on your phone signals financial constraint. The presence of investment apps, premium subscription services, and high-end retail apps signals financial comfort. This app-based inference is used by financial services companies to pre-screen potential customers and by advertisers to target income-appropriate offers without asking income questions that users would decline to answer....
Your phone infers your emotional state through a combination of signals that individually seem unrelated to emotion but that in aggregate are predictive of emotional condition. Typing speed and error rate in messaging apps correlate with stress and cognitive load. Screen usage patterns (longer sessions, more app-switching, more frequent check-ins) correlate with anxiety and rumination. Music selection correlates with mood. The timing and length of social media interactions correlate with loneliness and social need.
Research at MIT and Stanford has demonstrated that passive smartphone data (collected without any user input or mood logging) can predict depression and anxiety with accuracy comparable to clinical assessment instruments. A 2018 study published in JMIR Mental Health found that GPS mobility patterns alone — specifically, reduced mobility, reduced time spent away from home, and reduced location variety — predicted depressive episodes with significant accuracy....
Mental health is among the most sensitive personal attributes, and it is also among the most inferable from passive smartphone behavior. The mechanisms span multiple data streams: GPS mobility patterns have been shown in peer-reviewed research to correlate with depressive episodes; social communication patterns (reduced frequency, shorter messages, longer response times) correlate with anxiety and mood; the presence of mental health and wellness apps on a phone reflects the conditions they are designed to support; and location history showing visits to therapists' offices or mental health facilities is identifiable from GPS records.
The aggregate picture that smartphone data assembles about mental health is detailed because behavioral symptoms — reduced mobility, disrupted sleep, social withdrawal, changes in communication patterns — are captured passively and continuously, not only during clinical encounters. Research published in academic journals has demonstrated that passive smartphone data can identify periods of mental health difficulty with meaningful accuracy....
Climate and environmental crises
Climate Scientists Aghast at How Bad Things Are Getting, and So Fast
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2026]
Scientists Discover an Alarming Trend Climate Models Are Missing
[SciTech Daily, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2026]
[Climate Casino, via The Big Picture, July 14, 2026]
What’s coming has never been seen before in the history of modern global industrial civilization … and it’s just getting started. Climate Casino on the extreme weather events that used to be theoretical and are now showing up in the data with alarming frequency. The tail risks aren’t in the tail anymore.
Democrats' political malpractice
Democrats Fail Because They Won’t Name The Villains
David Sirota, July 17, 2026 [The Lever]
... Amid Slotkin’s anodyne recitation of the things that basically everyone in America would say they wanted, did you notice anything important missing?
Give yourself a star if you said: The villains.
That’s right: Slotkin’s grand vision includes no mention of the powerful donors and corporate forces blocking this vision from becoming reality, no explanation for why we don’t already have these things, and no mention of overcoming the obstacles to these purported objectives.
The omission isn’t an accident — nor is it merely a rhetorical tactic. It is a reflection of elite Democratic culture that has convinced itself that problems deliberately created by oligarch donors can somehow be solved without confronting oligarchy. This belief allows politicians like Slotkin to at once benefit from corporate donors’ largesse while omitting any mention of those donors’ participation in the societal crises Slotkin and her establishment faction insist they want to solve.
In their telling, the story of the affordability crisis doesn’t need to mention the Wall Street banks, corporate landlords, private equity moguls, healthcare conglomerates, and retail monopolists jacking up the rent, raising health care premiums, and paying starvation wages — all while those moneyed interests drown the political system in campaign cash.
In this faction’s telling, the story of endemic corruption can mention President Donald Trump’s most flagrant self-enrichment schemes, but it does not need to mention the specific super PACs and dark money groups buying elections up and down the ballot.
It does not need to mention the kind of crypto-funded groups that boosted Slotkin after she backed pro-crypto legislation or the healthcare industry-funded group that boosted Slotkin as she opposed Medicare For All. No, as long as everyone plays by the same official “rules” that allow super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups to legally buy the entire political process, it’s all good.
In this faction’s telling, there are no real villains — except maybe Trump and disgruntled lefties agitating in primaries for a bit of change.
This is the politics of villain avoidance — a corporate Democratic politics that seeks to simultaneously appeal to voters being crushed by societal crises and protect donors creating those crises....
As the Congressional Black Caucus Condemns Will Lawrence, Local Black Leaders Back Him Up
David Dayen, July 17, 2026 [The American Prospect]
On a podcast, Lawrence said Black establishment leaders’ support for the status quo ‘is a big problem.’ Black voters and leaders in Michigan agreed with him.
Don't Take Advice From Your Enemies
Hamilton Nolan, July 13, 2026 [How Things Work]
... These columns—a selection of what has appeared just in the past week—are examples of a particular genre of punditry that should not exist at all. That genre is: “Advice from your enemies.” ....
Writing about politics is fine. Writing about what your political enemies are doing is fine. What is stupid, farcical, at best a trap and at worst a sign of a devastating collapse in American logic, is to purport to give political advice to your political enemies. It is one thing for a Republican pundit to write “I dislike socialism.” It is another, more ridiculous thing for a Republican pundit to write “Democrats must reject socialism, for their own good.” The only thing that exceeds the uselessness of writing these types of columns is the reading of them.
If you, a citizen who does not spend an unhealthy amount of time reading political punditry, have ever made the mistake at nodding sagely at one of these columns and filing their advice in the serious side of your mind, I now give you a gift: the gift of never having to do that again. Taking advice from people who do not share your goals is and will always be a trick, and a waste of time. Stop it!
Do I, on the opposite side of the political spectrum from these pundits, have opinions about what Republicans should do? I sure do. They should fall to their knees, grovel before their false gods, beg forgiveness from the oppressed people of the world, and reverse all of their political beliefs. It is fine for me to share all of these correct thoughts. But I hardly expect Republicans to consider this to be advice. I do not share their goals. I want their entire political project to fail... And why would they ever believe me? I could never have a genuine thought about what Republicans should do in order to help Republicans. I do not want to help Republicans. Such a thought would be contrary to my entire nature. And if I ever did have a useful idea to empower Republicans, why would I ever share it? I might as well write “A Burglar’s Guide to Breaking Into My Home While I am Out of Town This Weekend.” The very act of writing such a piece would reveal me to be either an undercover cop or a moron.
That is exactly what you are getting when you read a piece by David Brooks or Bret Stephens or any Wall Street Journal columnist about what the Democrats should do. (And I am only using the strictest definition of this dynamic here. In reality, it should be expanded to include all essays about What the Left Should Do by corporate Democratic officials, mewling centrists, “common sense” Democratic operatives who now write for the Free Press, and so on. In all of these cases, people who fundamentally disagree with your goals are allegedly giving you good faith tips on what you should be doing.) Our national political media discourse would be greatly improved by eliminating all of these pieces....
[TW: And here is a timely example:]
[Chicago Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 07-14-2026]
Resistance
Christopher Armitage, July 18, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
The news supplies reasons for pessimism on a daily schedule. What follows is a list of reasons for optimism, each one something I have directly observed or can date and source.
Alex Nguyen, July 17, 2026 [Mother Jones]
California Is Making Ballot Seizure a Felony. States Can Do Even More to Protect Their Elections.
Christopher Armitage, July 12, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
BOOM! Billionaires Punched in the Nose Over Paramount-Warner by State Enforcers, Unions
Matt Stoller, July 14, 2026 [BIG]
Democracy Necessitates Resistance (w/ Roger Hallam)
Chris Hedges, July 17, 2026
In his new book, Roger Hallam of Extinction Rebellion provides tools for effective resistance to climate collapse under repressive systems.
Rebuilding 'Home' in the 21st Century (w/ Ece Temelkuran)
Chris Hedges, July 15, 2026
... In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Hedges and Temelkuran discuss her newest work, “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century,” and a previous book, “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism.” Temelkuran connects the crises of today to the neoliberalism of the late twentieth century, which made promises of prosperity but instead destroyed social infrastructure and financial security and increased state repression to subdue resultant popular struggles. Hedges calls this ‘cutthroat capitalism’, a system that divides people and pits them against each other and against their own interests. Temelkuran states, “I think people have been cheated enough with this liberal democracy promises, which were never fulfilled, so, they are perhaps taking a revenge on the entire political establishment.”
While it is tempting to believe that ousting particular political leaders, such as President Donald Trump, will solve the current crises, Temelkuran emphasizes that the crises are systemic in nature and require a long-term approach to organizing resistance.
Fundamental to that effort is breaking with a culture of fear, hatred and hostility that has been instilled by the ruling class. In this new world order, Temelkuran explains that more people are becoming ‘unhomed’ in the sense that the life they once knew no longer exists and won’t return. The antidote is a greater sense of connectedness and solidarity, of realizing that we are all vulnerable in a state that knows no boundaries in the violence, exploitation and displacement it will inflict on populations....
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, July 14, 2026 [Our Moral Moment]
After two weeks studying the choices professionals made during the Nazi regime, I keep coming back to the witness of Harald and Dorothee Poelchau....
The Poelchaus have been on my mind since I got back from two weeks in Germany and Poland with the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), an innovative, inter-professional program that immerses early career professionals in the story of the Nazi regime to ask this question: what can we learn from the decisions professionals made in the processes that led to the Holocaust and mass killings? (If you know or teach young professionals, you should encourage them to apply.)
Along with Rabbi Amy Wallk, I facilitated this year’s cohort of clergy fellows – an exceptional group of young pastors, rabbis, and chaplains from the US, Canada, Ghana, and Nigeria. We made our journey alongside and in dialogue with cohorts of doctors and journalists – good conversation partners for questions about how clergy serve life and shape a public narrative in our work. As it turns out, they’re also important conversation partners for anyone who hopes to offer moral leadership in the midst of an authoritarian crisis....
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Mike Brock, July 18, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
Patrick Carroll has written a response to my essay “Libertarianism is Dead”. It is a useful response. He has stripped the disagreement of every rhetorical courtesy that might obscure it and stated the Rothbardian position with admirable candor.
Libertarians, he says, do not necessarily oppose coercion, domination, hierarchy, or the end of democratic self-government. Those words have nonlibertarian meanings, and the resulting disputes bore him. He proposes that libertarians abandon the vocabulary of liberty altogether and say what they mean:
“I’d rather just say that, as a general rule, it is moral to respect property rights as libertarians understand them, and it is immoral to violate property rights as libertarians understand them.”
The phrase appears in Carroll’s essay “Does Libertarianism Reduce to Feudalism?”, and it contains the entire argument. Property rights are moral because libertarians understand them as moral. Exchanges are voluntary when property rights, as libertarians understand them, have not been violated. Hierarchies are acceptable when they arise from property rights, as libertarians understand them....
Christopher Armitage, July 14, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Supreme Court’s Most Brazen Attack on Congress Yet
Simon Lazarus, July 17, 2026 [The New Republic]
The high court’s decision in Landor v. Louisiana Dept. of Corrections and Public Safety could incapacitate the legislative branch’s policymaking powers.
Civic republicanism
Looking for some material to post in this section today, I revisited my notes on Lawrence A. Peskin's 2004 book, Manufacturing Revolution - The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD). (Peskin's book should be considered a landmark in the economic history of USA. Useful reviews are here, here, here, and here.)
My notes included Peskin's narrative on Mathew Carey. Born in Dublin in 1860, Carey was an Irish revolutionary under sentence of prison who was smuggled out of Ireland when he was 19. I suspect it was an intelligence operation directed by the American minister in Paris, Benjamin Franklin, who was also directing a network of espionage against Britain. But it is known that Carey ended up in Paris, where Franklin became a mentor, and introduced Carey to Marquis de Lafayette.
Carey was sent back to Ireland to begin publishing a periodical named The Volunteers' Journal, to promote the idea of Ireland becoming economically independent of Britain. As Peskin writes, within a few months, "the Irish House of Commons charged the Volunteers' Journal with printing "daring, false, scandalous and seditious libel" of Parliament, prompting "discontents among his majesty's subjects," creating groundless jealousies between Ireland and Britain, alienating "the affections of the people from his Majesty's government," and exciting an "opposition to the laws of the land."
Once again facing imprisonment, Carey again fled Ireland, this time to Franklin's city of Philadelphia. With the support of Lafayette and Franklin, Carey began publishing the Pennsylvania Evening Herald twice a week. Carey found that he was able to recollect and write the details of speeches and legislative debates, making the Herald a great success. Within a few years, Carey was operating one of the largest publishing and printing businesses in the country.
In January 1787, Carey launched a monthly magazine, The American Museum; or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces &c. Prose and Poetical. The first issue included a reprint Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, first pubkished 21 years earlier. Though it lasted only five years, The American Museum became one of the two first successful commercial magazines in USA.
In 1814, Mathew Carey made his 21-year old son, Henry C. Carey, a partner. During the 1820s, Henry gradually took complete control of the publishing business, building it into the largest publisher in USA. The firm, and its following iterations under various names appended to Carey's, published Henry Carey's numerous writings on political economy, helping him to become the best known and most influential American economist of the mid-19th century and Civil War period.
What is particularly important about the Carey's publishing business is the immense impact it had in assisting the industrial development of USA. Over the course of 19th century, the Carey firms published hundreds of books on almost every known scientific and technical subject. Architects, blacksmiths, boilermakers, boiler operators, brewers, brick and stone masons, carpenters, chemists, civil engineers, coopers, distillers, foundrymen, iron mongers, leather makers, locomotive engineers and firemen, machinists, mechanical engineers, metalworkers, pattern makers, railroad workers, road builders, steamboat men, surveyors, textile workers, tinsmiths, woodworkers -- all used Carey books to learn and improve the mastery of their trades and crafts. Archives.org has a pdf scan of 96 pages of a Catalogue of Practical & Scientific Books by Henry Carey Baird & Co. (I have a similar original hard copy in my possession, and believe the Archives.org copy is from the late 1880s or early 1890s.)
Many of these listings include a full Table of Contents, and a quick scan of just a few pages will give you a good idea of how important the Carey publishing legacy is to the industrial and economic development of the United States. How is it possible that any economic history of USA can be honestly written that does not include the vital role played by the Careys, father and son?
It simply isn't.
Which is why elites today are so spectacularly incompetent. They simply have never been taught how to actually BUILD a nation. How many hundreds of thousands - or is it millions? - of people have been miseducated in MBA schools and university economic departments for over a century now?
A complete scan of the second volume of Mathew Carey's American Museum is available at archive.org: American Museum; or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces &c. Prose and Poetical. The first half of the first volume is devoted to discussions of money. In the Introduction, Carey wrote "Every man, whether an advocate or opposer of paper-emissions, will readily and without hesitation allow, that the subject is as interesting to this country as almost any other whatsoever." The first article was written by Benjamin Franklin in 1764, while in London. It is not the better known 1729 essay by Franklin entitled "A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency."
The second article, “The true interest of the United States, and particularly of Pennsylvania, considered,” includes this excerpt:
From what has been premised, we may infer, that money, in its proper signification, is not wealth, but
the sign, token or representative of it. The absolute riches of a country, consist in the abundance of the
productions of nature, that minister directly to the support, the conveniency, and the enjoyment of mankind. (p. 25)
I note this because the phrase "the support, the conveniency, and the enjoyment of mankind" was a common sentiment, which I have identified as a primary principle of civic republicanism: a general social expectation that every citizen should "do good" by bettering the condition of their fellow human beings.
I include a large excerpt from the essay “Queries and replies relative to paper money” because it shows how much of the debate over economics today, such as Modern Monetary Theory, was actually answered at the founding of the republic. Problem is, we have allowed the rich and their special interests to suppress much of this history. The result has been that the principles of civic republicanism, and the proper policies of political economy for a republic, have been largely replaced John Locke's cult of worshiping private property. Note the simple rebuttal of "hard money" ideas, and the understanding that money is created from nothing by government, and the general acceptance of money is driven by government taxing it, which is echoed today by Modern Monetary Theory.
Attributed to “Z.”
What is money?
It is the legal creation of a circulating medium of trade, or arbitrary sign of property, by the legislative body of a state, out of materials of very small intrinsic value, to facilitate the exchange of one necessary article for another.
Have not gold and silver an intrinsic value, equal to what they pass for, as a medium of trade ?
By no means : iron is more intrinsically valuable to society than either.
How can you prove this assertion?
By confining any person to the use of one metal only, his choice will soon determine the matter—gold will not make a good plough-share, and silver a very bad axe or saw.
Can the legislature ever make a good circulating medium of paper, that will not be subject to depreciation ?
Yes, provided all sinister motives could be laid aside, and the law which gives it a political existence, as a medium of trade, be framed in such a judicious manner, as to support it in its credit and currency, without which, it will be of as little value as blank paper.
How is this desirable end to be effected ?
By emitting no more than is necessary for a medium of trade, making it a lawful tender, and diffusing it to every part of the state, so that every industrious person may obtain his proportion of it.
How is this to be done ? Surely you would not force people to take it, for what they have to dispose of: even the people who supply our markets, will not be compelled to take it ; and if we attempt to force it upon them, they will not bring in their produce, and soon reduce us to their own terms.
By imposing a tax in this money, equal to one fourth of the sum emitted, to be collected in one year; but if the citizens, who are taxed, cannot, or rather will not, procure these bills to pay their proportion, cause them, by law, to pay two shillings per pound more in hard money ; this, alone, will cause people in the most remote parts of the state, to procure a sufficient sum to pay their taxes. The custom-house will also take in a large quantity of it, and leave little chance for depreciation, and consequently speculation.
On page 89, we find a small listing under the title "Value of various estates in Europe," obviously meant to be a polemic against wealth inequality -- recognized at the time as an insidious danger to republican self-government:
THE following enormous estates of a few, contrasted with the deplorable indigence of the multitude in Europe, should afford cause of exultation to every American, at the happy equality and mediocrity so generally prevailing throughout this country : —
The duke of Orleans, when certain reversions centre in his person, will have a rental of Sterl. £. 300,000
The prince of Conde has above 200,000
The prince of Conti near 100,000
Comte Sheremeroff 170,000
Prince Lubormitski 110,000
Comte Czernicnew 90,000
Prince Radzivel 80,000
Duke of Medina Sidonia 90,000
Duke of Bedford 70,000
Duke of Marlborough 53,000
Duke of Northumberland 47,000
Duke of Devonfshire 36,000
Sir Watkin W. Wynn 35,000
(£. 100,000 in 1787 would be worth approximately $20.4 million in 2026.)
![[Graphic: Neoliberalism]](https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Neoliberalism-768x1152.png){kind=link}
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