Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 26, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Prosecutor Investigating U.S. Boat Strikes and Claims of Torture Was Murdered in Ecuador
Camila Lourdes Galarza, July 23, 2026 [Drop Site]
QUITO, Ecuador—Alexandra Bravo, the prosecutor assigned to investigate U.S. strikes on three Ecuadorian boats and the 36 survivors’ subsequent accounts of torture and kidnapping, was shot dead in the coastal city of Manta last month. According to police, on June 14 a hitman aboard a black motorcycle opened fire on Bravo as she and her sister were leaving a café at about 11 a.m. Bravo’s sister, who jumped to protect her, was also killed in the attack.
Christopher Armitage, July 25, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
War on Voting
Guest article by Jay Inslee, former governor of Washington State [MeidasTouch Network, Feb 03, 2026]
... Ask yourself this - why would Trump NOT surround polling places with camo-clad, face-masked, helmet-wearing, semi-automatic long gun carrying ICE and Border Patrol agents on election day, in every Democratic-leaning precinct in any targeted district? What would restrain him? His well-developed sense of propriety? His internal moral code? The spineless Republicans in the House and Senate that would have to threaten him with impeachment if he did this? Good luck finding those Profiles in Courage.
This would be devastating. He would not target all the precincts, just those with heavy Democratic performance. Given the fact that the Trump administration shoots protesters and then lies about them, the abject fear these troops would put in the minds of thousands of people who just want to vote cannot be measured, but is surely significant, particularly given the close margins in the House....
Seymour Hersh [via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2026]
Donald Trump Doesn't Want Nursing Home Residents To Vote
Brian Beutler, July 22, 2026 [Off Message]
On Monday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly rescinded standing guidance—first issued in October 2020, then renewed ahead of the 2024 election—reminding nursing-home owners that their residents have the right to vote “without interference, coercion, discrimination, or reprisal” from their long-term care facilities, and that they “are required to support residents in the exercise of their right to vote, such as assisting with absentee or mail-in voting or transporting residents to polling locations or ballot drop-boxes in a safe manner.”
War
New WSJ Article Paints Trump in ‘Downfall Video’ Type Scenes in the Oval
Josh Marshall, July 24, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
The Journal has an article today about the increasing unreality of the strategy, if one can call it that, the U.S. is using to approach Trump’s war with Iran. The headline tells the story: Trump is Losing Patience Over an Iran War with No Clear End in Sight. The article appears to be based on accounts from various advisors who’ve been present at planning meetings with Trump. It’s filled with quotes about how he’s out of patience, mad, fed up, has lost confidence in diplomacy, etc. One advisors says he’s moved into “revenge mode.” He’s telling advisors he thinks he can “break the Iranians’ will through an aggressive bombing campaign.”
Trump threatens to bomb a civilian target for every attack on shipping in Hormuz
[Drop Site Daily, July 22, 2026]
President Donald Trump said the U.S. would bomb one Iranian bridge or power plant for every attack by Iran on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, warning that the policy would apply to strikes carried out with “missiles, rockets, drones, or any other device or weapon.” In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the targets could include infrastructure “located next to, or in, the capital city of Tehran.”
'Open the Gates of Hell' - The child could stand down. Or not. Let's look at the 'not'
Thomas Neuburger, July 24, 2026 [God's Spies]
... If Trump decides to launch a major strike, a rage of revenge or even a landing of troops, there aren’t many pathways ahead. Either:
- The U.S. security state, in its wisdom, will raise its head above water and get in his way; or
- All hell will break loose.
If Trump really makes up his mind, those are the roads.
If the State Were to Try to Stop Trump…
Let’s look at the first — the State attempts to stop Trump. I wrote about that earlier. I think this is the least likely path, but if it occurs, here are all the State’s choices....
US Intelligence Assessment Says the US Cannot Bomb Iran Into Capitulation
Dave DeCamp, July 21, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press, July 25, 2026]
The Washington Post reported on Monday night that a new US intelligence assessment says that Iran’s government is unlikely to feel a significant impact or change its negotiating position as a result of the US airstrikes that have been hitting Iran.
The report, which cited current and former US officials, said that US intelligence agencies have also “concluded that Tehran and Washington are, for now, stuck in an indefinite limbo between peace and war,” though there’s been little peace lately as the US has bombed Iran for 10 consecutive nights.
WSJ: Iran rebuilding faster than Israeli intelligence expected
[Wall Street Journal, via [Drop Site Daily, July 24, 2026]
Iran has quickly rebuilt infrastructure damaged during months of U.S. and Israeli bombing, from missile bases deep inside mountains to bridges, ports, and production facilities, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
- Planet Labs and Airbus imagery showed repairs at missile bases near Kangavar, north of Kermanshah, and at Dezful, where crews reopened collapsed tunnel entrances and repaved access roads within weeks.
- One Israeli military official said Iran repaired a bridge hit by three Israeli bombs within days. Officials also said that some strikes only collapsed entrances to deeply buried facilities, leaving the missiles inside intact.
David D. Kirkpatrick, July 20, 2026 [The New Yorker]
On March 5, 2024, five months into the war in Gaza, Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, sent a confidential letter to President Joe Biden. Under the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross holds a unique responsibility to counsel states about avoiding war crimes. In the letter, which I obtained from a former United States official, Spoljaric reminded Biden that the organization had condemned the “horrific” October 7th massacre of Israelis by Hamas, and remained “relentless” in pressing the group to release the hostages it had taken. But she was now appealing to Biden “with profound alarm” because Israel, which had been pummelling Gaza with heavy munitions since October, was ignoring the Red Cross as never before. “The way the hostilities are being conducted by Israel is incompatible” with the laws of armed conflict, she wrote, “particularly the obligations to protect civilians and distinguish between military targets and civilians or civilian infrastructure, to ensure dignified treatment of detainees and the dead, to protect medical installations and personnel, and to provide and enable access of humanitarian aid.” ....
... Iran had been central to Biden’s thinking about the Middle East, several top advisers said. He’d feared that any public pressure the U.S. put on Israel—any “daylight” between the allies—could invite attacks by Iran or its Lebanese client, Hezbollah. The U.S. would then be compelled to defend Israel in a regional conflagration. Brett McGurk, Biden’s White House coördinator for the Middle East and probably his most influential adviser, championed this position, arguing that rock-solid support for Israel would help contain Iran, whose proxies killed three U.S. soldiers in the region during the first months of the Gaza conflict....
... alarms about potential war crimes began ringing inside the Biden Administration soon after Israel began its counterattack on Gaza. By November 1, 2023, the Palestinian death toll was at least eighty-eight hundred, including more than fifty-eight hundred women and children. Israeli jets were conducting as many as eight hundred strikes a day on northern Gaza, and Administration officials who were closely tracking the war told me that Israeli military planners could not possibly have preselected or so quickly identified that many legitimate military targets, such as tunnel entrances, rocket launchers, and Hamas leaders. Nor could the Israelis have carefully weighed whether the risk to civilian lives and infrastructure was proportionate to the military value of each target. Startlingly, the strikes appeared to move in a geographical line from the northeast to the southwest, flattening whole neighborhoods in a way that suggested little differentiation between civilian and military structures. Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, anxiously asked his staff how Israel could justify this scale of destruction. A senior State Department official told me, “We were all shocked at how aggressive and deadly it was, and asking, ‘What the fuck are they doing?’ " ....
Blinken flew to Israel a few days later. He met with Netanyahu and Gallant, and, according to people present, told them that letting in food was not only “a moral responsibility” but also “a strategic imperative and a legal imperative.” Yet Netanyahu wouldn’t budge until Blinken threatened to cancel a planned visit by Biden. Even then, Netanyahu agreed to let in only a small amount of supplies, which would have to come through Rafah, on Gaza’s border with Egypt; he also asked that this minor concession remain secret. He feared a domestic backlash for not starving Gaza’s women, children, and other civilians. Biden made his visit, and as he left Netanyahu bragged publicly that he’d defied the President. He declared that Israel “will not allow humanitarian assistance” from “our territory into the Gaza Strip.” ....
On May 5th, Israeli officials, in an apparent attempt to stir up American supporters on the eve of the report’s release to Congress, told Axios that the Biden Administration had quietly put a hold on a shipment of what the publication called “ammunition.” The withheld ammunition turned out to be thousands of enormous bombs: about half weighed two thousand pounds, the others five hundred pounds. (A two-thousand-pound bomb kills anyone within a radius of twelve hundred feet.) In an interview on CNN three days later, Biden said, of the two-thousand-pound munitions, “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs.” If Israel attacked Rafah’s “population centers,” he continued, he would not be “supplying the weapons.” Israeli officials said that their military used the two-thousand-pound bombs to destroy fortified tunnels, and although there are less indiscriminate ways to accomplish that objective, Republicans pounced. Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, declared that Biden’s “position is de facto for Hamas victory.” Representative Keith Self, of Texas, called Biden “Benedict Arnold.” Sixteen House Democrats joined Republicans in condemning the decision to withhold the large bombs....
And It Goes On - We don't get to say when it stops
Aurelien, July 22, 2026 [Trying to Understand the World, via Naked Capitalism 07-23-2026]
Given that about ninety per cent of all those who have ever written about international relations, war and conflict studies and military-strategic issues are alive and writing now, you might be surprised to learn that we still know very little about the principal causes of real-world conflicts, and even less than that about why and how they end. Moreover, we lack even an agreed definition of what a “conflict” is, which means that various attempts to calculate the frequency and length of conflicts, as well as to identify their end, give wildly different results....
There is probably no major conflict in modern history where experts completely agree on the “causes.” In turn, this is because the very structure and definition of such conflicts is often contested. If you believe that there is an organic and causal relationship between the Second Word War in Asia and that in Europe, then you will argue that the War started in the early 1930s, and look for causal connections between the two episodes. If (like me) you regard these as two separate wars with some thematic connections and a degree of influence on each other, then you will prefer different dates, different end-points and different emphases in accounts of the period. Even in the more geographically constricted First World War, there are huge differences in emphasis, and a debate that can never be settled about the ‘“causes,” both immediate and long-term. The causal chain between the assassination of an Austrian Archduke by Serb nationalists in Sarajevo, and fighting between British and German colonial troops in what was then Tanganyika, has about the strength of a cotton thread, and it is questionable in the end if we are even talking about the same conflict.
Likewise, it’s not always obvious when wars “end.” (The fighting did not stop everywhere in November 1918 for example.) How many wars have there been in the Middle East since 1948? Some would argue only one, with long pauses and changes of battlefront. Did any of these wars actually “end?” Was the Lebanese Civil War a separate event whose causes were primarily domestic, even if outside powers like Syria intervened from the start? Was it one war or several, with pauses and reconfigurations? Did that War actually end in 1990, or did exhaustion just produce a long pause where war does not seem attractive? And if there is, in fact, an underlying and insoluble crisis which occasionally takes the form of conflict, should we not be giving more of our attention to the crisis in question, and less to the periodic conflicts? ....
This in turn is an aspect of a larger problem, which is the historical tendency to view the West as the norm. If the Russians and the Iranians are doing something different from us, they must be wrong. If we are, by definition, doing the right thing, then we should win, and so we do not need to change anything substantial... This is itself part of a massive over-estimate of western norms and western power in the world, which has survived decades of disappointment, and is still very powerful, largely because we know little about strategic issues and concerns outside the West, and cannot be bothered to find out. We make assumptions about western power and influence which are normatively rather than pragmatically based. We assume that people who sound as though they might think like us actually do think like us, because our way of thinking is just superior. We assume that western doctrine, training and equipment is the best, because we have never seriously researched others, and we look for someone to blame when any of these are shown to be inadequate....
More generally, trying to actually get to grips with the fiendish complexity of, say, Middle East or West African politics is a life’s work for specialists, and western capitals are in general simply not interested in that level of detail. For generations now, it has been easier to invoke Great Power arguments than to attend to actual circumstances on the ground, and nothing much changes. From the 1970s, western powers claimed that independence movements in Africa, because they had looked to the Soviet Union for support, were therefore nothing but tools of Moscow. (As late as 1990, the BBC was furiously criticised by some right-wing politicians for its live coverage of the release of the “terrorist” Mandela.) And “interference” by the Soviet Union was seen everywhere: right-wing journalists, prompted by unidentified “intelligence sources” claimed in the 1970s that De Gaulle’s decision to withdraw French forces from the NATO Integrated Military Structure had been masterminded by the KGB. Political folklore being as unimaginative and unoriginal it is, fundamentally the same kinds of ideas circulate today, enabling politicians and pundits to avoid the complexities of real life, and to luxuriate in the idea of a mysterious and glamorous world of “psyops” and “colour revolutions” and “cut-outs” which they know, in reality, almost nothing about. And if we get it wrong, well the consequences don’t affect us....
The panic arises from the dawning understanding that western actions can have real consequences. For several decades, talking and acting tough against China, Russia or Iran has been essentially playing to a domestic audience, seeking to appear more radical and hard-line than the next actor. What the targets of this behaviour may themselves have thought was irrelevant, and anyway there was nothing they could do about it. That’s changed now, of course, but habits of generations die hard. It’s not that western governments are trying to “provoke a war” with China, it’s that they can’t abandon the habit of threatening and insulting that country, secure in the belief that there will never be any practical consequences. Until now, though, the subtlety with which the Chinese are conducting themselves is obviously more than western political systems can easily understand.
It follows that the West has now largely lost the ability to determine how crises will unfold, and especially when and how they will finish....
And the dreaded Military-Industrial Complex: won’t they force the war to continue? Maybe not so dreaded: of the largest US companies listed by revenue in Fortune magazine, none of the military companies are in the top fifty. Much economic power lies elsewhere, and anyway you can’t escalate with things you haven’t got....
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Truth Social to sell trading firms ‘fastest’ access to Trump’s posts.
[Reuters, via The Big Picture, July 19, 2026]
Trump Media & Technology Group has unveiled a paid-for, licensed data feed that will give banks and trading firms “the fastest” access to posts from influential Truth Social accounts, such as President Donald Trump’s, whose posts often move global markets. The product, called “Truth API,” will deliver posts from the 10 most influential accounts to customers at a significantly faster pace than a regular push notification on the Truth Social platform, a spokesperson said.
[ProPublica)
ProPublica documents the gifts — Kennedy Center galas, fancy dinners — that Paramount lavished on FCC officials while seeking regulatory approval. The appearance of corruption is indistinguishable from the thing itself.
Letters from an American, July 24, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, July 25, 2026
Tony Romm and Brad Plumer of the New York Times reported this afternoon that the Trump administration’s claim last October that it was cutting programs in order to protect taxpayers against waste was, in fact, a lie. In court filings, federal officials admitted that the $7.5 billion in cuts from clean energy projects begun under former president Joe Biden were “based solely” on whether states had voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought announced the cuts by saying, “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.” But, in fact, a government lawyer told the court that none of the cancellations were “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”
Trump administration freezes over $1B in Medicaid funds to California, Minnesota
[Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, via Drop Site Daily, July 22, 2026]
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said Tuesday it is deferring about $867.5 million in Medicaid payments to California and $199 million to Minnesota, Axios reported.
CMS claims that its financial reviews revealed “unsupported claims” for in-home care and other services in the states. Minnesota state officials called the change “unprecedented and punitive,” noting their full collaboration with CMS’ inquiry.
CMS announced in May that it would defer $1.3 billion in Medicaid funds to California, in what CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz claimed was the agency’s biggest ever deferral.
After "Political Terrorism" Summit, U.S. Names 43 Americans + Groups
Ken Klippenstein, July 20, 2026
Rubio report on Cuban subversion names Zohran Mamdani, Amy Goodman, Hasan Piker + orgs like DSA and Amazon Labor Union
Chris Hedges, July 22, 2026
Trump’s Consumer Watchdog Pick Worked For Companies Sued By The Agency
Luke Goldstein, July 22, 2026 [The Lever]
President Donald Trump’s pick to take over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Brian Johnson, previously consulted for a litany of companies and industry groups sued for alleged consumer protection violations, including by the financial regulatory agency he’s now poised to lead, according to financial disclosures reviewed by The Lever.
Among Johnson’s clients were payday lenders charging up to 360 percent interest rates, credit reporting agencies that distributed inaccurate information about consumers’ financial status, and a home equity company sued for allegedly trapping homeowners in debt with false promises....
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) began operations 15 years ago this week, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, with a mandate to protect the public from the kinds of rogue practices that Johnson’s clients have been accused of deploying.
Johnson, a longtime critic of the agency, worked as a deputy director at the Bureau under the first Trump administration, where he was once described as the “Wizard of Oz… pulling the levers behind the curtain.” Most notably, Johnson authored a “five-year strategic” plan to pare back the agency’s scrutiny of corporations, which was met with fawning praise from the financial industry.
Johnson most recently served as a Vice President at the national bank Capital One, a position he held in 2025 when Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau abruptly dropped a major lawsuit brought by the Biden administration against the bank....
The Alien Terrorist Removal Court
Steve Vladeck [via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2026]
DOJ withdraws subpoenas against NYT journalists
[New York Times, via [Drop Site Daily, July 24, 2026]
The Justice Department withdrew subpoenas seeking phone records and grand jury testimony from New York Times journalists after Judge Arun Subramanian pressed prosecutors for nearly an hour over procedural violations.
The DOJ had attempted to subpoena journalists investigating the security capabilities of Trump’s new Air Force One, donated to him by Qatar, an act the Times claimed was an attempt to intimidate its reporters. The Justice Department says that the investigation “remains ongoing.”
Barry Ritholtz, July 24, 2026 [The Big Picture]
These are as likely unlawful as the IEEPA tariffs were, but for different and more technical reasons. Congress did give the Executive branch limited authority to impose these sorts of tariffs, but with a very specific set of guidelines and procedures to follow.
The documents filed claim these were followed properly, but their own language makes it clear this is unlikely.
The new strategy is to use the complexity of Section 301 to provide SCOTUS cover to allow what is plainly a usurpation of Congressional authority.1 It was impossible for any credible court to have supported the IEEPA tariffs, as they were so clearly unconstitutional.2
8 things you need to know (and didn’t read) about Trump’s new tariffs
Dan Froomkin, July 24, 2026 [presswatchers.org]
Trump Jr.’s investment firm posts 200% returns
[Drop Site Daily, July 23, 2026]
Donald Trump Jr.’s investment firm 1789 Capital has generated returns of roughly 200% as of June 30, far outpacing the venture capital industry average of around 21%, the Times reported on Wednesday.
- 1789 Capital has grown from a fund managing a few hundred million dollars to one managing more than $3 billion in assets by investing in companies benefiting from Trump administration policies, The New York Times reported.
- The firm’s investments include rare-earths producer Vulcan Elements, which received a $620 million Defense Department loan months after 1789 invested and is now under congressional Democratic scrutiny, and Polymarket, now valued at $15 billion after federal regulators granted it a U.S. operating license.
Strategic Political Economy
Wolf Richter [via Naked Capitalism 07-21-2026]
Global power shift
China is now world’s No 1 science power, top Russian scientist Artem Oganov says
[South China Morning Post, July 19, 2026]
Spencer Ackerman, 20 July 2026 [FOREVER WARS and The Intercept]
Oligarchy
How America's Corporate Class Became Legally Unaccountable (w/ Marie Gottschalk) (video)
Chris Hedges, July 23, 2026
Luke Goldstein, July 14, 2026 [The Lever]
Felonomics
The CDC Has a Cyclospora Lab. DOGE Downsized It Last Year
[Wired, via The Big Picture, July 19, 2026]
Former CDC staffers on the cuts now haunting the outbreak response: “Based on simple math, these outbreak responses—which require rapid, timely responses—are going to be greatly diminished,” the former CDC lab director tells WIRED.
Trump gave us the worst diarrhea outbreak in decades yet corporate media yawns!
Dean Obeidallah, July 21, 2026
[Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2026]
The Kleptocrat Nesting Dolls Behind Trump’s Potemkin Gas Stations
Maureen Tkacik, July 20, 2026 [The American Prospect]
... Upon subpoenaing the gas station chain CEO’s bank records, PMG ultimately discovered he had no fewer than 28 other credit agreements he hadn’t disclosed on behalf of three or four alter-ego companies whose businesses he’d never listed on his application. The CEO and his brother/partner—two central New Jersey men in their thirties named Syed and Shamikh Kazmi, respectively—had outstanding default judgments against them in Wisconsin and Michigan, a business in Florida they had never disclosed, and legal disputes with landlords and franchisors from Circle K to Phillips 66 to 7-Eleven, the latter of which accused the brothers in a lawsuit of allowing a store they were operating to fall into such an alarming state of squalor it was forced to “disown” it, then exploiting a provision in the franchise agreement to order hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cigarettes in its last weeks of operation that they allegedly neither returned to corporate nor paid for. Another landlord was suing them for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent. The lawsuits would drag on and multiply while the Kazmi brothers bid on new assets under slightly altered names, then failed over and over again to wire over the required deposits....
Gas Grab - Big Oil is laying off workers while ramping up production — and profits.
Veronica Riccobene, Jonathan Easley, July 17, 2026 [The Lever]
Gusher. The Trump administration’s escalation of the war with Iran once again has Americans paying more at the pump, leading to a massive windfall for oil companies — even as the industry slashes jobs and reaps the benefits of reduced wartime regulations. After briefly dropping in June, the price of a gallon of gas hit $4 this week, up from $3.14 one year ago, as affordability becomes a major issue in the 2026 midterm elections. The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies reportedly raked in more than $30 million in excess profits every hour when gas prices spiked at the start of the war. And in the coming weeks, U.S.-based oil firms are expected to report their best quarterly profits in years.
📉 Still, despite increased production, employment in the oil and gas industry has fallen sharply, with Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Imperial Oil collectively shedding tens of thousands of jobs. In 2016, U.S. oil and gas extraction jobs employed 187,300 people. By June of 2026, that number had fallen to 114,500.
Trump calls for review after climate manual for judges withdrawn
Zach Schonfeld [The Hill, via scotusblog.com, July 21, 2026]
In a Truth Social post on Sunday, President Donald Trump demanded review “of an updated judges’ manual that he claims the left improperly influenced,” according to The Hill. “These Manuals have been totally DISCREDITED,” Trump wrote. “Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate.” The president’s comments come after “a controversial climate science chapter” was removed from “the updated ‘Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence,’ which federal judges use to aid them in cases involving complex scientific topics,” and after Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the foreword for the manual, was asked about that chapter’s removal during her congressional testimony last week. Kagan said “she hadn’t read the chapter ... and insisted the judge who managed the project is working to avoid a repeat.” “I know that she is engaged with members of Congress about ... how to make sure that the processes that the Federal Judicial Center uses [to produce the manual] are good ones and that a situation like this does not come up again,” Kagan said.
Ex-DOGE staffers launch military AI cyber startup valued at $1.4 billion
[Reuters, via Drop Site Daily, July 23, 2026]
Former Department of Government Efficiency employees—including Gavin Kliger, until recently the Pentagon’s chief data officer—have launched Cathedral, a startup seeking government contracts for AI-driven military cyber operations against adversaries like China, after closing a $160 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, Reuters reported Wednesday.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Investor alert: Rare earth mining isn’t paying off
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 07-25-2026]
China's export bans on gallium and other key materials have demolished supply chains for arms suppliers.
Now the War on Iran is liquidating arsenals far faster than the munitions can be replaced, and policymakers have pledged billions of dollars to build out new sources of supply....
The Pentagon is in desperate need of more gallium to build missiles and radars, gallium is a by-product of the aluminum mining and refining industry, China has cut off exports of gallium from its aluminum companies....
The gallium shortage is an urgent problem for Western militaries, because gallium is so critical in radar systems, communications, and electronic warfare platforms. Policymakers in the United States are suddenly aware of the problem, now that the Pentagon is blowing through their arsenal of weapons far faster than they can be replaced, and without gallium they cannot be replaced anyway....
[TW: Back in the 1980s, I was covering the quiet but very portentous conflict in the Reagan regime, as the military industrial complex joined with the old hands in State and Commerce Departments to warn that the Reagan ideologues' obsession with free market and free trade nostrums were endangering USA's military-industrial base. I was particularly clued in to the MIC freak out engendered by the sudden collapse of the USA machine tool industry. The Reagan ideologues quickly came to hate the Office of Technology Assessment in particular. (Anti)Republicans took a perverse joy in Newt Gingrich stripping OTA of ALL funding in 1995. Any points for saying "I told you so," when I told you so was forty years ago?]
‘Starvation Wages’ at Giant US Corporations Force Workers to Seek Taxpayer-Funded Aid
Julia Conley, July 23, 2026 [CommonDreams]
US Sen. Bernie Sanders recently commissioned a government analysis of federal aid programs and how much employees of some of the largest and most politically influential corporations in the country are relying on food and healthcare benefits due to the chronically low wages paid by Amazon, Walmart, and other firms.
On Wednesday, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the results of its research....
Six years after the GAO first analyzed low-wage workers’ use of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the report found that the number of Amazon employees who required federal assistance has nearly tripled since 2020, despite the fact that the e-commerce giant has increased its annual profits from $11.59 billion to $77.67 billion in that time....
Sanders noted that Walmart increased its annual profits from $14.88 billion in 2020 to $21.89 billion in 2025, but the number of workers who relied on Medicaid grew by 55% to more than 16,000 people in the 11 states sampled by the GAO....
New Fed research suggests far fewer Americans own homes than widely believed
[CBS, via Naked Capitalism 07-25-2026]
Only about 53% of U.S. adults own homes, far below the commonly cited 65% homeownership rate, according to new Federal Reserve research that paints a starker picture of access to homeownership.
Big Food Is Running Out of Moves With Shoppers and Investors
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, July 21, 2026]
Shrinkflation exhausted. Price hikes maxed out. Volume declining. The major food companies have no good options left. Investors are rightly giving up on companies like General Mills and Kraft Heinz, which are squeezed by everything from inflation to GLP-1s.
On Quality: An ode to Pirsig: What quality is and how it is degraded.
[Worse On Purpose, via The Big Picture, July 25, 2026]
Every investigation I’ve published documents the same story: a product stripped of what made it good while everything a shopper can check stayed intact. Same logo, same spec sheet, same four and a half stars, same price or higher. What got swapped out, the steel gauge, the stitch count and the years of service life, sits in the parts you can’t check from the aisle. That gap between what you can verify and what actually matters is the whole game, for them and for you. They use it to slowly diminish the quality of the products you once loved without tripping an alarm. You can use it to watch the theft happen.
Predatory finance
Private equity’s influence in U.S. manufacturing
[Private Equity Stakeholder Project, via Naked Capitalism 07-23-2026]
Apple's robo-repo (25 Jul 2026)
Cory Doctorow, July 25, 2026 [Pluralistic]
[TW: Before getting to Apple, this article is stuffed with the rip-off details on Klarna, the subprime crisis of 2007-2010 and how Obama and Geithner saved the banksters by sacrificing home-owners (the economic point where a reactionary populist revolt against elites was made inevitable), contract lending to "long-haul truckers, among the most exploited workforce in America," subprime auto-loans....]
... The next wave of automotive usury-tech was a kind of systematic exploration of the entire space between a car that is repossessed and a car that isn't. Some subprime cars are fitted with an extra stereo system that can only be controlled by the borrower over a wireless connection. Miss a payment and this secondary stereo turns itself on and starts playing earsplitting threats about what will happen to you if you don't pay up. The only way to turn it off is to make the payment. The next step is remote immobilization: miss too many payments (or violate a lease clause by crossing the county line) and your car just stops working:
But the apex of this usury-tech comes from (where else?) Tesla. Miss a Tesla payment and your car can do way more than just immobilize itself and tell the dealer where to get the car – it also unlock its doors, flash its lights, honk its horn, and back out of its parking space when the repo man arrives:
That's where the law comes in. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to produce a tool that bypasses an "access control." That means that if a computer is designed to block you from modifying it, removing that block is a felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $500k fine. DMCA 1201 doesn't distinguish between modifications undertaken for a lawful purpose (changing your printer so it works with generic ink) and unlawful purpose (breaking the locks on a DVD so you can sell infringing copies). DMCA 1201 criminalizes anything the manufacturer dislikes. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
A Network Unravelling - Disclosures, Defiance, and the Ongoing Fight for Epstein Transparency
Nolan Higdon, July 21, 2026 [Savage Minds, via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2026]
How America’s Corporate Class Became Legally Unaccountable (w/ Marie Gottschalk)
The Chris Hedges Report
Restoring balance to the economy
Senate Democrat proposes universal health care for children
Joseph Choi, 07/21/26 [The Hill]
Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) on Tuesday unveiled a proposal for all American children to receive Medicaid, a program he’s dubbed MediKids, saying Democrats must bring new ideas to move the conversation on healthcare forward.
Kim’s MediKids Act would automatically enroll every child into the program at birth, provide continued eligibility until the age of 26 and cover 100 percent of the federal medical assistance percentage for this cohort....
Democratic Sens. Alex Padilla (Calif.), Cory Booker (N.J.) and Tammy Duckworth (Ill.) are co-sponsors of the bill. Kim says conversations with Republicans are just now starting.
In recent years, childhood uninsurance rates have risen, going from 5.1 percent to 6 percent between 2022 and 2024, the highest it’s been in a decade....
Could A U.S. State Pass a 30 Hour Work Week? The Senate passed one in 1933 by 53 to 30.
Christopher Armitage, July 24, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Washington Still Ignores Airline Monopolies - The GAO's latest report doesn't make it past takeoff.
Economic Liberties, July 22, 2026 [The Economic Populist]
... In a recently released report on airline “competition” completed as part of the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act, the GAO claims Americans benefit from increased “competition” and that fares inclusive of junk fees are lower than they were 19 years ago. None of this is true. The twin effects of deregulation and dramatic concentration took a wrecking ball to airline competition.
In the spirit of the mandate that ordered this report commissioned, I reviewed the report and listed the most inaccurate things about it. I should add, in the interests of full disclosure, I was interviewed extensively by GAO investigators for this report — only to see much of what I told them dismissed or disregarded....
Disrupting mainstream politics
Should Federalist Society Membership be an Impeachable Offense for Judges?
Christopher Armitage, July 19, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
A Serious Exploration of the Case for Impeaching and Removing Every Federal Judge and Supreme Court Justice Who Has Ever Been a Member of the Federalist Society or Endorsed Unitary Executive Theory.
A sitting judge just delivered the most scathing critique of this Supreme Court term
Mark Joseph Stern, July 19, 2026 [Slate]
... Hawaiʻi Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins’ excoriating assessment of the term so valuable. In an opinion handed down Wednesday, the justice once again refused to import SCOTUS’s “results-driven approach to due process” into state law. He explained that the Hawaiʻi Constitution “takes no instruction” from “hubristic originalists” who are “driven by agenda and intent on swiping power that belongs to the people.” A Supreme Court “that systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignity,” he concluded, “does not chart the course for the Hawaiʻi Constitution.”
DANIEL R. GRANILLO vs. STATE OF HAWAIʻI (pdf)
[SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF HAWAIʻI]
In Citizens United v. Fed. Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), the Court claimed fidelity to text, history, and
tradition while invalidating yet another democratically vetted law, handing corporations the same speech rights as flesh-and
blood Americans and letting dollars talk louder than voters....But “the Supreme Court’s imperious ideology,” Eddins continued, “does not stop at due process. The same jurisprudence has cratered democracy itself,” a process that accelerated over the term that just ended. Its “judicial demolition” of the Voting Rights Act culminated in Louisiana v. Callais, which “buried what remained of the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. Pretend law for a real statute.” The supermajority “then ditched its own thirty-two day default for releasing decisions and hustled out its judgment mid-primary, a favor granted over objection only twice in twenty-five years.” Just weeks later, “on its shadow docket, the court tossed an eleven-day trial record built on fifty-one witnesses, 790 exhibits, 2,600 pages of testimony, and a 270-page opinion by a three-judge court.” In the process, “it resurrected a tainted congressional map the three-judge factfinders found deliberately entrenched racial bias against Black voters.”
[TW: The precise attack on SCOTUS by Hawaiʻi Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins struck a nerve in the land of conservative (anti)Republican bloviators. The National Review posted Hawaii Justices’ Stunning Screed Against the U.S. Supreme Court, whihch included wailing and gnashing such as "ongoing disregard for the rulings of the United States Supreme Court," "a meandering, nine-page broadside against the U.S. Supreme Court," "ugly and unhinged" and
Pages 72 through 80 are worth reading in full, if only to marvel at the scope and arrogance of the digression, spanning voting rights, campaign finance, abortion, religious liberty, the Second Amendment, the major questions doctrine, Chevron deference, the spending power, the removal power, and birthright citizenship.
[Reason magazine, the libertarian operation that destroyed the empathy and social conscience of generations of computer geeks and tech lords, carried Is The Hawaii Supreme Court's "Aloha Spirit" Consistent With A Republican Form Of Government? ]
Republicans Try to Smother OSHA Heat Standard Under General Duty Clause
To the surprise of no one, the Republican-controlled House Education and Workforce Committee yesterday approved H.R. 6213, the Heat Workforce Standards Act of 2025, a bill to stop OSHA from issuing a workplace heat standard “substantially similar” to the strong 2024 Biden proposal.
The discussion at the markup was not uninteresting. (If you missed it, you can still watch it here.)
The People Own the Constitution, Not the Court
Josh Marshall, July 20, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
America Has Eight Political Tribes. Which One Do You Belong to?
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 07-22-2026]
NYT’s Embarrassing Anti-DSA Meltdown
[FAIR, via Naked Capitalism 07-24-2026]
... The New York Times (e.g., 6/16/25) has been vocal about its desire to keep DSA-backed candidates out of office, especially Mamdani. The recent momentum for DSA inspired the paper to publish a news story (7/19/26) that painted DSA’s pro-tenant, pro-worker, tax-the-rich platform not as a threat to the monied class, but as the project of white gentrifiers suppressing Black and Latino electoral power....
A March poll found that Mamdani’s net approval rating, which is +10 points among white New Yorkers, is +23 among Latino voters and +42 among Black voters. Compare that to former Mayor Eric Adams, whose 2021 nomination “seemed to signal a high-water mark for Black political power” in New York City, according to the Times piece: In his last year in office, his net approval rating among Black voters was -36 (Quinnipiac, 3/5/25)....
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
AI solipsists and AI cynics (24 Jul 2026)
Cory Doctorow, July 24, 2026 [Pluralistic]
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
As a destructive economic pathology, AI is extraordinary. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money – over $1.4T, most of that in the past year – on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI can't do the jobs it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town....
AI does not appear to be boosting productivity, analysts at Barclays have said
[Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 07-25-2026]
The Strange Inner Life of Self-Driving Cars
[Wired, via The Big Picture, July 21, 2026]
What Waymo’s vehicles “see” and “think” — the hallucinations, the edge cases, the weird decisions. The AI behind the wheel is both more capable and more alien than you’d expect.
Collapse of independent news media
Climate and environmental crises
[Washington Post, July 21, 2026]
Democrats' political malpractice
David Sirota, July 16, 2026 [The Lever]
Whitmer’s War Against Medicare For All
David Sirota, July 16, 2026 [The Lever]
... El-Sayed has devoted his adult life to championing Medicare For All — he literally wrote the book on it — and has based his Senate campaign around a promise to make it a reality. He is a huge threat to the private health insurance industry. Stevens, by contrast, is an opponent of Medicare For All. She is no threat to that industry.
And so with El-Sayed surging in the polls, Stevens is getting a lifeline from Whitmer — a politician with familial and campaign finance ties to a major health insurance corporation whose business could be limited or ended by Medicare For All....
The Resistance Liberal Lawyers Helping Trump Take Over the Media
Matt Stoller, July 24, 2026 [BIG]
Resistance
Christopher Armitage, July 24, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
This is version 3.0 of the bill, previously published as the Child Sex Trafficking Investigation and Accountability Act, revised and strengthened for this release. Everything that follows is built from existing and long standing legal precedent.
The primary provisions of the Act, in plain terms:
- State attorneys general get Martin Act-style subpoena power: they can compel documents and testimony before any charges are filed, with no probable cause showing required.
- Use immunity lets prosecutors compel testimony from witnesses invoking the Fifth Amendment, the same mechanism that dismantled organized crime networks.
- No federal referral, cooperation, or approval is required, and a federal decision not to charge means nothing under state law.
- A presidential pardon reaches federal offenses only and has no effect on a state prosecution.
- Federal agents who obstruct the investigation can be prosecuted, and federal employment provides no immunity for openly criminal obstruction of justice.
- There is no statute of limitations going forward for child sex trafficking, and the limitations period is paused while a perpetrator conceals evidence or occupies public office.
- New in 3.0: a three-year revival window reopens civil cases that courts previously dismissed as too old.
- New in 3.0: survivors can sue anyone who knowingly profited from the operation, including financial institutions, not just the abusers themselves.
- New in 3.0: the attorney general can order records preserved from the day the law passes, and destroying them afterward is a felony.
- Fines and forfeitures from convictions finance a Survivors’ Compensation Fund, so the perpetrators pay for the recovery.
- If the attorney general refuses to act, any resident can bring the civil case for the state and keep up to twenty-five percent of the recovery.
- If the attorney general or the governor is implicated, a special prosecutor is appointed, and anyone convicted is permanently barred from public office in the state.
Jesse Wegman, July 20, 2026 [via scotusblog.com, July 22, 2026]
In a post for his Substack, Jesse Wegman explored the Brennan Center’s “new memo on Supreme Court term limits,” which “makes the case for why Congress has the power” under the Constitution’s necessary and proper clause “to institute term limits through federal statute, no constitutional amendment required.” Congress could impose “18-year terms for justices, followed by a shift to senior status. Senior justices would no longer sit on the nine-member Court. Instead, their duties would change to include sitting by designation on lower federal courts.” “When Congress was in the business of actually using its legislative powers over the Supreme Court, it relied on [the necessary and proper] clause all the time: to set the number of justices, or the Court’s jurisdiction, or the timing of its term, and so on,” Wegman observed, contending that “court reformers should see the Constitution as a friend, not a foe.”
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
North Carolina was the dress rehearsal for MAGA - The state offers lessons for the country.
Thomas Mills, July 21, 2026 [PoliticsNC]
... In January 2013, Republicans took control of North Carolina state government for the first time in more than a century. They moved quickly to upend state agencies and purge them of Democratic influence. They slashed and burned, often with no obvious intent to rebuild.
In the legislature, Republicans introduced legislation so brazen that even some of their own members seemed shocked. They introduced bills to create a state religion. They allowed guns on campuses and in bars. They flattened the progressive income tax, shifting the burden from the wealthy and corporations onto the middle and working class. They ended teacher tenure and banned Sharia Law. They put limits on abortion and drug-tested welfare recipients. They began solidifying their power by making nonpartisan school board elections partisan, stripping authority from local governments, introducing voter ID bills, reducing early voting days, and ending public financing of judicial campaigns.
Republicans moved with breathtaking speed. Democrats were paralyzed and unable to muster any effective response. The press was overwhelmed and couldn’t keep up with the flood of stories coming out of Raleigh or offer the context needed....
As their policies shifted the state hard to the right, they changed the rules to lock in their power. Extreme gerrymandering effectively gave Republicans veto-proof majorities in the legislature and nine of the state’s 13 US House districts, even as Democrats won a majority of the Congressional votes and half of the legislative ones cast in the state.
North Carolina state Representative David Lewis, chair of the Redistricting Committee, famously said, “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and 2 Democrats.” A North Carolina lawsuit, Rucho v. Common Cause, validated gerrymandering for partisan gain and set the stage for the national redistricting wars ahead of the 2026 midterms....
Civic republicanism
Last week, I presented the online archived second volume of Mathew Carey's 1788 American Museum; or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces &c. Prose and Poetical. I explained the important role played by Carey's publishing firms in industrial development of USA.
One thing I noted in perusing Number 1 was a few mentions of Sir James Steuart, an 18th century Scottish economist who some honest historians have identified as being a more important influence on the founding of the American republic than British empire apologist Adam Smith. Here's an exercise you can try yourself: do a text search for Adam Smith in the American Museum. My search yielded zero hits. Very interesting, given that around half the contents of the American Museum dealt with subjects of political economy.
Joseph Schumpeter, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, in his last book (which was never finished) History of Economic Analysis (pdf), acknowledged that Smith obtained enormous influence as a peddler of specific economic doctrines, but noted that Sir James Steuart's An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767) had "more originality and deeper thought than does the Wealth of Nations." So, why do we remember Smith today, and not Steuart? Schumpeter concluded that Steuart "was never much of a success in England," as a result of the elite disfavor Steuart faced for being a Jacobite adherent of restoring the Catholic Stuarts to the throne of the United Kingdom.
Schumpeter concluded that Adam Smith's undeniable success in Great Britain was due to English elites' favor for "the policies he advocated—free trade, laissez-faire, colonial policy, and so on." In other words, Adam Smith was crowned with success for being a prominent apologist for the exploitative brutality of the British empire:
....it was Adam Smith’s good fortune that he was thoroughly in sympathy with the humors of his time. He advocated the things that were in the offing, and he made his analysis serve them. Needless to insist on what this meant both for performance and success: where would the Wealth of Nations be without free trade and laissez-faire? Also, the ‘unfeeling’ or ‘slothful’ landlords who reap where they have not sown, the employers whose every meeting issues in conspiracy, the merchants who enjoy themselves and let their clerks and accountants do the work, and the poor laborers who support the rest of society in luxury—these are all important parts of the show. It has been held that A.Smith, far ahead of his time, braved unpopularity by giving expression to his social sympathies. This is not so. His sincerity I do not for a moment call into question. But those views were not unpopular. They were in fashion.
In fact, as Smith biographer Salim Rushid details, Adam Smith very carefully and deliberately went about currying favor with Scottish and English ruling elites. Rushid writes, that during his time "Adam Smith was not hailed as a new prophet except by some few, but very influential, persons such as Lord Shelburne and William Pitt." Adam Smith was merely a paid apologist for the ruin and misery Great Britain imposed on millions of colonial people in Ireland, Africa, China, India, and elsewhere. As Philippine economic historian Erle Frayne Argonza wrote in September 2008:
To continue on the theme of laissez faire, a doctrine started by the French physiocrats and systematized further by the Scots, let it be known that the principle of ‘free trade’ generated by physiocracy was largely a doctrinal defense of slave trade.... Adam Smith was an ‘intellectual prostitute’ whose services were procured by the British East India Company, precisely for the purpose of crafting in theoretical form the ‘free trade’ doctrine that was to justify, though subtly, the slave trade of that historic juncture.
In the following remarks, the writer's aim has been briefly to expose the fallacy... of doctrines, which, he conceives, are of tendency injurious to the welfare of his country. Adam Smith has founded a school in political economy... too plausible in the defence and too zealous in the advancement of their favorite theory, not to have gained a host of proselytes. What influence they may obtain abroad, is of little consequence to us; or certain it is, rather, that the more influence they do exert in Europe, the better they will promote the interests of America. But it is time for us to be vigilant and circumspect, when men and men of letters among us, who deservedly possess great credit in the public mind, profess themselves emulous to pin their faith on the infallibility of Adam Smith. When this becomes apparent, it is evidently time to exhibit the proofs of his fallibility, and of the pernicious effects arising from injudicious application of his theories to practice. . . .
As Americans, also, we are all bound to take exception to his illiberal reflections on the dispute, which led to the revolutionary war, and on our causes of complaint against the mother country.— We have not been sufficiently awake to the mischievous effects of introducing many English writings into our seminaries of education, and of giving credence to their authors on subjects of political economy and politics. —It is a truism to say that our institutions are radically different from the English. Ours are throughout republican, theirs are substantially monarchical. Theirs are the oft-changed remnants of feudal barbarism; ours are a great political invention, which undergoes its first trial in this country.—And yet we have Blackstone and Paley for our text books in politics, who, whatever may be their excellencies on other accounts, are certainly the bigoted advocates, the courtly apologists, of whatever, in the system of the British government, is corrupt in itself, and most adverse to the genius and principles of our own government.
And so also we take Smith as our magnus Apollo in political economy, the basis of whose theory is, that the country gentlemen, that is, the landed aristocracy, of Britain, are the only class for whose benefit government is instituted, laws enacted, or who deserve the regard of the statesman, and that all the other productive classes, the mechanical, the manufacturing, the mercantile, are a set of sharpers, who have been constantly engaged, ever since the Conquest, in a conspiracy to defraud the simple, innocent, and defenceless country gentlemen, and to impoverish and ruin the country. These are strong terms, but they are not stronger than the text warrants. . . Surely it is not for our interest to allow the opinions of our national enemy to acquire a kind of prescriptive authority in the country.—It is not for our interest to place the writings of our national enemy in the hands of our youth, and thus administer, ourselves, poisoned aliment to the lips of the rising generation.
...Adam Smith... takes pains to ridicule our colonial legislatures as little knots of factious rebels... he sneers at the high minded men, who composed our continental congress, as being upstart shopkeepers and attorneys, animated only with the little pride of becoming provincial dukes and marquises... he stigmatises, with the grossest terms of opprobrium, the master spirits of seventy-six, Washington and Adams, Franklin and Jefferson and their compeers, whose glorious names are and will be the watchword of millions, who shall never dream of the learned Glasgow sage's existence. Americans may not be apprised of these things; but they ought to be, ere they determine to repose implicit reliance upon the opinions of Adam Smith.
The opinions of Adam Smith on this subject, are introduced here, not for the purpose of refuting them, for they do not deserve so much attention; but only to hold them up to the reprobation and indignation of an insulted people.
Let it be holden in remembrance then, that, in treating of colonies, he traduces, in good set phrases, the whole American people.
If not Adam Smith, then whose ideas provided the basis of the new USA economy?
Simple. The USA economy was built on the ideas of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury. But that's not what has been taught in university economic courses for over a century.
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