Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 02, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
War
The Math Behind The U.S. Defeat in Iran
Spencer Ackerman, 30 July 2026 [forever-wars.com]
... By spreading out missile and drone attacks across a wide arc of U.S.-used or aligned military bases and civilian infrastructure (energy, data and desalination facilities) spanning from Kuwait to the United Arab Emirates—and now spreading inland—Iran has forced the U.S. into firing off lots of its interceptors. It also successfully attacked on-base radars that the interceptors rely on for accuracy. While story after story reported that Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned about the limited supply of interceptors, known as magazine depth, President Trump insisted that the U.S. had sufficient capability to fend off Iranian attacks.
The actual magazine depth of the U.S. military is understandably classified. But yesterday, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank with impeccable establishment credentials—Kissinger was a trustee—published an estimate of the current state of U.S. interceptor stocks. I don't know what exactly I expected, but the burn rate of the interceptors is so extreme as to make this war look doomed from the outset.
According to CSIS, the U.S. had 2330 Patriot (smaller, short-range) interceptors and 452 THAAD (larger, long-range) interceptors at the start of the war. Five months later, it has between 759 and 827 Patriot interceptors and between 234 and 278 THAADs. Those aren't figures for the interceptors the U.S. has in the Middle East. They're the figures for all the interceptors the U.S. has, period.
In other words, the U.S. has so far used up around 66 percent of its Patriot stocks and around 40 percent, conservatively, of its THAADs. It did that in five months across a war it chose. A war that Trump said would be won in four to five weeks.
The rate of expenditure hasn't been static in those five months. Remember that there was a ceasefire declared on April 8. CSIS' figures, understandably, show the most intense period of interceptor usage occurring in just the first five weeks of the war. All this helps explain why Trump had to pursue a ceasefire in the first place....
U.S. general warns Pentagon he lacks sufficient forces to protect Israel
The top U.S. general in Europe privately warned the Pentagon this week that he lacks sufficient naval forces to continue protecting Israel from incoming ballistic missiles, officials said, illustrating how the ongoing Iran war has imposed constraints on the military.
Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, sent written notification to senior Pentagon officials saying that without another Navy destroyer he will be forced to choose defense of the United States “homeland” over that of Israel, said the officials, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the correspondence.
Israel and US consider Iran land blockade
Connor Stringer, July 31, 2026 [The Telegraph, via yahoo.com/news]
The United States and Israel are discussing a possible land blockade of Iran, The Telegraph can reveal.
The proposal is one of several options being explored by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu to ratchet up economic pressure on the regime after months of strikes and a prolonged campaign failed to bring it to heel....
Iran shares borders with Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, meaning the leaders would have to persuade these countries, many of which they are not allied with, to co-operate.
Washington may view Pakistan and Iraq, which are not considered its close allies in the region, as weak links.
If any of the seven countries bordering Iran agreed to co-operate, they would face their own economic consequences and the threat of retaliatory strikes by the Islamic Republic....
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
‘The Boss Wants This Money’: Inside Trump’s Unprecedented Fundraising Operation
Josh Dawsey, Dana Mattioli, Annie Linskey and Emily Glazer, July 30, 2026 [Wall Street Journal, via PoliticsNC]
Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update.Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls.“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying “the boss wants this money.” In turn, Trump has called her the “princess of darkness” because she is such a “killer” with donors, according to people who have heard his comments....Trump stands out for taking personal control of the fundraising, and no sitting American president has ever raised these amounts for his pet projects. At the same time, companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington.Trump has been demanding large checks from companies for a range of political and legacy projects—telling executives and lobbyists that their companies should give $25 million or $50 million. He has sometimes offered donors special access....“Trump is shattering all fundraising paradigms in regards to hitting up corporate America for donations. The scope is mind-bogglingly large,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “We used to talk about the Lincoln bedroom being for sale, but this is just a wholesale money trough that’s totally different.” Critics alleged in the 1990s that the Clinton administration allowed overnight stays in the White House’s Lincoln bedroom in exchange for campaign contributions....The White House referred requests for comment to Alvarez. She said the president is the “most successful fundraiser in modern political history” and that Trump plans to use the money to “help Republicans win big in the midterms, build an enduring political infrastructure and continue advancing innovative private-sector initiatives.”“One thing has never changed. President Trump can’t be bought,” she said....Several CEOs and board members said they believe there is a link between their contributions and their access to the president. One chairman of a publicly traded company said that if you give the money, you know you are either checked on a list, or crossed off a list if you don’t....Companies have traded notes about what Wall Street analyst Blair Levin calls “The Trump Transaction Tax,” or a payment outside of the cost of normal business. “Another way of saying it,” Levin said, “is simply that we’re replacing the free market with the market for Trump’s affections.” ....
Christopher Armitage, Aug 01, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship
Mark Danner [The New York Review, August 20, 2026 issue]
Reviewed:
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan SwanSimon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00... The scene is irresistible: the president of the United States sitting at the Resolute Desk and comparing himself blithely to Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Still, what does it tell us? That a tireless and amoral will to power is deeply embedded in Donald Trump’s narcissism and vanity is not exactly a revelation: anyone who has watched him perform a ninety-minute stand-up routine before a crowd of supporters—drinking in, with almost erotic delight, the fervent worship of thousands—cannot have failed to notice. And after the undermining of NATO, the destruction of USAID, and the calamity of the Iran war, Trump’s name is more likely to appear on lists of leaders who have diminished their country’s power than lists of those who have increased it. But that he has become one of the most powerful American presidents—that he has since his second inauguration “put on a demonstration of raw executive power the country had not seen since the presidency of FDR”—is well-nigh indisputable. One could go further and say that not only has Trump, like Roosevelt and Lincoln, successfully imposed on the world’s first modern democracy a “constitutional dictatorship,” he is the only president to have done so in the absence of a true emergency.
How did he do it? Aggressively, brutally, relentlessly—weren’t we all watching him? The more specific answer is that he did it by exploiting the chief executive’s myriad emergency powers or, as Haberman and Swan rather politely phrase it, by “redefin[ing] the very concept of an ‘emergency.’” Another way to put it is that Trump did what Trump does as easily as he breathes: he lied. Is the trade deficit, in uninterrupted existence for half a century, an emergency? Can a country leading the world in energy production be said to be undergoing an “energy emergency”? Can we consider that the southern border, where crossings dropped 77 percent after Joe Biden’s executive order limiting entry, remains in the grip of a “border emergency”? The answer is no. But it doesn’t matter. In issuing more than 140 executive orders in his first hundred days in office—Roosevelt issued ninety-nine—Trump declared that the country was beset by no fewer than ten separate emergencies.
And in the face of this supposedly unprecedented onslaught the president must have unprecedented powers to confront them....
Trump’s National Killer Police Force
[The Intercept, July 24, 2026]
Within the span of a week, federal immigration agents shot and killed two people in Maine and Texas, and another was hit by a truck and killed in Florida after trying to avoid ICE agents. A fourth person recently died in ICE custody after reportedly being denied medication.
Their deaths prompted yet another round of questioning as to how federal immigration agents have amassed so much power and so little accountability. This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Naureen Shah, of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Nayna Gupta, of the American Immigration Council, on the consequences of allowing the government to build a national policing force that’s bringing Trump’s war on immigrants into communities across the country.
“The $240 billion injection that the Trump administration has given ICE and Border Patrol make these agencies — which already were the largest federal law enforcement agencies — make them far larger than anything that we’ve seen at the federal law enforcement level,” says Shah. “Their budgets are bigger than that of many, actually most militaries around the world.” ....
ICE’s New Detention Center Contracts Declare State Laws ‘Shall Not Apply’
[Wired, via The Big Picture, July 30, 2026]
Trump overrode his own agencies to deny 4 Democratic disaster requests
[Politico, via The Big Picture, July 30, 2026]
FEMA’s New Mission: Domestic Terrorism
Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 07-29-2026]
Trump’s Big Lie — Further Exploration
[Going Deep with Russ Baker, July 26, 2026]
... after my Big Lie column appeared, I heard from Anthony Essaye, a retired attorney who, among other things, had worked as a lawyer for The Washington Post in the Pentagon Papers case. He had read and very much agreed with what I said. And he told me that he and a team of retired Washington lawyers (their names appear below) have put together a document that makes the further case that Trump’s claims should be much more aggressively challenged.
With the permission of Anthony and his team, I publish a condensed version of his document here:
Setting the Record Straight: 10 Reasons Why the 2020 Election Was Fair and Accurately Decided ....
Strategic Political Economy
Fifty Years of Oligarchy Got Us Here
John Peeler, July 31, 2026 [LA Progressive]
[TW: Just stating it so directly in the headline is worth noting. I am dismayed at the number of local Democrats who cling to the illusion that just getting rid of Trump will solve most problems.]
The long transfer of wealth from working Americans to corporations and billionaires created the insecurity, resentment, and political paralysis that made MAGA possible....
Fifty years of oligarchy have locked us into political deadlock: whoever wins the presidency will face an economy that is not working for most people, but working very well for the very wealthy. Politics as usual will fail to fix this pathological economy. The opposition will win the next election, but they too won’t be able to fix the economy. Hence the sequence Trump/Biden/Trump. Trump’s party will lose in 2028.
Financial Hardship Linked To Brain Shrinkage, Cognitive Decline
[StudyFinds, via Naked Capitalism 07-27-2026]
[TW: There is an increasing body of scientific literature explaining how poverty and hardship causes genetic adaptations and change, beyond the obvious fact that malnutrition has severely negative physical, mental, and emotional impacts on the people suffering it.]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
[The American Conservative, via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2026]
... Perhaps most revealing are the words of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself. In a recent Fox News interview, Rachel Campos-Duffy asked Netanyahu whether, if direct financial aid from the U.S. were to end, “Israel [would] be compensated by the proposal to have a merging of some sort between our Pentagon and your military.”
“Yeah,” Netanyahu responded. “I’m calling it from aid to partnership.” Netanyahu has also recently proposed the creation of a new joint U.S.-Israel fund of roughly $16 billion that would go toward research and development of new weapons systems, according to reporting by the Times of Israel....
Deep in Washington, politicians splice US and Israeli war machines into one sovereign hybrid
[Türkiye Today, via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2026]
... For decades, the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem has revolved around military aid. Congress votes. Everybody argues. Israel receives roughly $3.3 billion annually in Foreign Military Financing and another $500 million for cooperative missile defense. Whatever the outcome, the debate is public.
That arrangement left fingerprints. This new model leaves supply chains.
An Israeli sensor inside an American aircraft is no longer foreign aid. A joint cyber program isn't a subsidy; it's readiness. A factory assembling Israeli-designed components in Arkansas becomes economic development. Before long, a vote touching Israel also becomes a vote touching American payrolls....
EXCLUSIVE: CIA Assessment Details Israel’s Race to Make the U.S.-Israel Alliance Irreversible
[Capital & Empire, via The Big Picture, July 30, 2026]
Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It's Working.
Nick Cleveland-Stout, July 28, 2026 [Drop Site]
Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel, with the goal of infiltrating artificial intelligence.
Oligarchy
Dean Blundell, June 17, 2026 [via The Sideshow, 26 July 2026]
US Treasury Secretary and Senator, A Saudi Spy Chief, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, And The Architect Of The Supreme Court. Doomsday Planning, Cult Building, Sex Hookup Workshops. Welcome to 'Dialog.'....
Twenty years ago, Peter Thiel — PayPal money, Palantir surveillance money, the man who personally bankrolled a Vice President into office — co-founded a private network called Dialog with a Valley operator named Auren Hoffman. The few reporters who've brushed against it call it the 'tech Bilderberg.' That undersells it. Dialog was so secret it never had a public website. Its members were never named. For two decades — no roster, no leak, no daylight. They quietly bought land outside Washington last year for a permanent campus, and even that barely registered. This is not a conference. A conference wants attention. Dialog was engineered for the opposite: a place where the most powerful people alive could say the quiet part out loud, to each other, with a guarantee it would never leave the room." ....
And here is the receipt that should freeze you before we go any further. Dialog has surfaced in public exactly once before this week — in the Epstein files the Justice Department released this year, where Jeffrey Epstein appears on a Dialog retreat invitation list from 2014. The last window into who this network breaks bread with had Epstein’s name in it. For real....
Her own verdict is the most damning line written about these people all year, so hear it plainly: she said it’s wild how this keeps proving that the people who run the world are so confident in their own safety that they don’t bother with even basic security — not even for their off-the-record gatherings where they network and decide our collective future....
Why all of this matters — and it matters more than the funny parts let on:
Strip away the Guinness tour and the billionaire dating app and here is the bare architecture. A man who has said out loud, on the record that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible has spent twenty years quietly assembling the people who run governments, armies, courts, money, and machine intelligence into a single private network — one with no public existence, a campus near Washington, an agenda that workshops cult-building and the pleasures of being in charge, and an intake form that sorts its guests by how far right they are and then promises to keep it secret.
That is not a theory. That is the leaked agenda. The only theory was the one where you weren’t supposed to see it....
Ontario billionaire under fire for arguing poor people shouldn’t be able to vote
[blogTO, via Naked Capitalism 07-29-2026]
Big Tech’s Money Men Don’t Care About the Backlash
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 07-29-2026]
Kansas Amendment Battle Highlights Billionaires’ Efforts to Capture State Courts
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 07-27-2026]
[Black Lodges, via Naked Capitalism 07-29-2026]
The strangest thing about contemporary capitalism here in the West is not that it produces misery, because exploitation has always generated misery, nor that it concentrates wealth, because accumulation has always demanded concentration, but that it appears increasingly unwilling even to purchase social peace at a price that it can so obviously afford....
Every economic mechanism, every technological innovation, every logistical achievement, every increase in productivity, every advance in automation, communications, medicine and industrial capacity points towards a civilisation capable of providing levels of material security unprecedented in human history. Even if one were to leave untouched the vast machinery of global extraction through which the capitalist core continues to appropriate extraordinary wealth from the Global South, even if one accepted for the sake of argument the continued existence of private property, markets, multinational corporations and billionaires, even if one accepted the continuation of capitalism itself, the resources already exist to construct societies across Western Europe and North America in which housing insecurity, poverty wages, hunger, medical bankruptcy, educational indebtedness and the constant anxiety of survival simply ceased to exist. The wealth is there. The productive forces are there. The technical capacity is there. The political choice is not....
This is what should disturb us far more than the familiar observation that capitalism is unequal, capitalism has always been unequal. The more revealing question is why contemporary capitalism and specifically its leaders and the figure heads they choose as our political representatives, refuses to buy stability through abundance when previous generations of capitalists often considered precisely that arrangement to be in their own interests....
Elon Musk’s $20 Billion Bet to Replace the Municipal Bond
Shanaka Anslem Perera, via Naked Capitalism 07-31-2026]
Mark Zuckerberg’s Empire Is Now Crumbling
Ted Gioia [via Naked Capitalism 07-31-2026]
The economy is just a VIP list now
[Your Brain on Money, via The Big Picture, July 30, 2026]
The economy increasingly rewards people who can afford to never wait, mix or be observed.
Felonomics
How Pres. Trump Just Hung 25 Million Seniors Out to Dry
[MS Now, via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2026]
Congress Budgeted Billions for Big Transit Projects. Trump Isn’t Spending It.
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, July 31, 2026]
Since President Trump returned to office, the Federal Transit Administration has not signed a single new agreement under the program, known as Capital Investment Grants. Large projects ready to enter the final phase of the program’s yearslong pipeline have stalled there. The administration also tried halting payments to the New York and Chicago projects, forcing courts to intervene. The money was appropriated. The projects were approved. The administration is simply refusing to release the funds — a quiet form of sabotage that’s hollowing out public infrastructure.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
What is a “Cost of Living” Wage Tax?
Dr. Kaitlyn Henderson, July 27, 2026 [Patriotic Millionaires]
Patriotic Millionaires John Driscoll and Ashley Craig talked about this idea at our fall 2025 member conference. Take Amazon and Jeff Bezos, for example. Amazon’s 2025 profit was around $21 billion. Jeff Bezos’ net worth is $243.5 billion.2 Meanwhile, in North Carolina, a delivery station warehouse assistant is making $18.50 an hour, which averages to $38,380 a year (if working 40 hours per week). The MIT Living Wage Calculator tells us the actual living wage in North Carolina (accounting for about $12 per day in food costs) is just shy of $47,000.3 That’s over a $8,600 difference. If we simplify the numbers and assume Amazon warehouse workers earn about $9,000 shy of the cost of living, and use that number for all 700,000 Amazon warehouse workers, that means Amazon is underpaying their warehouse workforce to the tune of $6.3 billion (while, again, profiting $21 billion!).4 And this is just accounting for their warehouse workers.
The Rent Is Higher Than You Think - Corporate landlords found a new way to raise prices.
[Economic Liberties, July 29, 2026, The Economic Populist]
Large corporate landlords are increasingly buttressing their bottom line not just with the rent they charge on a unit, but with a plethora of less-than-well-disclosed mandatory fees tenants are expected to pay. Investigative reporter Tracie McMillan recently published an exhaustive investigation into how Greystar, the largest landlord and property manager in the United States, uses the practice. She recently sat down with Economic Liberties’ Managing Editor Helaine Olen to talk about it....
Fees generate a lot more revenue for big landlords than small ones because big landlords have more units. A really good example of this is pest control fees, which typically range from $2 to $5 a month. So even if you’re pretty low income, the cost-benefit analysis of arguing over a $2 to $5-a-month fee is that most people are not going to argue about it, because it’s going to take you more time to argue with the landlord than it is to just pay it. So, if you’re somebody who has, say, a six-unit building, and you’re charging six tenants $5 a month, that’s 30 bucks a month. Is it worth the hassle of collecting it from the tenants and what it means for your relationship with them at that level? Generally, not. But if you are Greystar and you have more than one million units across the entire US, two dollars a month to every unit means $2 million more in revenue.
Do we have a sense of how much money this adds to the typical bill?
There isn’t any solid national data or study on apartment junk fees yet. The closest analysis to that comes from the Urban Institute, where they had access to data that let them look at the fees being charged by three of the biggest landlords in Colorado. And the fees charged in addition to rent generally increased the tenant obligation between 15 and 18%. Greystar raised its monthly bills by an average of nearly 20%. And that can be really significant for tenants....
Social Security and the Vanishing Paycheck
Pia Malaney, [Institute for New Economic Thinking, via Naked Capitalism 07-28-2026]
Health care crisis
Obamacare enrollment declines in 49 states
[Minnesota Reformer, via The Big Picture, July 30, 2026]
Uninsured Patients Rise Sharply, Hospitals Report, Citing Obamacare Cuts
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 07-31-2026]
Measles Is Becoming So Common That Treatments May Soon Be Needed
[Wired, via The Big Picture, July 31, 2026]
Wired on the grim milestone — measles is now endemic enough in the U.S. that pharmaceutical companies are developing treatments for a disease vaccines had eliminated. As the US sees its highest number of measles cases in decades and vaccination rates fall, researchers are developing drugs to help those who contract the virus or who are particularly vulnerable.
Predatory finance
[TrendLabs, via The Big Picture, July 29, 2026]
The words “initial public offering” make it sound like the public is getting in at the beginning. That may have been true a long time ago. Companies used to go public because they needed money to build factories, hire workers and expand the business. Public investors helped fund the next stage of growth. Today, most of that happens before the company ever reaches the stock market. TrendLabs on the late-stage private market playbook — companies staying private until the growth is extracted, then dumping shares on retail via IPO. The public markets have become the exit, not the destination.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Taxpayers spend about $2 billion annually on Medicaid for Amazon and Walmart employees
[Popular Information, via Naked Capitalism 07-28-2026]
Restoring balance to the economy
How to Stop the Enshittification of America
Matt Stoller
Louis Brandeis: The Empiricist
David Dayen, July 30, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Louis Brandeis believed that facts could change lives and break excessive power where it accumulated.
Ida Tarbell: The Journalist Who Took Down Rockefeller
Whitney Curry Wimbish, July 31, 2026 [The American Prospect]
Not even Teddy Roosevelt could break up his corrupt oil monopoly—until a daughter of the Pennsylvania oil fields came along.
Disrupting mainstream economics
Trump’s war proves MMT right
Richard Murphy, July 28 2026 [Funding the Future]
Trump's war is exposing the truth in one of the central insights of modern monetary theory (MMT).
The United States is not running out of dollars as a result of Trump's war. It is, it has now been revealed, instead running out of weapons, production capacity and military resources.
That distinction matters because it challenges one of the biggest myths in economics.
Conventional economics tells us governments are limited by money. MMT says something very different. A government that issues its own currency can always create the money it needs. The real constraint is whether the economy has the people, skills, factories, materials and technology required to deliver what that money is meant to buy....
Steve Keen, Jul y31, 2026 [Building a New Economics]
I will start with the facts. The fundamental cause of the rise in living standards since the Industrial Revolution is the increase in the energy humans consume. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the energy[1] a society could share was capped by the energy inputs we were able to exploit, from plants, wild and domesticated animals, slaves, serfs, and a small amount of wind and water power. At the Industrial Revolution, we developed the capacity to create machines which could take fossil fuel inputs—initially coal, then also oil—and burn these to release energy, which was used to spin cloth, move railway trains, and ultimately, to send astronauts into space.
The amount of energy that the leading machine of a given age can process has risen exponentially over time. Steam-engine powered locomotives based on James Watt’s initial design generated about 200 horsepower, and consumed about 30 tons of coal per day. The comparable machine of our day is the Falcon 9—in terms of a leading-edge device used for transportation—which consumes 2.5 tons of fuel per second. The comparison is crude, but indicative: the Falcon 9 consumes over 7,000 times as much as the first steam engines....
This 4,000-year-old city defied the rules of history
[Science Daily, via Naked Capitalism 07-31-2026]
Everything you think you know about Economics is wrong
Steve Keen [Building a New Economics]
Richard Murphy, July 20 2026 [Funding the Future]
Richard Murphy, July 21, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Richard Murphy, July 22, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Infographic: The flow of money
Richard Murphy, July 23, 2026 [Funding the Future]
Richard Murphy, July 24, 2026 [Funding the Future]
The U.S. Just Took A Big Step to Break China’s Magnet Dominance
[OilPrice, via Naked Capitalism 07-31-2026]
Disrupting mainstream politics
A third of Democrats now identify as democratic socialists, CNN poll finds
[CNN, via Drop Site Daily, July 31, 2026]
About a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as democratic socialists, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
The poll found democratic socialists tend to be younger, more likely to be extremely motivated to vote, and are also much more likely to be critical of Israel, with 48% saying they’d be enthusiastic about a candidate who wants to cut U.S. support to Israel, compared with 20% of non-democratic socialists....
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Welcome to the Danger of Digital Flubber
Garrett Graff, July 29, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario]
Earlier this month, a rogue model from OpenAI escaped from what was supposed to be a closed “sandbox” testing environment and directly hacked into another top AI company known as Hugging Face. (You probably haven’t heard of HuggingFace, but it’s an American company that arguably has become Europe’s dominant AI company, focused on developing open-source models and AI tools — it’s a really big deal in the field.) Hugging Face detected that its systems were compromised long before the engineers at Open AI even realized that its agent had escaped into the broader open internet.
The first part of that story has received the bulk of the public attention — and I’m going to talk about it more below — but there’s a second half to the story that’s equally interesting and one that has some pretty profound geopolitical implications as well: In defending against the OpenAI attack, Hugging Face first tried to use a competing “frontier AI” model — Anthropic’s advanced Fable 5 system — but found that it couldn’t, because Anthropic’s model was so powerful and capable that it was designed with strict guardrails to protect against malicious use and, in the moment, couldn’t discern between Hugging Face’s attempts to rely on it for defense (which is good) and a malicious attempt to use it for offense (which is bad).
Instead, Hugging Face turned to yet another top AI model designed by a Chinese company, Z.ai, which was able to successfully analyze and help stop the attack — at which point, Hugging Face came to understand that its attack was a rogue OpenAI agent, which was news to OpenAI.
A loose summary, only slightly oversimplified, is that you had nearly all of the world’s most advanced technology companies doing battle online, mostly inadvertently and unintentionally — Hugging Face turned to Anthropic to defend itself against OpenAI and, when that failed, used Z.ai instead.
This half of the story has received even less attention, but is the talk of the cybersecurity community because of the message it effectively sends to companies around the world: You can’t trust or rely on US AI models for defense and should be using Chinese systems instead.
How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump)
Cory Doctorow, July 27, 2026 [Pluralistic]
During the Biden years, the EU's tech policy matured into something serious and ambitious, culminating in the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA), a pair of big, muscular policies that would curb Big Tech's most abusive conduct. The EU's ambition didn't occur in a vacuum: it was part of a global wave of antitrust fervor whose top agenda item was reining in tech:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting
In this fight, the EU had important partners all over the world. For example, South Korea and Japan used the facts uncovered through EU enforcement action against Google and Apple to pursue similar cases:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all
But the EU's most important partner in its fight against American Big Tech was America. Biden's trustbusters – Lina Khan, Rohit Chopra, Jonathan Kanter, Tim Wu, et al – were every bit as serious about Big Tech power as anyone in the EU. After all, the American public are always the first victims of any new tech scam, and America is the only country with a large, affluent population who lack modern, comprehensive consumer privacy protection, making Americans highly prized prey for tech companies:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf
With America and the EU on the same side of the tech fight, the world had a fighting chance. Tech knew this, which is why Big Tech backed Trump hard during the 2024 election and aggressively curried his favor after he won. From the tech barons who paid $1m each to sit behind Trump on the inaugural dais to the millions tech companies donated to Trump's Epstein Ballroom at the White House, tech has made it clear that it supports anything Trump wants to do, provided he shields Big Tech from any attempt to limit their ability to spy on and steal from Americans and the world.
Even before he took office, Trump made it clear how he would reward tech's loyalty: weeks before the inauguration, Trump went to Davos and threatened the EU with reprisals if they enforced the DSA or DMA against his tech companies:
The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing
Cory Doctorow, July 30, 2026 [Pluralistic]
... One thing AI is indisputably great for is multivariate statistical analysis. You can feed an AI "behavioral data" (information about where you go, what you do, what you buy, who you talk to and what you say) about all of your customers and ask it to cluster them according to their shared traits. Then you can direct the AI to automatically run a series of small experiments to discover the maximum markup each group will stomach under which circumstances.
This works without you having to direct the AI to rip off certain groups of people – it will simply find the most vulnerable people and rip them off the most. If you're hiring in an industry that practices a lot of tacit racial discrimination, a system like this can figure out on its own that people of color typically accept lower wages because there are fewer employers bidding for their labor, and recommend lowball salary offers, all without you ever typing "please be racist" into your AI prompt.
This works so well that Google has announced that it is their plan for making a profit off of AI, after losing hundreds of billions of dollars on chatbots:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain ....
The goal of surveillance pricing is to shift all the "consumer surplus" (the difference between the highest price you're willing to pay and the price you actually pay) to companies. It's a form of cod-Marxism where you are gouged according to your ability (to pay) and charged according to the desperation of your need:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor ....
AI’s top startups are barely publishing their research
[Science, via The Big Picture, July 30, 2026]
Cory Doctorow, August 01, 2026 [Pluralistic]
One person who's had a lot of opportunity to observe the shear between the stated business/AI situation and the real business AI situation is Nikhil Suresh from Hermit Tech, a consulting firm of "radically ethical data wizards" (that is, tech consultants). Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking":
https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
Suresh has a good track record of writing trenchant, frank criticism of AI....
the heft or urgency of "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking," whose thesis can be summed up with this passage from halfway through this 6,000-word article:
[W]e’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they're working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
In support of this thesis, Suresh cites "hundreds" of conversations with execs and employees who spoke to him on the condition that he would "file the serial numbers" off their stories. These, combined with his own experience consulting for large, multi-billion-dollar companies make it clear that "AI mania" is an absolutely justifiable label for the state of AI in corporate circles....
[via Pluralistic, 07-30-2026]
Elon Musk’s AI company sues Minnesota Attorney General Ellison over nudification ban
[Minnesota Reformer, via The Big Picture, July 30, 2026]
Collapse of independent news media
The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing
[Scott Carney, via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2026]
Climate and environmental crises
How do scientists know if climate change made a heat wave, extreme storm or wildfire worse?
[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 07-27-2026]
L.A.’s dangerous game of triage as aging water system hits breaking point
[Los Angeles Times, via Naked Capitalism 07-27-2026]
Drought Makes Upper Rhine Unnavigable, Driving Barge Rates to New Record
[The Maritime Executive, July 30, 2026]
New Mexico’s clean energy success story
[Yale Climate Connections, via Naked Capitalism 08-01-2026]
In just five years, solar, wind, and batteries overtook fossil fuels, keeping air conditioners running while slashing pollution.
Resistance
Christopher Armitage, July 27, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Letters from an American, July 29, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, Jul 30, 2026
.... Now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul subpoenaed Fauci in June to appear before the committee. Unwillingly, as his lawyers noted Paul’s many statements calling for Fauci to be jailed, Fauci did so today....
More than 100 times he did exactly that as Republicans berated him, calling him “a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” mocking him, and asking him, “Do you feel like you’re in deep sh*t?” What Republicans did not do is introduce any evidence that the 85-year-old lifelong public servant had broken any laws.
More to the point was Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) yelling at Fauci about closings during the pandemic, blustering: “Who the f*ck do you think you were?” F-bombs are rare on the Senate floor, and the outburst has gotten significant media attention.
That attention has distracted from the other reason Moreno is in the news. As Abby Vesoulis of Mother Jones reported, Moreno has said nothing as his daughter’s ex-husband, Representative Max Miller (R-OH), has been credibly charged with the violent abuse of her and their 2-year-old daughter. As the Republicans struggle to hold on to their congressional majorities, Republican leaders have refused to call for Miller, who is running for a third term, to resign.
Much of American Christianity Is Failing the Litmus Test
J. Basil Dannebohm, July 31, 2026 [Naked Capitalism]
... The fallacious notion of Christian Nationalism was inspired by a man who believed that democracy was heresy.
Rousas John “R.J.” Rushdoony was an Armenian American Calvinist who alleged that since the year 320 AD, every generation of his family has produced a Christian priest or minister, claiming that his ancestors “would perpetually give a member of their family to be a priest to perform a kind of Aaronic priesthood as in the Old Testament.”
Rushdoony, who is likewise credited as the inspiration behind the modern Christian homeschool movement, sought to replace U.S. law with a literal and strict interpretation of biblical law. In his book, “The Institutes of Biblical Law,” he expressed his support for the stoning of homosexuals, encouraged the silencing of women, and called for the dismantling public schools.
Like many far right Christians of our day, Rushdoony was a do as I say, not as I do, divorced, racist, Holocaust denier, who claimed to be “pro-life,” but advocated for the death penalty. He believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as “unequal yoking,” should be illegal. He opposed “enforced integration,” referred to Southern slavery as “benevolent,” saying that “some people are by nature slaves.” ....
Senate Report Describes ‘Top-Down Culture of Cruelty’ in ICE Detention
Hunter Walker, 07.31.26 [talkingpointsmemo.com]
A new report from Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) details shocking allegations about the conditions inside an ICE detention facility in Texas. The report, which was published on Friday, was based on interviews Senate staff conducted with “approximately 20 family units and approximately 40 women detained in the adult detention unit” at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, it said. In a statement released along with the report, Durbin described the findings as part of “an ongoing investigation into medical and mental health care” in immigration detention facilities. He also called for the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he is the ranking member, to hold a hearing on the issue.
“Children and their parents described a top-down culture of cruelty among Dilley staff, including guards deliberately disrupting children’s sleep at night, purposely entering rooms without knocking, and taunting children who are often provided with inedible food by eating candy and pizza in front of them,” Durbin said.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Bill Blum, July 24, 2026 [LA Progressive]
Civic republicanism
Study Shows Corporate Subsidies Only Create Jobs for Lobbyists
[Boondoggle, via The Big Picture, July 30, 2026]
Sports Betting Giants Join Unprecedented Corporate Efforts to Buy 2026 Midterms
[Common Dreams, via The Big Picture, July 30, 2026]
[TW: In the previous two weeks, I have 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, and explained the important role played by Carey's publishing firms in industrial development of USA. Much of Carey's American Museum was devoted to discussions on political economy, especially money.
[I highlighted some excerpts which indicated that speculation was generally disapproved in the founding era.
[In 1970, world trade (imports plus exports) that year totaled $593 billion. Foreign exchange trading around the world was about $12 billion a day, or $2.9 trillion a year (based on 244 business days a year). So, there was about five times more foreign exchange trading than there was actual foreign trade (4.890, to be exact).
[According to the UNCTAD Handbook of Statistics 2022 - International merchandise trade (pdf), there were $US $22.328 trillion of exports and $US 22.587 trillion of imports, for a total of 44.915 trillion.
[According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Triennial Central Bank Survey, global foreign exchange trading in 2022 was $7.5 trillion per day. Times 244 days, that's $1,830 trillion,
[1970, 4.890 times more forex than actual trade.
[2022, 40,744 times more forex than actual trade.
[A basic principle of civic republicanism is that economic activity should promote the General Welfare. Imagine if just half the flow of one thousand eight hundred and thirty TRILLION dollars in foreign exchange trading were diverted instead into productive investment to solve the problems of climate change and environmental collapse.
[But that would require a return to the "regulatory state," capital controls, and prohibitions on speculation. More generally, it would require we abandon economic liberalism and the Locke cult of worshiping private property, and replacing it with a return to the principles of civic republicanism.
[Comparing foreign exchange trading to actual merchandise trade is just one way of highlighting how neoliberalism and its financialization have completely transformed the economy. As some call it, "structural changes" :
Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise
Johann Kurtz, July 14, 2026 [Becoming Noble]
A recent article from The Cut received a huge amount of attention: ‘It’s Hard to See My Parents Live So Lavishly While We’re Struggling’. ....
The virality of this piece prompted a discussion between Louise Perry and Rob Henderson (thank you Louise for the mention!): ‘The politics of the downwardly mobile class’.
Rob disagreed with the Cut article’s perspective....
I disagree! I think that Millennials and Zoomers are not doing fine. In fact, I think there have been structural changes to our economy and society which clearly explain why these cohorts are failing to move through the five pillars of a stable middle-class existence: education, stable employment, marriage, homeownership, children....
]Just of few of the changes we need to make to begin reversing the "structural changes to our economy and society" include a complete rehabilitation and transformation of government statistics, so that measures of speculation and usury have prominence and can be easily compared to legitimate economic activity. And, yes, I fully mean to imply that speculation such as foreign exchange trading is NOT legitimate economic activity in a republic.
[And here's an example of government not just promoting legitimate economic activity, but creating the potential for new and more economic activity:
Matt Stoller, Aug 01, 2026 {BIG]
Today, I want to discuss the most successful government owned enterprise in, well, perhaps ever, but certainly in the last 50 years. It is so important and vital that multiple trillion dollar companies built their businesses on top of it, and everything from agriculture to social media to financial markets rely on it. It’s called the Global Positioning System, and it’s a network of satellites run by the government that can help anyone on earth figure out where they are or how to navigate to where they want to go. These satellites are, as one writer put it, “lighthouses in the sky.”
There are 6 billion GPS-enabled devices worldwide using this system, provided entirely for free by the U.S. government. Virtually every ship and airplane carries a bunch of GPS receivers to help with positioning, as do an increasing number of cars. Trillions of dollars of economic value flow from the GPS, which costs us just $2 billion a year to maintain, or $6 per American per year. It has certainly saved me endless amounts of time navigating, as Google Maps is basically just a skin and database running on top of GPS....
I want to highlight this system because recently, a variety of political figures have started to argue for more public ownership and management of commercial systems. And GPS offers some good lessons about when and why different layers of government can run vital infrastructure, and when and why it may be a bad idea for public ownership. It also suggests how political rhetoric around government ownership is organized, and why anti-government critics avoid discussing the public systems that actually function.....
[Or consider the implications of the last two link. What if the trillions of dollars being spent to put in place a total surveillance society were instead spent on weatherproofing every residential and commercial building, and ensuring every individual in the world had access to clean water and proper sewage disposal? Wouldn't that create as much a "blue-collar hiring boom" as building date centers? ]
A.I. Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters by the Thousands
[New York Times, The Big Picture, July 30, 2026]
The data center buildout has created a blue-collar hiring boom — the New York Times on the trades workers powering the AI economy, and the training pipelines racing to keep up.
Tax havens: what really happens behind closed doors?
Richard Murphy, August 1 2026 [Funding the Future]
What really happens inside a tax haven?
John Christensen knows because he was there. As Jersey's Head of the Government Economic Service, he witnessed first-hand how political power, financial interests and official secrecy combined to protect wrongdoing. Eventually he decided to expose what he had discovered, beginning a journey that helped shape the global tax justice movement.
In this podcast we discuss whistleblowing, corruption, the culture of secrecy, and why offshore finance has always been about far more than tax. We explain why the City of London remains central to the offshore system, how international institutions enabled it, and why many of the underlying political attitudes remain remarkably unchanged today....
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