Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 06, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
Don’t look away any longer – Solidarity with Hüseyin Doğru
[defenddemocracy.press, Aug 30, 2026 ]
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
Mike Brock, Sep 03, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
Pierre Damas Bel was twenty years old. He wanted to be a doctor. He was in JROTC. He graduated high school in May and started at Wright State University in Ohio a few weeks ago. On August 31, he called his father on a video call at 8:03 in the evening and said, “I’m not feeling okay mentally because of the bullying.” His father told him to come home so they could talk. Around eleven that night, police came to his father’s door and said Pierre had parked his car on the shoulder of an interstate in Springfield, Ohio, walked into oncoming traffic, and been hit by a tractor-trailer. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
He was wearing an ankle monitor. ICE had put it on his leg after summoning him to a mandatory in-person check-in. He had come to the United States as a child under Temporary Protected Status. His parents fled Haiti in 2024 because armed gangs were burning their neighborhood down. The family had a pending asylum case. In late July, the Trump administration terminated Haiti’s TPS designation, putting roughly 350,000 Haitians on notice that the United States government intended to deport them to a country whose capital the United States itself will not fly passenger aircraft into because it is too dangerous. The offer ICE made to the Haitians of Ohio was this: wear a monitor or accept $2,600 and a flight to Port-au-Prince. Pierre wore the monitor.
It was too heavy to play soccer in. It restricted him to a seventy-five-mile radius. It was visible under his clothes. When his JROTC unit distributed uniforms, Pierre did not receive one, and his father believes the omission was because of the device on his leg. Classmates saw it and taunted him. On Instagram in late July, before he died, Pierre wrote: “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”
His father said Pierre felt like he was treated like an animal.
The Republican Party did this. Not “the system.” Not “policy.” Not “immigration debates.” The Republican Party, as a coordinated political organization, made a set of decisions that produced exactly this outcome at exactly this scale on exactly this timeline. They ran a Vice-Presidential candidate who stood on a debate stage and said Haitians in Springfield were eating pets. He said it knowing it was false. He said it because he wanted an atmosphere. He got the atmosphere. A twenty-year-old walked through that atmosphere with a monitor on his leg for the last few weeks of his life, in that same town, and now he is dead on the shoulder of an interstate....
Asawin Suebsaeng, Sep 03, 2026 [Zeteo]
However bad you think things must be in Springfield, Ohio, today, the reality on the ground is worse.
Even if you are looking on, as a distant observer, in disgust at recent headlines (including about the suicide of 20-year-old student Pierre Damas Bel), it is difficult to grasp the scale of what is happening in and around this small Midwest city, and to its Haitian population, their friends, and neighbors.
For years, Donald Trump and his party have waged a protracted campaign of racist lies, fear, and demagoguery on Springfield. This summer, that campaign culminated in the Trump administration’s ICE clampdown in the city, following President Trump’s destruction of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that once shielded the Haitian community. The crackdown – blessed by the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority that this president cemented – is unlike anything else occurring now in Trump and JD Vance’s America.
The president and his allies are orchestrating horror and degradation all over the country. But in Springfield, the heightened level of fear is so widespread, and the state-imposed terror against a vulnerable minority so constant, that it is impossible to see this as anything but the Trump administration’s proof of concept for the president’s militarized vision of what America should be – a place where everyday people are afraid to go outside, in a republic of “law and order” that the federal government meticulously and arbitrarily constructs. It is the latest front in Trump and his party’s mission to codify MAGA’s brand of American racism and sadistic cruelty into law.
Pentagon secretly employs conservative influencers to promote Hegseth, attack critics
[Drop Site Daily, 08-30-2026]
The Pentagon has quietly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings into government roles, including retired colonels Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson, without disclosing their assignments, according to The Washington Post.
Maness, Schlichter, and Anderson have published columns and social media posts defending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and attacking military critics without disclosing their Pentagon ties.
Maness and Schlichter, who have over 135,000 and nearly 620,000 X followers, respectively, hold active “.civ” government email addresses assigned to the office of Undersecretary of Defense Anthony Tata, though a Pentagon spokesman declined to say whether any are paid or detail their roles.
WSJ: Pentagon to take stake in Venezuelan oil venture: The Pentagon will reportedly receive a 35% stake in “North American Blue Energy Partners,” run by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman close to Rodríguez who authorities have investigated after allegations of money laundering.
The stake will come through “penny warrants,” allowing Washington to acquire shares for a token price with little upfront spending. The U.S. could also buy 20% of the company’s future oil output at cost.
What Might Happen to Trump’s Ill-Gotten Gains
[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2026]
ICE arrests in San Francisco Bay Area area up nearly 70%, data shows
[ABC 7 Eyewitness News, via Naked Capitalism 08-30-2026]
A single signature by Trump can remove you from the internet
[Il Fatto Quotidiano, via Naked Capitalism 09-02-2026]
Yesterday the Trump administration hit Autistici/Inventati, a European technology collective whose main activity is providing digital infrastructure, with a banking blockade with PayPal and Banca Etica closing its accounts.
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 09-04-2026]
War on voting
Joyce Vance, Sep 01, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
War
U.S. military commanders call Iran war “unsustainable”
Drop Site Daily, September 1, 2026
Four senior U.S. commanders formally warned War Secretary Pete Hegseth that the prolonged Iran operation is unsustainable and is already weakening the military’s ability to confront threats elsewhere, including threats to the U.S. homeland, according to the Washington Post.
The objections appeared in a classified August 14 assessment covering the worldwide availability of U.S. forces and weapons.
Those involved in the warning include the Navy’s top admiral, Daryl Caudle, and the commanders of the European, Southern, and Indo-Pacific commands.
Caudle reportedly warned Hegseth that the Navy cannot maintain its current support for the war indefinitely, with barely one-quarter of the destroyer fleet reportedly ready to deploy.
The Pentagon attacked the publication of the classified information but did not deny that the commanders filed formal objections.
