Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 13, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
How the EU is using anti-Russia sanctions to criminalise journalism
Hüseyin Dogru, September 6, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]
The EU sanctioned me and my media outlet for covering Palestine protests in Germany.
War on voting
The Final Battle for America’s Democracy
Michael Luttig, September 10, 2026 [The New Republic]
[Summarized in link below, plus more.]
Letters from an American, September 12, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, September 12, 2026
On Thursday, in The New Republic, conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published a dire warning to the Republican Party…and to all Americans. In the piece, Luttig outlined how Republicans could refuse to seat elected Democrats in January after a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterm elections of November. “The coming crisis,” the piece says, would be “The Final Battle for America’s Democracy.”
Luttig spelled out that Trump is fighting a war against America’s democracy. While the refusal of Vice President Mike Pence to assist his power grab made it fail in January 2021, Luttig notes, today Trump and his Republican congressional allies are more determined than ever to take over the country.
Luttig focuses on the ability of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to prevent the recognition of duly-elected Democratic representatives on January 3. Johnson has the power, Luttig says, to remove the current House clerk, Kevin McCumber, and replace him temporarily with a MAGA loyalist who will refuse to list Democrats on the roll of those elected to the 120th Congress.
In this scenario, once Democrats are eliminated, they will have to get a federal court to order the temporary clerk to list their names. If a court does so, another crisis point will arrive if the clerk simply refuses to obey the order. Then it’s possible the courts will stay out of the fight until the 120th Congress formally convenes and the Republicans vote not to seat the Democrats. That vote would be reviewable by the courts, including the Supreme Court.
But that review would take weeks, if not months, paralyzing the United States and leaving the country “helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” And at that point, how would the current Supreme Court answer the question: “Is the United States of America a democracy, in which ‘We the People’ elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?”
As if to illustrate Luttig’s warning, House speaker Johnson told attendees at Trump’s convention in Dallas on Thursday: “We cannot and will not allow them to take the majority in the Congress. We’re not gonna do it.”
Trump’s attempt to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voting has recently had a test run. Yesterday, Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket picked up a story from Jeff Berlew of the Tallahassee Democrat to report that the USPS rejected mailed ballots from Leon County, in Florida, because the words “return service requested” were only 0.236 inches from the election office’s return address. They were supposed to be a full quarter-inch apart. So, the delivery of those mail in ballots came down to a federal complaint about a spacing issue of 0.014 of an inch.
“It’s ridiculous,” Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley told Berlew. But, as Saksa notes, the rejection of ballots for such a petty flaw shows what will likely happen if the Supreme Court lifts the injunction blocking the postal service from implementing the new rules it has put in place since Trump ordered such interference in a March executive order.
On Thursday, September 10, Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Trump has sent threatening letters to at least thirty top election officials in the states, warning that those officials “are currently under investigation” and are subject to “ongoing litigation,” and so must not destroy any records relating to the 2024 election. As Corasaniti notes, the administration has sued 30 states for their voter lists and has lost 23 of the cases and won none. Trump has claimed to be the victim of voter fraud since the 2016 primaries but has never produced any proof of his claims.
In July, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the civil rights division in the DOJ, threatened state election officials with criminal prosecution if any noncitizens cast a ballot in their state (although it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote), and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin threatened election officials with criminal prosecution if they did not put Trump’s election changes into effect....
Voting Rights Groups Are Preparing to Confront ICE at the Polls
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2026]
War
Iran shifting military doctrine toward preemptive attack: Army spokesman
[Andolu Agency, via Naked Capitalism 09-06-2026]
IRGC ballistic missile retaliation forces US aircraft carrier, destroyer to flee
[PressTV, via Naked Capitalism 09-06-2026]
Space industry lacks workers needed to rebuild satellites lost in war, report says
Michael Scanlon, Sep 4, 2026 [Defense News]
Iran Is Producing Ballistic Missiles Again
[WSJ, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2026]
[Antiwar, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2026]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025
“Washington’s Venezuela Oil Deal Is About Much More Than Crude” [OilPrice.com]. jp8
[OilPrice.com, via thejackpot.blog 09-08-2026]
[L]ocking in a fifth of the world’s largest national oil reserves for a century is unprecedented in the modern era. That said, several key questions remain about the workability of the deal and where it fits into Trump’s global oil market order.” More: “This new iteration [of the Monroe Doctrine] — termed the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ — means a dramatic shift away from a post-Cold War model of global American dominance into a highly transactional, realpolitik vision of a world effectively carved into three distinct spheres of influence. China would hold the primary role in Asia, while Russia would either dominate or significantly influence Europe, depending on how any future conflict between European NATO members and Moscow unfolds. But, at the top, the U.S. would maintain overall dominance around the globe while also exerting direct influence across the Americas (North and South America). Naturally, as energy underpins the economies — and thus politics — of every country in the world, shifting the centre of dominance in global energy supplies to the Americas is a core part of that aim, but at the same time the U.S. reserves the right to extend its influence in the Middle East or anywhere else it wants, as it sees fit. The practical consequence of this for global oil flows is that the U.S. aims to orchestrate a dramatic ramping up of oil production not just domestically but across key countries in its Americas sphere of influence — most notably Venezuela in the short- to medium-term, but also Argentina, and Brazil — to compensate for losses from the Middle East, as fully examined recently by OilPrice.com.”
"Biden Family Grift vs. Trump Family Grift: Let's Do the Numbers
Dean Baker [via Avedon's The Sideshow, 28 August 2026]
And it's not even close. If anyone is wondering, I did not forget to put the Biden numbers on the graph. They are just too small to be visible next to the Trump graft numbers. Most people recognize that Donald Trump and his kids are stealing from us with both hands every day. But they are not as outraged as they should be because most have the view that everyone does it. While I will never defend the Democrats as paragons of honesty (what the hell are those crypto contributions?), they are not in the same ballpark as Trump and his crew."
Trump Is in Open Revolt Against the Constitution
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, September 07, 2026]
The president’s plot to subvert the integrity of the midterm elections looks like this. Issue a rule requiring states to give lists of mail-in voters to the Postal Service if their citizens hope to receive mail-in ballots. Knowing that this is a blatantly unconstitutional seizure of the states’ prerogative to run their own elections, count on a federal court to block the rule. Then challenge the injunction, arguing — under the Supreme Court’s “Purcell principle” — that it is too late to make any adjustments to voting procedures, and that the new rules should be treated as the status quo. Then hope that the Supreme Court accepts the argument that the new rules are the status quo and therefore can’t be blocked. Jamelle Bouie traces the plot’s mechanics, down to the bet on the Supreme Court’s Purcell principle.
Europeans investigating Epstein say DOJ has not agreed to requests for help
[Washington Post, via thejackpot.blog 09-09-2026]
"European law enforcement agencies chasing leads from the U.S. investigative files on deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein say that one year after the first batch of files was released, the Justice Department has yet to respond to their requests for help." More: "In the United States, no charges have resulted from the release of the Epstein files. But the documents exposed the financier's relationships with influential people around the world — both before and after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to prostitution charges — and have sparked a slew of international investigations." And: "Several European law enforcement officials said in interviews that DOJ has not responded to their requests for mutual legal assistance, which could permit foreign investigators to obtain evidence, information and testimony from the U.S."
‘Absolutely Bonkers’ and ‘Unacceptable’: Trump Posts Map Showing US Takeovers of Other Nations
Jessica Corbett, September 07, 2026 [CommonDreams]
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 09-09-2026]
Jessica Pishko [via Naked Capitalism 09-09-2026]
[The Guardian, via The Big Picture, September 07, 2026]
The move marks a fundamental shift for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Without this data, it will be much harder for the agency to identify widespread cases of discrimination in hiring and promotions, experts and former employees of the commission say. And, they warn, it will bring the Trump administration one step closer to reshaping the commission from an independent watchdog into an arm of the executive branch narrowly focused on advancing the political grievances of Donald Trump’s base. Amy Qin on the EEOC data experts say the agency can’t police hiring discrimination without.
Following Project 2025 Playbook, Trump Officials Unveil Plan to Rig 2030 Census
Brett Wilkins, September 09, 2026 [CommonDreams]
The Trump administration on Wednesday formally proposed sweeping changes to the 2030 US Census that could exclude millions of people from the population count, alter congressional representation in favor of Republicans, and shift the distribution of federal resources among states.
The proposal—which was published in the Federal Register and is subject to a 30-day public comment period—redefines a person’s “usual residence” as the place where they legally spend the most days during the Census count period, with tax records such as returns and W-2s used as evidence....
Strategic Political Economy
People aged 65 and over surpass young children in historic global shift
[Nation Thailand, via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2026]
By 2025, the share of the world’s population aged 65 and over had overtaken that of children aged five and under, marking the first such crossover on record, according to the US Census Bureau.
Its August 2026 report, An Aging World: 2025, says the shift is occurring faster than expected a decade ago and is creating an unprecedented, increasingly “top-heavy” age structure.
GRAPH - Percentage of global population who are young children or seniors
[US Census, via The Big Picture, September 12, 2026]
Race, Class, and Oligarchy: Why Race Cannot Be Reduced to Class
Sharon Kyle, Sep 6, 2026 [LA Progressive]
I have found myself asking a question that I don't particularly enjoy admitting:
Is the work I have been doing at LA Progressive a waste of time?
For nearly two decades, my husband, Dick Price, and I have published LA Progressive. We have written, edited, curated, and published tens of thousands of articles about racism, economic inequality, war, criminal justice, healthcare, labor, democracy, and the many other issues that animate progressive politics....
Oligarchic power needs the racial hiearchy to survive. The political Right does not treat race as incidental. It has long understood the power of racial hierarchy to organize identity, redirect anger, fracture coalitions, and persuade people to act against their own material interests....
Because racial hierarchy introduces another kind of control over the masses: relative status—and with it, an obstacle to class solidarity.
An oligarchy faces a simple mathematical problem: there are very few oligarchs and millions of working people.
In a functioning democracy, ordinary people have the numbers to demand progressive taxation, strong unions, universal healthcare, affordable housing, public education, corporate accountability, and higher wages.
So how does a tiny wealthy minority maintain an economic system that overwhelmingly benefits itself?
One answer is division.
And in the United States, race has been among the most enduring instruments for producing it.
Tell working people their taxes are going to undeserving Black people. Tell them immigrants are taking their jobs. Tell them affirmative action is why their children did not get admitted. Tell them welfare rewards laziness. Tell them racial justice itself is discrimination against them.
Resentment begins flowing sideways instead of upward.
The white worker becomes angry at the Black worker rather than at the economic forces holding down both their wages. The struggling citizen blames the immigrant rather than the employer benefiting from vulnerable labor.
Race is the wedge.
Class is the harvest.
The wedge splits the potential coalition.
The harvest is concentrated wealth and power....
The Impotence of Being Kevin Warsh
Institute for New Economic Thinking
VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital
Anil Dash [via The Big Picture, September 13, 2026]
We really, really need to talk about venture capital. Because it’s not “venture capital” anymore.
There’s a huge disconnect between what most people think of VC, where an investor has a big fund and cuts checks to help a founder build a company, and the current reality, where a handful of billionaire extremists use the cover of “VC” to advance an outrageous agenda where they’re accountable to no one.
I’m gonna explain this from a standpoint that almost never gets articulated: I’ve personally raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding as CEO of startups, and been directly involved as a board member or advisor in raising hundreds of millions more. I’ve sat in board rooms, across the table from the people I’m talking about here, or been at the industry events that they frequent. So this isn’t sour grapes because these VCs wouldn’t cut me a check, or some chip on my shoulder about these investors due to a business deal. This is what I know about these bad actors because I’m part of the community of creators and inventors who build the things that they used to invest in — back when they still cared about innovation.
Many of the trends in society and politics that people are most angry about, from data centers being forced down everyone’s throats, to all of our favorite apps and services being enshittified, to politicians being paid to ignore the will of the people, are all being supercharged by these cancer capitalists. They have warped the structure of venture capital into a form of oligarchy that answers to no market, no regulators, and no voters. So it’s worth understanding exactly how they did it....
Global power shift
Compliance Decoupling: China Is Breaking the West’s Supply-Chain Compliance Chain
Leon Liao [via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2026]
...Over the past several years, Washington has built an increasingly elaborate supply-chain compliance regime around allegations of forced labor in Xinjiang. The U.S. government defines the legal boundary. Importers carry the evidentiary burden. Multinational companies transmit the requirements through procurement contracts. RBA, RMI, Altana, Verité and third-party auditors help translate those requirements into supply-chain maps, factory assessments, material traceability and certification results. Washington gradually translated the Xinjiang forced-labor narrative into a compliance infrastructure capable of reaching deep into Chinese factories, mines, smelters and multi-tier supplier networks.
China’s August 5 countermeasures against RBA and five other U.S. entities struck directly at this institutional transmission layer. Beijing cannot decide whether U.S. Customs admits a shipment into an American port. It can, however, increasingly decide who may enter Chinese factories, who may request data from Chinese companies, which foreign institutions Chinese suppliers may cooperate with, and under what conditions supply-chain information can leave China.
China can challenge that system because its manufacturing base has become too large to audit around.
The first effects are already visible. RMI has suspended new RMAP assessments in China and extended the validity of existing certifications. Some rare-earth suppliers are reportedly walking away from U.S. business even after obtaining export licenses. Over time, the more consequential result may be a split in one of globalization’s least discussed layers: the physical supply chain may remain globally integrated even as the systems that audit, certify and govern it divide into two....
China’s First Arctic Container Service Reaches Europe
[gCaptain, via Naked Capitalism 09-10-2026]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Liberal Zionists Are Evil Shitbags
Caitlin Johnstone [via Naked Capitalism 09-06-2026]
Oligarchy
[Hollywood Reporter, via thejackpot.blog Water Cooler, 2026-09-08]
“Gibney paints Musk as an unabashed megalomaniac. He ventures outside the professional sphere to touch on the ‘legions of children,’ as someone describes them; the disposable ‘breeders’; the drug use; and the father who seems like a nightmarish piece of work. But the gossipy tidbits almost pale next to the eye-opening shadiness of some of the business strategies.” More: “The Tesla chapter is compelling less for the success of launching electric vehicles on the market than the more inconvenient factors that somehow went ignored — from falsehoods about the time required to swap out a battery pack to the playing down of fatalities that resulted from glitches in self-driving cars, reported to have caused at least 65 deaths.” More: “Around the same time, Musk mastered the art of stock manipulation, as well as securing government handouts and energy credits. He’s now inextricably linked with Republican Party politics and more specifically Donald Trump. But the film notes that although foundational funding for Musk’s SpaceX rocket program came from the George W. Bush administration, along with a $1.6 billion contract that reportedly rescued the division from looming bankruptcy, it was the Obama administration that honored and expanded on the initiative through NASA. In retrospect, that now looks like an uncharacteristically laissez-faire decision.” More: “Gibney lays out the shift by which Musk turned away from the Democrats to align himself for personal gain with Trump, in what many believe was a case of him buying the 2024 election, funneling close to $300 million into the campaign.”
Felonomics
Inflation Could Soon ‘Get a Lot More Painful’ as Trump’s Iran War Drives Diesel Over $6 a Gallon
Brad Reed, September 11, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Trump, Who Calls Medicare for All Too Expensive, Vows $5,000 to Every US Adult—If GOP Wins Midterms
Jake Johnson, September 10, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Health care crisis
To Boost Profits, Medicare Advantage Giants Move to Kick Over a Million Seniors Off Their Plans
Jake Johnson, September 10, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Two of the largest Medicare Advantage insurers in the US, UnitedHealthcare and Humana, have signaled in recent days that they plan to exit certain “underperforming” markets and curb benefits in an effort to boost their bottom lines, a strategy that’s expected to kick more than a million seniors from their coverage.
Restoring balance to the economy
The Sovereign Reset: Escaping the Interest Trap with Greenbacks
Ellen Brown, September 7, 2026 [CounterPunch, via Rick Summers]
In August 2026, the U.S. debt reached a gravity-defying $40 trillion, with an estimated fiscal year 2026 deficitof $2.1 trillion. Interest on the debt hit a record $1.4 trillion over the last 12 months and now consumes more than any federal program except Social Security and Medicare, eclipsing defense spending for the first time in U.S. history. Paid with borrowed money, interest compounds exponentially, making it the fastest-growing part of the budget, far outpacing economic growth. By 2036, the Congressional Budget Office projects that interest costs will double to $2.1 trillion, with debt held by the public reaching 120 percent of GDP. The CBO director has declared the trajectory to be “not sustainable.”
Increasingly, prominent analysts are saying the United States will have to “print” its way out. But using whose printing press, printing what? ....
... the Treasury at the direction of Congress actually does have keystroke ability. It is a sovereign power that our forebears used to finance the American Revolution, the Civil War, and some of the most explosive periods of economic growth in U.S. history. From the “colonial scrip” that Benjamin Franklin credited with the prosperity of the colonies, to the Continentals that funded the Revolution, the power to create money was viewed as a public utility. The U.S. Constitution formalized that power in Article I, Section 8, granting Congress the power “to coin Money [and] regulate the Value thereof.”
After Lincoln’s Treasury printed enough U.S. Notes or “Greenbacks” to win the Civil War, the Supreme Court twice affirmed its authority to do so. But that power was captured and handed to a banking cartel that met in secret on Jekyll Island in 1910, where they designed a system in which every new dollar must be borrowed into existence from bankers who simply write deposits into their borrowers’ accounts. And thus was the government’s sovereign power to create its own currency captured by private profiteers....
Breaking Up Big Medicine vs. Single-Payer: An Analysis of Competing Health Care Reform Proposals
Institute for New Economic Thinking
Estimate the cost of an anti-union campaign.
[laborlab.us, September 09, 2026, via Pluralistic]
Disrupting mainstream economics
How corporate America built a better Roach Motel
Cory Doctorow, September 07, 2026 [Pluralistic]
... In a new Stigler paper, "Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism," UC's Li Azinovic-Yang, Ava E Speros and Christopher R Stewart and Stanford's John D Kepler report on some clever research into how a monopolist could raise prices, lower quality, anger its customers, and still dominate its market:
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/-/media/research/stigler/pdfs/workingpapers/387_customer.pdf
The researchers' hypothesis was that dominant businesses don't maintain their lead by making their customers happy, but by making it harder for those customers to leave. There's good reasons to suspect this. Between 2002 and 2024, the average "customer relationship" (how long a customer continues to purchase from a merchant) has risen from 7.5 years to 11.5 years, a 50% surge in "customer loyalty," far outstripping any measure of customer satisfaction over the same period. This is true across all the largest sectors of the economy: "manufacturing, information, professional services, financial services, and wholesale trade."
How to explain the falling divorce rate between customers and businesses? That's where the researchers got very clever. They realized that when a company seeks permission to acquire another business, it must publish truthful and comprehensive information about how the merger is expected to increase the profits of the new combination. These disclosures are validated by external auditors, boards of directors, and/or audit committees. There are legal repercussions for falsifying them or making material omissions to them, and they are matters of public record.
Crucially, these disclosures must include the business's plans to retain its customers, and its plans to increase the profits from those customers. That's where the researchers struck gold. They amassed a novel data-set of 9,500 acquisitions that disclosed over $1t worth of "customer relationship-related intangibles," more than 20% of all the assets that changed hands....
That's the first half of the story: an empirical account of how the business world switched from "acquiring customers" to taking hostages.
But the second half of the paper is even more interesting: an empirical investigation into the effects of this customer lock-in. For starters, increased customer retention is "associated with higher gross profit margins": that is, the companies whose customers can't leave squeeze those customers for more profit. What's more, once a company has its customers locked in, it starts to capture a larger share of all the profits in its entire sector: these hostage-takers become so profitable that their profits dwarf the profits of their competitors....
it's rare that we actually catch executives explicitly admitting that their job is to find ways to take you hostage and squeeze you.
Historically, those revelations have come from extraordinary circumstances, like when Frontier (the worst ISP in America) went bankrupt and we learned that the company had 1.6 million customers who had no access to competing broadband connections. Frontier carried these hostages on their balance sheet as a special, highly valued asset, since they could be charged more for slower, less reliable service:
In assembling this novel, high-quality data-set, the researchers on this paper have performed an important service, capturing a vast number of sworn confessions of highly paid enshittifiers, and then showing how their hostage-taking wrecked competition, prices, wages, jobs and innovation.
Guess What Happened After New York Raised Taxes on the Rich? More Millionaires Moved In
Julia Conley, September 10, 2026 [CommonDreams]
...Poking a giant hole in the persistent theory that wealthy people won’t want to live in states that require more from them in taxes, the number of New Yorkers reporting more than $1 million in income grew by about 3% after the tax rate was raised, the SOI data shows....
Craig Tindale [via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2026]
Interview: The Global Political Economy of Copper
[Dollars & Sense, via Naked Capitalism 09-10-2026]
Disrupting mainstream politics
AfD’s Historic Win Sends Reverberations of ‘Shock’ Through German Establishment
Simplicius [via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2026]
Last night Germany’s much-maligned AfD party won a crushing and historic victory. The victory is already being downplayed by many, owing to the fact that Saxony-Anhalt is technically one of Germany’s smallest and least consequential states. But there is far more to it than sheer numbers, as the win defines a turning point not only in German but European politics, and cements the gradual downfall of the globalist ruling class that has tried desperately for decades to keep populist movements from gaining power, in particular....
An Act of Defiance: Why DSA Has More Juice Than Bernie’s Our Revolution
Les Leopold, Sep 08, 2026
... the growing power of the oligarchy in the U.S. was bound to generate an anti-capitalist reaction, but that misses a critical point about the nature of the buzz.
What’s most powerful about DSA, in my opinion, is that it is a walking, talking act of defiance—an in-your-face challenge not only to capitalism and corporate elites, but to the Democratic Party establishment as well.
It baits establishment leaders to come out and defend the corporate system that has served them so well. Talking socialism, no matter how vague or utopian, will flush out prosperous Democrats who are quite comfortable with elite corporate capitalism.
And working people know the difference between small-business free enterprise, often built by former workers, and the business of giant banks and corporations that are milking them dry. In effect, DSA’s socialism provokes corporate Democrats to show their true stripes....
Thomas Mills, Sep 09, 2026 [PoliticsNC]
... Before the Civil Rights Movement, Republicans were heavily concentrated in areas of the state that had remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War. During the period of racial integration, Republicans invited the segregationists into their camp. Conservative commentator Jesse Helms switched his registration from Democrat to Republican and ran on an anti-Civil Rights platform in 1972. A majority of white Democrats voted to send him to Washington and kicked off a long, steady decline in Democratic registration that finally bottomed out this summer.
For years, many voters kept their Democratic registration even though they supported Republicans, particularly at the federal level. Closed primaries kept people from changing their registration, especially in eastern rural counties where votes for local office often became racial affairs. Black Democrats voted for Black candidates while white Democrats voted for white candidates for offices like sheriff and county commissioner....
When I started working in politics in the early 1990s, Democrats made up about 60% of the voters, Republicans 30%, and unaffiliated voters, a designation added in the late 1970s, about 10%. Republicans’ quick rise over 20 years would slow to a crawl while Democrats continued to fall precipitously and unaffiliated voters began their ascendancy. For years, we knew anyone registered Republican would support GOP candidates, but we didn’t trust registered Democrats to support the Democratic candidate.
As of today, the Jessiecrats, as we called them, have finally died off. Democrats can largely count on the support of the people who are registered with their party. To win elections, though, they will still need to convince the plurality of voters who rejected both major parties.
While Democrats are benefitting from the anti-incumbent sentiment driven by the Trump administration’s failures, it’s hard to call the advantage a surge. Republicans surpassed Democrats in total registration for the first time in state history this past January, and Democrats have been narrowing that gap since mid-July. To put it in perspective, Jackson’s last report showed Democrats increased their registration by 668 voters and Republicans by 198, while 3,735 registered unaffiliated. Unaffiliated voters make up 40% of the vote, while Democrats and Republicans make up 30% each.
The transition from the old Solid South is complete. Neither party is going to dominate the state again.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Economic Liberties, Sep 10, 2026 [The Economic Populist]
Chris Parr, a prolific Youtuber, has built up a massive following by focusing on humorous investigations into current events and life oddities. But his greatest hit came this summer, when he decided to find out if he could trick surveillance pricing systems into giving him a better deal. The hilarious and insightful result, How I Tricked Big Tech’s AI Pricing Algorithms to Save $8,793, has become his most-watched video of all time, racking up more than 1.3 million views since July. Parr’s findings on the corrosive impact of surveillance pricing have been corroborated by similar investigations from Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union which have shown this practice impacts not just prices, but also workers’ wages. Lawmakers in twenty states and counting have proposed banning the practice outright: in some states like Colorado and California, strong bans have been killed, while in others, like Maryland, loophole-riddled bans have become law. Among another subset of states, including New York and Illinois, strong bans are still under active consideration....
The Canary and George Galloway have been debanked without explanation
[Council Estate Media, via Naked Capitalism 09-06-2026]
Left-wing media outlet The Canary and Workers’ Party leader George Galloway have both had their bank accounts closed by LLoyds Banking Group without explanation. Given they are critics of western imperialism and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, I think we can all work out what’s happening here....
Little Tobacco Moment Meta Wins.
Scott Galloway [via The Big Picture, September 08, 2026]
Our “Big Tobacco moment” ended with Meta’s shareholders richer, competitors weaker, and its business model intact. Scott Galloway on the Meta settlement — 47 states and DC, up to $17.1 billion in penalties, no admission of wrongdoing. “We’ve been played, again.”
Collapse of independent news media
Jessica Corbett, September 11, 2026 [CommonDreams]
Climate and environmental crises
Spain Got a Head Start on Renewables — Now It Needs a Battery Revolution.
[Bloomberg, via The Big Picture, September 08, 2026]
Today, renewables account for about 60% of electricity on the Spanish grid, compared with about 50% across the European Union and one-third globally. That bold bet has lowered Spain’s power bills — which are now cheaper than they were before the latest Middle East conflict or the invasion of Ukraine — and put the country on track to meet its 2030 renewable targets. Spain is both ahead of the clean-power curve and the fastest-growing major economy in Europe, proof that deploying green energy at massive scale isn’t at odds with growth. Bloomberg on the country whose wind industry was once so low-tech that a broken turbine blade meant calling in a repairman — and what its grid needs next.
Democrats' political malpractice
Does DSA Belong in the Democratic Party? Rahm Emanuel Draws a Hard Line
[Egberto Off the Record substack, via Naked Capitalism 09-06-2026]
[TW: Rahm Emanuel is of a sort with Larry Summers - a contrary indicator. Anything they favor, should be opposed by good, decent people -- or at least be subject to stubborn suspicion.]
How Status Quo Democrats Could Create Another Trump
David Sirota, Sep 08, 2026 [The Lever]
... the message went largely unheard amid Democratic politicians and pundits insinuating that voters were insufficiently grateful for Joe Biden’s allegedly wonderful economy.
Fast forward five years and we are on the verge of the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries. For the most part, Democrats and their media outlets are still soothing themselves with the fraudulent story of Trump as an anomaly rather than a symptom and still promoting the politics of restoration rather than transformation. Indeed, the over-the-top celebration of Barack Obama’s new $800 million monument to himself was an example of this desperate pining for a return to a pre-Trump normal — even though that “normal” was what created Trump in the first place, and even though restoring such a “normal” could create the conditions for an even worse Trump in the future.
So it is time for another alarm to sound — and thankfully, a new paper has provided one. And this particular warning is backed by reams of economic data....
Resistance
Christopher Armitage, Sep 08, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Also: the Sign-Up Form for New Petitioners, the Oppositional Federalism Paper Free on SSRN, a New Form for Your Questions, and the First ER Designs Retiring September 30.
Christopher Armitage, Sep 11, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
Fewer and fewer companies run more and more of your life, and a handful of states are proving the laws to stop them still work.
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
A Doctor Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He’s a Senator.
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 09-09-2026]
Grindr crashes in Dallas after huge surge in activity at the Republican convention [Irish Star].
[Irish Star, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20260911]
“Grindr, the world’s largest LGBTQ+ dating app, reportedly went down as the Republican National Convention’s midterm event began on Wednesday.” And: “A similar incident was reported during the 2024 RNC in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “If that’s the case, it aligns with Grindr activity during previous national conventions,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.”
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Missouri's Republican-Imposed Catch-22, and the Ballad of Denny Hoskins
John Light | 09.10.26 [Talking Points Memo]
Readers of The Brief are likely aware of what's going on with Missouri's election maps, and of a character at the center of that drama, secretary of state Denny Hoskins.
But as the chaos around a gambit he pulled off this year intensifies, reaching the U.S. Supreme Court twice in just a few days, and with Missouri's state Supreme Court threatening to hold Hoskins in contempt, I wanted to look back at exactly what that gambit was and how it came to create the catch-22 now facing Missouri's voters.
The story takes us back to last year, when the state, at President Trump's urging, passed a new, heavily gerrymandered map that would likely eliminate one Democratic seat in Congress....
Joyce Vance, Sep 10, 2026 [Civil Discourse
Civic republicanism
Cory Doctorow, September 09, 2026 [Pluralistic]
... As many people have observed, the problem with vaccines is that they work too well. The incredible, astounding, profound wonders of vaccines led many people to think of measles as a rash, the flu as a bad cold, mumps as a thing that makes you look like Brando playing Don Corleone. Vaccines worked so well to eliminate a terror that stalked the land and stole people's lives and loved ones and little children...
Now that we've turned our backs on this miracle, now that vaccination is in retreat and long-forgotten diseases are taking our babies, millions of people are still insisting that vaccines are a hoax....
It's one thing to learn to hit a ball by swinging at it and watching where it goes – it's another altogether to swing blindfolded, go home, and then, eight years later, have someone tell you where the ball ended up. No one would start smoking if the first puff caused you to break out in visible tumors.
The attenuated, complex relationship between smoking and cancer creates a space where death merchants could instill profitable doubt and the more our institutions fail us, the easier it is to spread that doubt.
After all, nearly all of us lack the technical expertise to sort through the claims and counterclaims of tobacco lobbyists and public health authorities. To a large extent, we have to trust the process: trust it to be a well-administered truth-seeking exercise that does its best to find the correct answer to complex, technical questions. When the state is manifestly bad at doing its job, we still have to answer these complex, technical questions, but (lacking both the expertise to draw an informed conclusion and a reliable process by which expert disagreements can be settled), we're left helpless to do so....
This is an essay about anti-trust.
135 years ago, monopolists were such a destructive force – ruining workers' lives; corrupting politicians; pauperizing, swindling and poisoning their customers – that we created the first anti-monopoly laws:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/
It took a quarter of a century to really start putting those laws into effect, but we eventually dismantled the robber barons' vast, destructive machines:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/20/if-you-wanted-to-get-there/#i-wouldnt-start-from-here
The World Wars helped: two consecutive orgies of capital destruction left oligarchs' treasuries so bare that we were finally able to realize some of our most utopian dreams of mutual aid and care, and all around the world, we won labor rights, state pensions, public medicine, all the wonders of the era the French call "Les Trente Glorieuses" (the 30 glorious years):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses
But because antitrust worked, we forgot how corrosive monopolies were. When the neoliberal economists of the Reagan/Thatcher era told us that we were missing out on the "efficiencies" of vast corporations, we blundered into their trap, letting them define the debate, so that instead of talking about how monopolies could clobber workers, customers and governments, we talked about whether monopolies might reduce prices. Sure, a monopoly can reduce prices – but as soon as it eliminates its competitors and captures its government, it's going to raise those prices, safe in the knowledge that a company that's too big to fail is too big to jail:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities
The dismantling of anti-monopoly law and the growth of the monopolies happened gradually, and then all at once. The decision to kill antitrust enforcement took place a half-century ago, but it was only in the past few years that the relationship of monopoly to our political, environmental and social dysfunction has entered our politics....
Like vaccines, antitrust worked too well. By the time Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan decided to welcome "efficient" monopolies, it had been so long since the world had been brought to the brink of ruin by oligarchs that it was easy to sell the pain of "lost efficiency" as worse than the distant horrors of the Gilded Age.
As the old joke goes, "When it don't rain the roof don't leak; when it's raining, I can't hardly fix it." We got rid of antitrust because it had been so long since oligarchs ran the world, we forgot how bad they'd made everything. Now that oligarchs are driving civilization off a cliff, we can't imagine fighting these seemingly omnipotent monsters.
We can fix this, just as our not-so-distant ancestors did when they tamed their robber barons. It won't be easy. It starts with remembering.
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