Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 25, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
A Blue Wave Won’t Wash Away Our Oligarchy Problem
New Republic
War on voting
Ballot Rejections Soared in Rural Counties After USPS Reduced Mail Service
Ken B. Morales, Jen Fifield and Misty Harris, [ProPublica]
Trump’s Last-Ditch Election Lawsuits, Explained
Joyce Vance, October 24, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
How the GOP Is Working to Steal the Midterms (w/ Joel McCleary and Mark Medish)
Chris Hedges, Oct 21, 2026
Noah Robertson, Oct 20, 2026 [The Washington Post]
A small group of U.S. national security officials has been discreetly advising state governments and congressional lawmakers on how to prepare for the possibility that the Trump administration will attempt to interfere in November’s midterm elections, according to people involved in the effort.
The group includes about 10 current and former officials with experience in the Defense Department, some of whom have previously focused on countering authoritarianism abroad.
Their efforts are motivated not by political bias, they say, but a growing sense of alarm that President Donald Trump will harm American democracy by undermining the integrity of the vote to keep the Republican Party in power.Over the past several months, the group has consulted with officials from 10 states, including governors, election officials and members of the House and Senate from both political parties who share a fear of federal intervention, two people involved in the effort said.
The effort, which has not been previously reported, focuses on states and jurisdictions where tightly contested races will determine control of Congress for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. Members of the group remain in contact with congressional staffs, and at least one state has continued to meet with them as it works to address potential vulnerabilities....
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [Mediaite]
The Secret Terms of Trump’s Venezuelan Oil Deal
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2026]
TRUMP PARDONED VENEZUELAN BILLIONAIRE AFTER FAMILY OFFERED ALINA HABBA $50 MILLION DEAL
[Law Commentary, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2026]
Pentagon Installs New Economic Spying And Sabotage Units
[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 10-23-2026]
There was some grumbling in Congress when the Trump administration installed Stephen Feinberg, a billionaire from New York, as the second man in the Pentagon. Feinberg had previously led Cerberus Capital Management which has various financial interests in Pentagon purveyors. He had also been chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board from 2018 to 2021, during the first Trump administration.
Feinberg first made headlines when the Pentagon invested billions to take equity stakes in more than a dozen private businesses. There are serious concerns that Feinberg is directing money to businesses he himself and/or Donald Trump’s family are interested in.
His newest endeavors though seem to be less concerned with business. They look like attempts to duplicate the Central Intelligence Agency within the Defense Department....
A Texas Cop Signed on to Help ICE Deport His Neighbors. It Tore the Town Apart.
Francesca D’Annunzio and McKenzie Funk, October 25, 2026 [propublica.org]
Ingram, Texas, was just rebuilding from a devastating flood when its tiny police department enrolled in ICE’s 287(g) deportation program. Within a year, cops would hand over the equivalent of 10% of the town.
“This Is Not What the Founders Envisioned”
Joyce Vance, October 24, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
As his lawyers prepared to return to court this morning in the legal battle over the East Potomac links, Donald Trump was up early, posting on Truth Social about U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes. He called her a “crazed lunatic” and suggested she “may be insane.” ....
It’s easy to lose sight of how commonplace that has become. And how devastating it is. It used to be that threats against federal judges came from unhappy litigants, as with three of the four federal judges who have been murdered in the last 50 years. The fourth, Judge John Roll, was killed in the shooting involving Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. In 2020, Judge Esther Salas faced an attack in her own home that led to the murder of her son, by a lawyer in a case in front of her who was a self-described “anti-feminist” and “men's rights” lawyer. But those events didn’t come from inside of the house.
PBS reported that “Hundreds of federal judges have received threats against themselves and their families this year [2026], according to the U.S. Marshals Service. It comes amid a litany of verbal and written attacks by President Trump and his administration on judges who have ruled against them.” There is no reason for the president of the United States to put federal judges, public servants, in harm’s way. And yet, that was where his attention was focused as the lawyers returned to court in the East Potomac Park case today....
Strategic Political Economy
GRAPH - Corporate America’s share of the nation’s income, 1950-2025
[Axios, US Bureau of Economic Analysis, via The Big Picture 10-21-2026]
Wealth Inequality in America Drawn to Scale
[Dream Again USA. [22
Quite the infographic.
Global power shift
China invests record $583 billion in science and tech as US administration seeks research cuts
[Interesting Engineering, via Naked Capitalism 10-18-2026]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
AIPAC Is Spending Millions — Just Not Under Its Own Name
Luke Goldstein and Katya Schwenk, Oct 24, 2026 [The Lever]
... Under the guise of championing popular liberal causes like electing women, promoting reproductive rights, or supporting Latino candidates, these pass-through groups are helping increasingly toxic political machines deliver ads to voters without being named, and they’re weaponizing disclosure deadlines to keep their fingerprints hidden until after ballots are cast. Campaign spending through super PACs that can keep their donors secret until after Election Day has more than doubled this cycle compared with 2024, according to Politico.
These front groups and disclosure loopholes mark a new frontier for secretive political spending in elections already awash in dark money networks that let donors obscure their identities from the voters they’re trying to influence. And they are surely a direct response to this election season’s distinct anti-establishment political climate, where even the most powerful lobbying operations recognize they must find new ways to subvert public sentiment without being exposed....
*WATCH OUR NEW AIPAC DOCUMENTARY* Zeteo Pulls Back the Curtain on the Pro-Israel Lobby
[Zeteo, Oct 21, 2026]
Oligarchy
Premium: The Hater’s Guide To Blackstone
Ed Zitron [via Naked Capitalism 10-24-2026]
For whatever reason, Blackstone founder and CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman has a thirty-chapter-long series called “My Personal History” that is, well, exactly what it sounds like — a financial hagiography that frames him as a noble, sensible man with strong values, like when he sent a letter to “distinguished skull and bones alumni” Averell Harriman, whose father Edward Harriman had crashed the stock market in 1901 in his dogged attempt to monopolize the post-bubble railroad industry. Averell himself had co-founded a bank with Fritz Thyssen, who banked the nazis.
Heather Cox Richardson, October 22, 2026
... Strategic studies scholar Phillips P. O’Brien wasn’t buying that explanation, posting that it is evident “the White House is desperately trying to make [Musk] the fall guy for what is happening to Ukraine.” He continued: “If Trump wanted to help Ukraine militarily and with starshield he could. He is president. He doesn’t want to.”
But it is simply astonishing that the president of the United States, the commander in chief of the United States military, is suggesting he had to negotiate with a private citizen to tell him to stop interfering with American foreign policy....
As Republicans brace for election losses, Musk prepares for war
Faiz Siddiqui, October 23, 2026 [The Washington Post]
A host of Democrats have said they are eager to wield the power of their office to investigate the tech titan and his ventures should they win either chamber in the midterms.
Elon Musk Just Threatened the Coming Democratic Majority
Lee Hepner, Oct 22, 2026 [BIG]
A few months ago, Paramount owner David Ellison succeeded in forcing California and Democratic states attorneys general to drop their antitrust suit against his acquisition of Warner Brothers. He used a variety of tactics, including a threat to move the studios out of the state, and ultimately bluffed the elected officials into folding. BIG predicted at the time that Ellison’s threatened capital strike, along with political coercion, was a preview of what is to come if voters choose Democrats as a Congressional majority.
And sure enough, that’s what one of Ellison’s close allies - Elon Musk - just did. Earlier this week, following reports that Musk had throttled Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite network, Politico ran a story that several Dem members of Congress are gearing up to hold oversight hearings if the midterms go their way in a couple of weeks.
Musk responded by explicitly threatening any Democrat or institution seeking to scrutinize him, his portfolio of companies, or his time at DOGE....
United States of Oligarchy Exposes Trump Regime Corruption
[The Nerd Reich, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]
The Nerd Reich podcast interviews Casey Michel about his new book on how America’s wealthiest ally with dictators and oligarchs betting against democracy.
The Biggest Source of Inequality That No One Talks About
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]
For 40 years, pass-through income has let millionaires and billionaires sidestep the corporate tax and shield much of their fortunes from income tax. Rogé Karma tallies the trillions in lost revenue.
Felonomics
Trump Aides Are Getting Ready to Penalize Defaulting Student Loan Borrowers
[Washington Sun, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261019]
“Last year, the White House Office of Management and Budget began assisting the Education Department in preparing to seize federal benefits and wages from defaulted borrowers. Trump administration officials are preparing to impose financial penalties on millions of Americans in default on their federal student loans next year, according to five sources familiar with the matter.” And: “The Treasury Department is moving forward with plans to hire private debt collectors, three of the sources said, possibly as soon as November. The sources said those plans are unlikely to be announced before the midterm elections.”
FEMA tells states to handle disasters on their own
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2026]
Pending Home Sales Plunge to Record Low
[Wolf Street, via Naked Capitalism 10-21-2026]
Health care crisis
David Dayen, October 23, 2026 [The American Prospect]
... And that’s before the $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts.
CONVERSATIONS LIKE THE ONES AT MLKCH are happening at safety-net hospitals across the country. Their primary patient population is on Medicaid, and the cuts put into place by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that Republicans passed last year will torch planned budgets and send administrators frantically searching for revenue to keep the doors open.
This is the silent issue animating much of the anti-Republican backlash in the midterms, and it compounds on itself. Work requirements and other paperwork mandates are pushing people off the Medicaid rolls; enrollment is down by 6 million since Donald Trump’s inauguration; 2.5 million of those are children. The expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies has made insurance supremely unaffordable, and enrollment in those exchanges is down by 5 million.
This spike in the uninsured population leads people to turn to emergency departments as their primary mode of care, and uncompensated care—U.S. hospitals are required to take on all emergency patients—shreds budgets for safety-net hospitals. If they go out of business, the flow of patients moves to the next ER, and the next, recreating the same problems in a new venue. And the worst cuts are yet to come....
Predatory finance
Same Rules, Different Ruins - How the Basel weights priced factories out of eleven economies' banks
Craig Tindale [via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2026]
The Basel Committee de-industrialised the countries that adopted its rules. According to World Bank figures, manufacturing’s share of GDP fell in ten of the eleven countries in this essay, dropping by 16.8% in India and 60.7% in Australia, where it fell from 13.7% of GDP in 1990 to 5.4% in 2024....
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
The Cover-Up: How a Trillion-Dollar Industry Launders Illegal Gold
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, October 24, 2026]
This is an illegal mine in Madagascar. Its gold is banned from the world’s legitimate marketplace. Thousands of children work in these mines, in violation of international law. Yet Madagascar’s gold flowed easily to market. And the world’s gold authority helped cover it up. The line between dirty and clean gold is an industry fiction. Wall Street and governments profit off gold from criminals, gangsters and those who exploit children.
Fabrications, fraud and false accounting: how Deloitte helped Abramovich hide $10bn
[The London Bureau of Investigative Journalism, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]
The Big Four firm spent years faking documents that helped the sanctioned oligarch conceal assets and dodge tax
[ProPublica, via Drop Site Daily, October 20, 2026]
In early 2025, the FBI opened a corruption investigation built on confessions from Martin Kao, CEO of the defense contractor Navatek, who told agents that his business model was bribing officials for government contracts, according to a new report from ProPublica. He said he struck cash-for-contracts deals with Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rep. James Clyburn and Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, and with Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. Agents found that much of Kao’s account matched company records seized in the investigation.
After Trump returned to the White House, the DOJ’s anti-corruption section lost authority to file new cases, the career prosecutor quit, and agents assigned to the case were fired or pushed out. The case is now dead. The living lawmakers involved (Clyburn, Wilson, and Collins) have denied any wrongdoing.
How Trump’s FBI Purge Saved Lindsey Graham and James Clyburn From a Bribery Investigation
ProPublica
Restoring balance to the economy
New Mexico Takes Meta To Court and Wins
[Economic Liberties, Oct 23, 2026, The Economic Populist]
A New Mexico judge this week ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for deceiving users about its data privacy practices after a jury last month found the company guilty of 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection laws. New Mexico’s victory is a profound lesson to both state and national enforcers: if you want to hold Meta accountable, don’t settle. It’s a take we’ve been sharing with Politico, the Associated Press, and more this week.
New Mexico’s verdict is part of a pattern, with the “Land of Enchantment” having now pressed its own cases against Meta to judgment three times and counting: $375 million in March over child safety violations, $567 million in a second child safety case this August, and now $25 billion. This has all been done after other enforcers signed a settlement, leaving them unlikely to ever pursue what New Mexico just won. The case sends the message that strong consumer laws, when enforced, are a great way to hold big tech to account for its abusive business practices....
Christopher Armitage, Oct 19, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
...The European Union sets the penalty for the same kind of failure by the size of the company. Under the Digital Services Act, the European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, can fine a large online platform up to 6% of global annual revenue. For Meta’s 2025 revenue, that comes to about $12 billion. The commission issued its first fine under that law on Dec. 5, 2025: €120 million against X for transparency violations, including an ad repository that left out who paid for each ad.
Brazil and Australia apply the same principle to bribery and corporate misconduct. Brazil’s Clean Company Law, in force since 2014, makes a company strictly liable when the company’s employees or agents bribe public officials for the company’s benefit. Prosecutors have to prove the bribe and the benefit. The law allows a fine of up to 20% of the prior year’s gross revenue, and the fine can never be less than the benefit the company obtained. Australia’s 2019 corporate penalties law sets the maximum civil penalty for a company at the greatest of several measures. Those measures include three times the benefit obtained and 10% of annual turnover, up to 910 million Australian dollars....
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Why aren’t AI companies being charged for hacking?
[Musing Mortoray, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]
A blogger asks whether hacking is legal now, after Anthropic models broke into three systems and OpenAI’s hit an Australian government health site. AI companies claim their hacks were unpredictable accidents — but they follow foreseeably from deliberate design choices, and that establishes criminal intent.
Cory Doctorow, October 19, 2026 [Pluralistic]
... the internet's original sin isn't advertising, it's surveillance. Contrary to what you have been told – and pax Winner's framework – the internet is fully compatible with privacy:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/31/losing-the-crypto-wars/#surveillance-monopolism
It wasn't the internet's technopolitics that made it a surveillance nightmare. It was just plain politics. Specifically, our politicians decided to stop enacting and enforcing privacy laws....
Surveillance also promotes oligarchy. Without surveillance, oligarchs must give up more of their fortunes to keep the public happy, because the alternative is spending even more money on guards to keep the public from building guillotines on their lawns. Surveillance lets oligarchs make targeted strikes on restive radicals, which is much cheaper than broad-spectrum policies that make us all better off and neutralize the case for guillotines:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/26/autostabilizer/#slicey-bois
These are the technopolitics of surveillance, not advertising. There is nothing about advertising that demands surveillance. For centuries, advertising was not meaningfully linked to surveillance. The decision to fuse surveillance with advertising was just that – a decision, not an inevitability....
[More Perfect Union] Oct 22, 2026
Collapse of independent news media
If the Supreme Court wants to protect freedom of the press, here is its chance
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 10-18-2026]
The death of history’s most successful publisher
Cory Doctorow [Pluralistic]
Contrast this with AI, the money-losingest endeavor in the history of human civilization. Google is losing hundreds of billions of dollars on AI. The more AI Google does, the worse the company’s financial footing becomes. If Google does this for long enough, it may cease to exist altogether. This collapse can only be prolonged by Google’s ongoing extraction of value from web publishers, who no longer have their works connected with audiences via Google search results. Instead, Google usurps those audiences, shows them as many ads as it can, and still loses money in the bargain.”
Democrats' political malpractice
Why Are Democrats The Party Of No?
David Sirota, Oct 22, 2026 [The Lever]
It is an open secret that establishment Democrats loathe the left of their own party more than they oppose Republicans. You can see it in corporate Democrats trying to sabotage populist Democratic nominees and vilifying the Democratic Socialists of America. Less well understood is a related dynamic: Establishment Democrats’ foremost mission — the thing they equate with the ultimate form of toughness, courage, and morality — is using power to block the full set of policies the public actually wants.
To them, Democrats’ highest virtue is not their ability to enact big ideas, but instead their willingness to replace the GOP as the new party of no and be this era’s William Buckley — a bulwark that “stands athwart history, yelling stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
This vector isn’t much talked about in polite circles, but it is finally getting a rare moment in the sun, after a series of scream-the-quiet-part spectacles related to Medicare For All, which a new Yale study shows could save $1 trillion and 114,000 lives every year.
The first of those came from Majority Democrats, a billionaire front group aiming to become a new version of the old Democratic Leadership Council....
[ABC News, via Naked Capitalism 10-18-2026]
David Gilmour, October 19, 2026 [yahoo.com/news/politics]
David Sirota, Oct 22, 2026 [The Lever]
The Blue-State Democrats Fighting To Shield Billionaires From Taxes
David Sirota, Oct 22, 2026 [The Lever]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
MAGA Built the Censorship Machine It Spent Years Falsely Accusing Democrats of Building
[Techdirt, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]
Mike Masnick on the projection: the apparatus MAGA warned Democrats were building is the one it built itself.
All the Things You’re Not Allowed to Say In Texas
[The Atlantic, via The Big Picture, October 18, 2026]
How new state laws and university policies at Texas Tech, Texas A&M, and UT Austin are restricting what professors can teach.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Supreme Court’s Right Flank Wants to Give You Fewer Privacy Rights Than a Famous Judge
[Slate, via Naked Capitalism 10-18-2026]
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-22-2026]
Civic republicanism
Harold Meyerson, October 22, 2026 [The American Prospect]
This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the decision to block Ukraine from the high-speed Starlink satellite alerts that enabled it to intercept Russian missiles and drones was made by SpaceX owner Elon Musk, either in conjunction with President Trump or in advance of Trump’s support for the action. Whichever version is more correct, Musk is either making or carrying out a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign and military policy—something that no private citizen has ever done in our 250-year history....
I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2026]
the breakdown of elite competence
The REAL Reason Europe Destroyed Itself | Dr. Ulrike Guérot (YouTube video)
[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 10-20-2026]
[Robin K:
A very provocative presentation followed by Q&A on the future of Europe. The title is slightly misleading. Her talk is about the future of Europe, based on her recent book, Why Europe Should Become a Republic. Guérot makes a distiction between democracy and republic. She aims for recreating Europe as a national Republic.
[NY Post, via Naked Capitalism 10-18-2026]
[TW: The tech bro flagrantly violated one of the basic principles of political economy in a republic: government should encourage citizens to "do good." Letting players kill billionaires might not be much better, but it at least would be taking aim at the cause of most all our problems.]
.
