Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 01, 2026
by Tony Wikrent
He Called for Trump's Impeachment. Now an Air Force Major Sits in Solitary Confinement.
Jeffrey Sterling, Oct 26, 2026 [laprogressive.com]
Major Jason Watson faces ten military charges after publicly demanding Trump's removal. His prolonged isolation raises serious questions about constitutional loyalty, selective prosecution, and punishment before trial....
You can also help by sending letters of support to Major Watson while he is being confined to the following address:
Jason P. Watson
Calvert County Detention Center
P.O. Box 9
Barstow, MD 20610
Jordan Zakarin, Oct 24, 2026 [Progress Report]
Christopher Armitage, Oct 27, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
... Milan Svolik, a Yale political scientist whose 2012 book The Politics of Authoritarian Rule built a dataset of every dictatorship from 1946 to 2008, argues that every authoritarian government faces two problems, control of the people it rules and power sharing with the elites it rules with, and that the second one ends more regimes.
His 2009 study in the American Journal of Political Science counted 303 dictators who lost power by nonconstitutional means and found 205 removed by regime insiders and 32 by popular uprising. Two-thirds of the dictators in the dataset fell to the people standing next to them.
The rule for the United States follows directly: the people positioned in the data to end this regime are inside its coalition, the senators, governors, donors, generals and judges whose cooperation the coalition needs, and every indicator worth reading measures their cohesion....
the Egyptian army let Hosni Mubarak fall and the Syrian army fired on Syrians. A professional force promoted by merit and bound by law is the kind that declines to fire, and the last 13 months produced two readings of that variable.
In Nepal, police killed 19 protesters on Sept. 8, 2025, the first day of the youth protests against corruption and a social media ban. The next morning Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli left his residence in an army helicopter and resigned, the army chief, Gen. Ashok Raj Sigdel, went on television that evening to call for talks, and by Sept. 11 the generals were at army headquarters negotiating with the protesters over who would be prime minister; the protesters named a former chief justice, Sushila Karki, and she was sworn in the next day.
In Madagascar, Col. Michael Randrianirina of the CAPSAT unit, the unit that had put President Andry Rajoelina in power in 2009, posted a video on Oct. 11, 2025 telling the security forces to refuse any order to shoot the demonstrators; his soldiers walked the protesters into the capital’s main square the next day, the gendarmerie joined on Oct. 13, Rajoelina left the country, and Randrianirina was sworn in as interim president on Oct. 17.
In the United States, Bellin’s finding comes down to which force gets the order to fire: the military, promoted by merit and sworn to the Constitution, or the second force the regime is building. Congress gave ICE $76.5 billion, nearly 10 times its annual budget, close to $30 billion of it to hire 10,000 officers....
Lula’s Victory Disrupts Washington’s Donroe Doctrine & Israel’s Issac Accords
Fiorella Isabel [via Naked Capitalism 10-29-2026]
War on voting
Exclusive: National Guard Mobilizes for Election
Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-30-2026]
Feds Prep for Election “Doomsday” Scenario
Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 10-28-2026]
[The Hill, via Drop Site Daily: October 30, 2026]
The DOJ said in a court filing on Wednesday that ICE and FBI employees will not monitor the midterm elections next week. Instead, agents of the Bureau of Prisons, the ATF, and the DEA will. The disclosure follows a suit from the NAACP that sought to bar prosecutors and law enforcement from monitoring polling places. The DOJ said that agents of the Bureau of Prisons, the ATF, and the DEA will stand outside the polls to observe the scene, take notes, and interview willing voters. The federal agents will not act as law enforcement officials, the DOJ added, and will not carry firearms.
An Epic Opinion From Judge Carter
Joyce Vance, Oct 29, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
Judge David Carter in California issued his opinion in the California case where the Justice Department is insisting California set aside ballots cast by voters it thinks might not be citizens. It’s one for the history books. It is not flashy. There is no poetry or fancy wordplay. It’s the plainspoken eloquence of the opinion that grabbed me, as the Judge laid out the importance of the right to vote and this administration’s attempt to interfere with it in language as suitable for citizens as it is for lawyers.
“This case is about the right of every American citizen to vote in a free and fair election. Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch. In bringing this lawsuit, the Executive would have this Court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign. But California and its people are sovereign, too.” ....
Washington State Finds Citizens on DOJ’s Purported List of Noncitizen Voters
John Light, Oct 29, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
Washington State late Wednesday responded to the DOJ’s demand that it segregate 400 ballots from supposed noncitizen voters. Washington, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs wrote in a letter to the state’s two U.S. attorneys, would not be doing as the DOJ asked.
“This list includes United States citizens and is not reliable,” he wrote. “Without individualized proof of ineligibility, it would be both irresponsible and illegal for election officials to decline to process a registered voter’s ballot. If you have individualized proof, I invite you to provide it so election officials can take appropriate steps that are consistent with federal and state law.” ....
War
Inside Donald Trump’s Secret Plan To Restart The Iran War After The Election
Brian Beutler, Oct 30, 2026 [Off Message]
Operatives aligned with the president spent months devising a plan to resume the war—only after ballots had been cast. Republicans have worked studiously to avoid tipping off voters.
How To Make Permanent War Irreversible
[Un-Diplomatic, via Naked Capitalism 10-30-2026]
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [Mediaite]
Donald Trump Is Newly Accused of Rape – and Epstein Allegedly Helped
Prem Thakker, Oct 27, 2026 [Zeteo]
...In a newly released report from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, investigators say a “growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s.”...
Alan Macleod, October 30, 2026 [mintpressnews.com]
Why Is the Media Ignoring the New Rape Allegation Against Trump?
Justin Baragona, Oct 28, 2026 [Zeteo]
On Monday morning, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a jaw-dropping report about Donald Trump’s longtime ties to deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, including a brand new allegation that the president brutally raped a young beauty pageant contestant.
“The bottom line: there is more than sufficient evidence to launch a criminal investigation,” the Judiciary Democrats wrote in the report, calling for an independent special counsel to investigate and prosecute the president’s alleged criminal activity alongside Epstein.
Normally, one would think a 53-page congressional report detailing allegations from 11 women tying the president to a pedophile financier’s sex-trafficking operation, with five women directly accusing the commander-in-chief of raping or sexually assaulting them, would lead to round-the-clock coverage by the mainstream and legacy media.
Well, you would be wrong....
Trump and Epstein’s intrasexual competition
Julie K. Brown [The Epstein Files, via Naked Capitalism 10-28-2026]
In Trump’s pardon economy, crime victims lost out on at least $119 million in restitution
[CBS News, via Naked Capitalism 10-28-2026]
Corporations Are Joining Trump’s NSPM-7 Crackdown
Dan Boguslaw [via Naked Capitalism 10-28-2026]
Donald Trump’s crackdown on the left has jumped government containment to the private sector, according to confidential State Department documents obtained by Deeper States and corporate solicitations posted online. Announced in September of last year, National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 instructs government agencies to crackdown on what the President and his closest advisors say is a burgeoning left wing terrorism movement spread out across America, and the world.
Already the FBI and DHS have launched NSPM-7 investigations from coast to coast, targeting individuals and groups that represent “anti-American values”, anti “traditional family values”, beliefs antagonistic to ICE, and “anti-capitalist” sentiments. In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio expanded the NSPM-7 fixation to foreign allies in a ministerial on left wing political violence which brought together intelligence and security officials from over 60 allied countries....
Trump’s Ass Stands Grotesquely Exposed
W.A. Lawrence [via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2026]
A Year Ago, Trump Bet You’d Forget This. Did You?
Joyce Vance, Oct 31, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
...The post I flagged for myself was about something that happened during the shutdown [a year ago]. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, commonly known as food stamps, is a federal program that helps low-income individuals and families buy groceries. During the shutdown, the Department of Agriculture decided to freeze those payments. It claimed the government could not fund them because of the shutdown and announced that the payments would be frozen starting on November 1. That meant the money people relied on to feed themselves and their families would simply stop....
Heather Cox Richardson, Oct 27, 2026 [Letters from an American]
Zach Everson of Public Citizen noted that Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., opened ten years ago today, and Republicans’ refusal to condemn the flood of money into that enterprise to buy his goodwill convinced him that there would be no repercussions for grifting off the presidency. Everson notes that at the opening Trump said, “Today’s a metaphor for what we can accomplish in this country,” and now, ten years later, he has made more than $1.4 billion off crypto while investors have lost $4.8 billion.
On Thursday a shareholder of a publicly traded U.S. crypto company sued Trump and his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company. The lawsuit accuses Trump and the company “corruptly profiting” off more than $2 billion in crypto deals, including a deal that violates the Constitution’s prohibition on accepting gifts from foreign countries: a $500 million investment made by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the current president of the United Arab Emirates and who manages a UAE sovereign wealth fund.
Trump says Norwegian immigrants not welcome in the US because of Nobel snub
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 10-26-2026]
AP: ICE detained mentally ill man for almost a year despite records showing he was born in the U.S.
[Associated Press, via Drop Site Daily: October 27, 2026]
ICE arrested Phillip James, a U.S. citizen, in January and has held him in detention ever since, according to an Associated Press investigation. James, who has paranoid schizophrenia, said that he was born in Jamaica, but a Florida birth certificate and a 1988 paternity case show that he was born in Orange County, Florida. He was also issued a U.S. passport. An immigration judge ordered James’ deportation to Jamaica in April, though Jamaica said that it has no record of his being born there. His lawyers have petitioned federal judge Damon Leichty for his release.
Robert Barnes : Who Will Trump Blame?
Judge Napolitano [YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2026]
[TW: Napolitano interview of former Trump lawyer Robert Barnes, who genuinely seems to have access to sources and advisers close to Trump. I found the entire interview very informative, including Barnes's discussion of what the GOP's internal polling is showing, and Trump's increasing rage and bitterness. ]
Trump's Tyranny, Part II: It's the Corruption
Garrett Graff, October 26, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario]
Trump's Tyranny, Part III: He Acts Like a King
Garrett Graff, October 30, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario]
Strategic Political Economy
Anthropic Isn't Just a Company, It's a Payoff
Matt Stoller, Oct 31, 2026 [BIG]
The trillion dollar Anthropic IPO will enrich Google and Amazon, who are ostensibly competitors. How does that make sense? It doesn’t, unless Anthropic is four flailing monopolies in a trench coat....
... There’s something unusual about Anthropic’s filing, and big tech earnings in general, that has important policy implications. Unlike nearly any other initial public offering I can think of, large chunks of Anthropic are owned or controlled by its rivals or suppliers: Amazon, Google, Broadcom, and Microsoft. Indeed, I have read a bunch of S-1’s, I have never seen one discuss how dependent the company doing an IPO is on other large firms. These dependencies explain why the entire tech complex is now rising and falling together, as if it’s one interconnected entity. Because in some ways, it now is.
Can Private Capital Keep Africa Wild?
[CEO Magazine, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2026]
John Kiriakou: CIA Regime Change from Ukraine to Iran
Glenn Diesen [YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2026]
Important.
Global power shift
Chip Wars Update: China blows up ASML’s supply chain for EUV machines
Kevin Walmsley [via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2026]
India tightens its grip on Pakistan’s lifeline
[Noon Report, via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2026]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Elijah Magnier: BREAKING: Netanyahu Faces Deadlock, U.S. to Gulf: Prepare for Iran Military Campaign
[Dialogue Works, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-2026]
[Magnier does a patient job of setting forth some of the complicated potential paths to forming a government.]
Oligarchy
California elites spend $612 million to defeat billionaire tax
[Politico, via Drop Site Daily: October 28, 2026]
Seventy past and current California billionaires have spent a record-setting $612 million to block a one-time, 5% tax on their wealth, a Politico analysis found. That spending has pushed support for the tax below 50%, according to two new polls.
A Spooky Halloween With Peter Thiel and the Antichrist
Derick Dirmaier, Kate Riga and Joe Ragazzo, October 31, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]
... I got an email offering to take me “Inside Peter Thiel’s Nashville Antichrist Lectures.” And maybe the Halloween spirit got the better of me, because I clicked....
To the extent that I can summarize four days of billionaire mumbo jumbo that took my inside-access correspondent some 10,000 words to convey, the crux of Thiel’s concept of the Antichrist comes from 1 Thessalonians 5:3 where the apostle Paul says, “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.” This verse has often been cited as a prophecy of the end times; the Antichrist brokers a false state of security with humanity before breaking it and leading them to damnation. In Thiel’s telling, the phrase “Peace and safety” is a stand-in for the global regulatory state exemplified by institutions like the United Nations or the FDA. For Thiel, the age of modernity, and thus progress, ended sometime between the development of the nuclear bomb and the moon landing. Post moon landing, we’ve been in a state of stagnation where concerns over safety have trumped our innate desire to innovate and solve problems like the pesky issue of our own mortality. AI won’t move the needle enough: Thiel wants us to become fully transhuman and go to Mars.
Borrowing heavily from Carl Schmitt, Thiel identifies the Antichrist as an attempt to unify nations into one global world order. He believes that current apocalyptic fears about climate change, nuclear war, or AI-driven doomsday are manifestations of the Antichrist intended to make us afraid of our own technology and lure us into a unified nanny state under a false sense of security. We will follow the Antichrist according to Girard’s memetic theory, which explains humans fundamentally seek to imitate other humans. Copying others, says Girard, can lead to memetic rivalry or violence in which case communities restore unity by directing the violence at a scapegoat (the crucifixion of Jesus being the ultimate example). In Thiel’s reading of Girard, scapegoats are necessary, and thus a single world order without nation states competing and scapegoating each other would lead to the ultimate unleashing of violence — e.g. armageddon....
Felonomics
[New York Times, via Drop Site Daily: October 30, 2026]
More than 50 major U.S. oil and gas companies earned over $130 billion in profits between April and September during the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, according to a New York Times analysis. Over the same period last year, the companies took less than $47 billion in profits.
Comparing the same periods this year and last year, Exxon Mobil’s third-quarter profits in 2026 more than doubled to $15.41 billion, while Chevron’s nearly tripled to $9.92 billion, as soaring oil prices and disruptions to Middle Eastern refining capacity boosted earnings.
Meanwhile, Americans have paid $147 billion for gasoline and diesel since the war began on February 28, equivalent to more than $1,100 per household, according to Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab.
Despite the windfall, many companies are paying down debt and accumulating cash rather than expanding production or refining capacity. One oil executive, Valero Energy’s chief financial officer, said that much of the surplus would ultimately go to shareholders.
[The Guardian, via Drop Site Daily: October 26, 2026]
Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dropped from 41.6 million in July 2025 to 36.5 million in June 2026, after the program’s work requirements were expanded and its allowances for people without dependents contracted under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Arizona’s enrollment is down 50%.
Advocates note that work requirements converged with a tightening job market. The Food Bank Council of Michigan’s helpline calls more than tripled, forcing a temporary suspension, and Houston’s independent district lost free-meal eligibility at 26 schools because fewer students are on SNAP.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Corporate Greed is Coming for Everything
[Working Class Stories, via Naked Capitalism 10-26-2026]
Health care crisis
Why 43% of hospitals are losing money
[Becker’s Hospital Review, via Naked Capitalism 10-26-2026]
Bad debt and charity care per calendar day rose 13% year over year in August and are up 49% over three years, according to Kaufman Hall. As a share of gross operating revenue, bad debt and charity care are up 7% year to date and 14% since 2023....
This is not a one-month spike. Kaufman Hall’s March data showed bad debt and charity care per calendar day up 18% year over year and 46% from the first quarter of 2023.
The most visible driver this year is the expiration of enhanced ACA premium tax credits at the end of 2025. Second-quarter earnings from the largest for-profit operators showed former exchange enrollees becoming uninsured patients at close to a 1-to-1 rate....
Predatory finance
Finance capital’s ultimatum to Lula in Brazil: Impose austerity or your victory ‘will turn to ashes’
[WSWS, via thejackpot.blog/node/TodaysWaterCooler20261030]
The British magazine The Economist published after the election an editorial titled ‘Markets are dismayed by Lula’s surprise win—and for good reason.’ The text argues bluntly: Either the government abandons its campaign promises and submits to the demands of capital, or it will be reduced to ‘ashes.’ The magazine begins by noting that ‘if Lula’s supporters are elated, the markets are running scared,’ and adds that ‘they are right to.’” More: “Lula is accused of having ‘talked down the need for fiscal discipline’ during the campaign and of having promised ‘an extravagance of big new bungs.’ What the spokesmen of the capitalist oligarchy call ‘extravagance’ amounts in fact to crumbs—such as the promise of increased welfare benefits for the poorest and free public transportation on weekends—that do not even begin to address the brutal levels of social inequality in the country.”
Africa’s Debt Crisis Deepens as AFRODAD Demands Overhaul of Global Financial System
[Africa Brief [27
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Wall Street is Coming for Your Burger
Lynn Parramore, Oct 25, 2026 [Institute for New Economic Thinking]
Wall Street takes a bite out of your burger, leaving consumers and workers with the bill. As private equity firms and activist investors tighten their grip on America’s restaurant chains, the pursuit of quick profits is impacting a quintessentially American institution in the form of thinner patties, cheaper ingredients, understaffed restaurants, and higher prices. As INET's Lynn Parramore finds, the problem goes far beyond fast food. It’s a classic case of what we’ve long warned about: financialization run amok, where extracting value from businesses takes precedence over building them, and workers and customers bear the costs while executives and shareholders cash out. This calls for a recipe of stronger accountability, tougher antitrust enforcement, and changing the rules of corporate governance.
Restoring balance to the economy
We Know How to Fix Homelessness. Look at Denver.
German Lopez, Oct. 13, 2026 [New York Times]
Denver has recorded the biggest recent drop in street homelessness among the largest U.S. cities, according to my analysis of local data. The city’s drop was roughly 13 times the national rate in 2025, the most recent year for federal statistics. Since 2023, Denver’s unsheltered population is down 64 percent. “What they’re doing is working,” said Samantha Batko, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Urban Institute, which is independently evaluating the city’s progress.Since Mayor Mike Johnston of Denver took office in 2023, he has focused on getting unsheltered homelessness to zero. He has done so by using some fairly standard ideas. Police officers break up homeless encampments, warning that repeated violations could lead to arrest. With the help of social workers, the city connects those people to services and shelters. Crucially, it has expanded those services to ensure that officers and social workers have something to connect people to.
By successfully combining enforcement and social services, Denver demonstrates that cities don’t need to choose between those binaries. They should do both....The balanced approach has shrunk the number of encampments across Denver, the Urban Institute’s evaluation found. From 2023 to 2025, the number of active encampments fell by nearly half. The number of large encampments, with 10 or more tents or structures, dropped by 91 percent....
I came away from Denver convinced that the mayor’s focus and determination are the most crucial factors. I’ve seen this happen nationwide: Policies that work in one place fail in another because officials can replicate the law or the money but not the leadership — the force of will — behind the original success.
Disrupting mainstream economics
Steve Keen, Oct 25, 202 [Building a New Economics]
The first computer model to predict the weather was developed in the 1960s (Manabe and Wetherald 1967). Over time, this research led to the development of “Global Circulation Models”, which are used for both weather forecasting and climate modelling (Edwards 2011). These programs have become increasingly sophisticated over time, given the importance of weather modelling to numerous industries, the military, and the general public....
The accuracy of both weather and climate forecasts have risen over time as a result. There are still enormous weaknesses in these models: they necessarily work at high levels of aggregation, when weather processes operate at as low as the molecular scale; clouds are difficult to model, since they both reflect and absorb heat; and so on. But the models have predicted global average temperatures very well, and shown that the increase in temperatures over the last century can only be explained by human activity. They also predict many other consequences of global warming, including both extreme storms and drought, since the moisture content of air rises 7% for every 1°C increase in temperature.
These models are the gold standard in modelling the climate. And economists do not use them....
[Economic Liberties, Oct 28, 2026 The Economic Populist]
... In what ways did FDR economically respond to the threat of fascism?
The fascist threat in the United States was also quite real by the time that he came to power. One of the first things that Roosevelt did was to take the United States off the gold standard, which was really the core of economic orthodoxy at the time. This was kind of like the deficit rules of their day. Without it, FDR could have his large-scale public investments, direct employment programs, infrastructure projects, his programs for the arts, and so on.
By confronting the Great Depression with direct state action, Roosevelt demonstrated that the democratic state could improve the material lot of its people. To restore trust in the democratic state you need the state to be able to act effectively.
How was anti-fascist economics hollowed out in the decades after World War II?
After the war, the sense was that states can plan quite effectively. Then the question became if we could do it for war, why can’t we do it for peace? If we can build arsenals of democracy, why can’t we build public housing and public infrastructure? You had a consensus that you could aim for full employment and low inflation.
However, with the rise of McCarthyism and the neoclassical synthesis, you get this hollowed out form of Keynesianism without what we today call industrial policy. Instead of the New Deal, where the state actually had the capacity to do concrete projects, it becomes these pretty mathematical signs of macroeconomic aggregates. You get this interpretation to say that Keynesianism was always about the Phillips curve, a trade-off between unemployment and inflation. But during the seventies stagflation, you had a combination of unemployment and inflation, therefore this kind of Keynesian economics didn’t make sense. That opens the door for the defeatism of [University of Chicago economist] Milton Friedman that whenever the state tries to do anything good all it does is create inflation. The state becomes incapable of improving people’s lot....
Steve Keen, Oct 27, 202 [Building a New Economics]
Mike Brock, Oct 31, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
... Engagement was a commonplace among the first generation of neoliberal politicians and the intellectuals who supplied their arguments. Milton Friedman gave it its respectable form in a 1958 essay, four years before his book of the same name, “Capitalism and Freedom“: a market separates economic power from political power and so provides, in his phrase, “numerous independent foci of potential opposition” to a government that would suppress freedom. Friedman was careful to add that “capitalism alone is not sufficient to guarantee freedom.” The politicians who borrowed his argument mostly left the caveat behind.
Margaret Thatcher built the Hong Kong handover on it. In the House of Lords in 1992 she said that an enterprise economy “has usually preceded a political democracy, but the latter usually follows from the establishment of the former,” and she projected that “there could be universal suffrage by 2007.” Two years later, marking the tenth anniversary of the Joint Declaration in a speech to the Asia Society in Kowloon, she said that as China’s economy was liberated, changes in how China was governed were “bound to follow.” “You cannot for long have a free economy without those who create it also having some say in the laws by which it is governed,” she said. “It doesn’t make any difference in the long term whether you start with economic reform or you start with political reform; you will finish up with both. That is the lesson of history.”
On March 8, 2000, Bill Clinton went to Johns Hopkins to give the theory its American closing argument and sell Congress on permanent normal trade relations with Beijing. “By joining the WTO,” he said, “China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values -- economic freedom.” When he got to Beijing’s efforts to police the internet he got a laugh: “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Then he predicted that “in the knowledge economy, economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.”
China joined the WTO on December 11, 2001. The Communist Party nailed the Jello to the wall and then sold the world the hammer....
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Updated Google privacy policy says your Gmail might be used for advertising
[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2026]
BREAKING NEWS: Gmail Users Need to Read This!
[X, via Naked Capitalism 10-26-2026]
Nyx
@Nyx_Tech_AI
🚨 BREAKING NEWS: Gmail Users Need to Read This!If you have a Gmail account, you need to read this.
Google’s AI is now rifling through your inbox emails and attachments, bank statements, tax docs, medical letters, the whole stack. It was enabled by default, and that quiet rollout is now facing a class-action lawsuit.
Here are 5 steps to turn it off because the kill switch is buried in two different spots....
Monopoly Round-Up: What Happens When Cybersecurity is Bad for Business
Lee Hepner, Oct 25, 2026 [BIG]
How can anyone be surprised about the PHP hack when hacking is the business model? We’ve had a cybersecurity crisis for decades, driven by Wall Street financiers and deregulation. Let’s wake up.
New Report: Big Insurance, Big Tech, and the Hidden Use of AI in Health Insurance
[HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 10-28-2026]
Cheap Aftermarket Car Screens Are Loaded With Spyware, By the Way
[The Drive, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2026]
Collapse of independent news media
New book published today — STAND AND DELIVER – THE HISTORY OF PODCAST JOURNALISM
John Helmer [via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2026]
THE LEGLESS PODCASTERS — WHY THE NAPOLITANO GANG MAKES THE SAME WAR MISTAKE SO OFTEN
John Helmer [via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2026]
Climate and environmental crises
[ZME Science, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-2026]
Bangladesh’s climate migrants are arriving in cities unprepared to protect them
[Mongabay, via Naked Capitalism 10-27-2026]
In a landmark climate trial, Canadian youth accuse the government of violating their rights
[Corporate Knights, via Naked Capitalism 10-29-2026]
Off-Grid Solar Is Now the Cheapest Power for Nearly 400 Million People
Alex Kimani, Oct 29, 2026 [oilprice.com]
Off-grid solar is now the cheapest electricity solution for at least 398 million people, with the World Bank estimating $11.4 billion in investment needed through 2030.
Off-grid solar adoption has surged 26% in two years, supporting 219,000 jobs and generating an estimated $28 billion in additional income and savings over 15 years.
Africa, India and Pakistan are experiencing rapid solar growth, driven by plunging panel costs, government incentives and rising electricity prices.
Democrats' political malpractice
The Left’s Donors Don’t Hold Grudges. The Establishment’s Do.
Zohreen Shah, October 31 2026 [The Lever]
Midterm campaign filings reveal a one-way loyalty test: Progressive donors rally behind Democratic nominees, while establishment money disappears — or moves to Republicans — when those nominees are populists.
Pelosi SLAMS Abdul In Final Days
[Breaking Points, via Naked Capitalism 10-31-2026]
Eoin Higgins, October 31 2026 [The Lever]
Reed Galen, Oct 28, 2026 [The Intercept]
Three Simple Tests For A Democratic Majority
Brian Beutler, Oct 28, 2026 [Off Message]
If Democrats win next week, these easy, low-risk moves will reveal whether they actually intend to wield power—or whether it’s time for more insurgency....
NO MORE JUDGES
This is the only litmus test that requires Democrats to win control of the Senate: Not just no more Trump Supreme Court justices, but no more Trump judges, period....FINISH THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF GERRYMANDERING
Democrats have to finish what Trump started. Republicans gerrymandered so aggressively over the past year that the House now has a strong GOP bias—that’s why Democrats can’t count on winning the House without winning the generic ballot by perhaps four or more points. But that also means Democrats have more unpicked fruit (in states like Virginia and New York) to say nothing of the new districts they’ll be able to gerrymander if they win new state-level trifectas next week....
STOP THE VANITY PROJECTS ....
Resistance
The Bright Side of the Dark Side of AI - Adobe charged him to cancel, so he rebuilt Adobe
Thomas Neuburger, Oct 28, 2026 [God’s Spies]
It’s clear that AI is going to do a lot of destroying — of jobs, of the economy when overvalued companies lose markets, of attempts by humans to correct wealth inequality, of our ability to interact with humans at companies determined to cut costs, of most people’s ability to deal with government at all — in short, of happiness on all too grand a scale.
Yet there’s a bright side for us that people like Altman and Zuckerberg haven’t considered: AI eats what it’s fed regardless of source. AI is now eating Adobe. And that’s just the start.
Like most software companies of any great size these days, Adobe products now runs on a subscription model, meaning you don’t buy its products, you rent them. Calling it a subscription is polite....
Now comes AI the Disruptor. AI allows Adobe and firms like it to create and update their products considerably faster than using human labor alone. For them, AI is gold; it’s cash in the bank.
Unfortunately for Adobe, AI can hurt them as well. A software engineer named Brandon Thomas has cloned Adobe’s Creative Suite. Not copied and pasted the code, but totally replicated it with no stolen parts. He used AI to do almost all of the work. He started on September 30, and one week later he had his first release. The result is now free to all who want to use it....
Thomas Neuburger, Oct 30, 2026 [God’s Spies]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Company linked to Darline Graham’s husband was sanctioned for arming Russia against Ukraine
Ryan Grim, Oct 28, 2026 [DropSite News]
Lindsey Graham’s central political ambition was to confront and contain Russia. The former South Carolina senator died within hours of returning from Ukraine, where he toured a drone factory as one of his last acts on his earth. His sister Darline Graham now holds his seat and is on the ballot next week. It turns out that her husband works for a company linked to a Chinese firm sanctioned in 2024 for providing sophisticated military tech to Russia.
How Cleta Mitchell Turned Trump’s “Big Lie” Into a Movement
Doug Bock Clark, October 28, 2026 [ProPublica]
- Hidden Hand: Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell has shaped virtually every aspect of the Trump administration’s norm-busting agenda on American elections.
- Movement Builder: After working to overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat, Mitchell forged a national grassroots movement to overhaul voting. Some of her allies now hold top administration jobs.
- More Drastic Steps: With the midterms approaching, Mitchell has pressed the Trump administration to take actions that even some who’ve worked with her say go too far.
Dougald Lamont, Oct 25, 2026
... Mr. Agresti, I put three questions to you:
- Which words of Jesus did Mr. Talarico misquote?
- How do you reconcile “no role for government” with the gleaning laws, the third-year tithe and the release of debts in Torah, and with Jesus’s acceptance of Caesar’s tax?
- By the test of Matthew 7:16, what fruits show Mr. Talarico to be a false prophet?
Scripture puts care for the poor and the sick at the centre of faithful life, and at times makes that care a matter of law. It leaves to judgment how a modern state should carry it out.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Fifth Circuit rules Trump mandatory detention policy constitutional
[Courthouse News Service, via Naked Capitalism 10-25-2026]
Civic republicanism
Why I Want 11,000 Members of the U.S. House
Christopher Armitage, Oct 24, 2026 [The Existentialist Republic]
On the last day of the Constitutional Convention, Sept. 17, 1787, George Washington rose from the president’s chair and spoke on a question for the only time that summer. Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts had moved to shrink a House district from 40,000 people to 30,000, and George Washington told the delegates the larger number had “always appeared to himself among the exceptionable parts of the plan“ and that he wished the change made. The delegates agreed without a dissent, and the number went into Article I: the House shall not exceed one for every 30,000 people. The United States has about 346 million people now, so one representative for every 30,000 of them, the ratio George Washington asked for, comes to about 11,500 seats. I want 11,000 members of the U.S. House, and the reason is the people you talk to every day.
Our behavior, our thoughts, our worldview and our beliefs are largely shaped by the people we interact with, our circle, and researchers have measured how much the people around us change what we do and believe. Nicholas Christakis, the physician and sociologist who ran the social network studies at Harvard Medical School, and James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, tracked the Framingham Heart Study’s social network for decades, 4,739 people over 20 years in the happiness study alone, and found that happiness, obesity, smoking and drinking spread through friendships three degrees out, to a friend of a friend of a friend, and no further. Alan Gerber and Donald Green, the Yale political scientists whose field experiments built modern turnout research, mailed Michigan households before the 2006 primary with Christopher Larimer and found that showing people their neighbors’ voting records raised turnout 8.1 percentage points, against 1.8 points for a mailer that appealed to civic duty. Joshua Kalla and David Broockman, political scientists then at Berkeley and Stanford, found in 2016 that a 10-minute conversation at the door reduced prejudice against transgender people for at least three months. Robin Dunbar, the Oxford evolutionary psychologist, put the number of stable relationships a human brain can hold at about 150. A representative is a person, and the people in front of a representative change them the way the people in front of you change you.
A House member with 30,000 constituents sees the same people their constituents see: the barber, the school board, the union hall, the one grocery store. A House member with 800,000 constituents cannot know the district, so the people they talk to every day are the people who can get through to them: donors, staff, lobbyists and party leadership. One hundred fifty people who each know 150 people is 22,500, so in a district of 30,000 the representative is a friend of a friend to nearly everyone in it. In a district of 800,000, most constituents know nobody who knows the representative, and Christakis and Fowler found no effect at all past the third degree. That is why I want the power inverted: the official closest to you should hold the most of it, because that official is the one you and the people you know can change, the one you can call and look in the eye at a meeting on a Tuesday night....
Mike Brock, October 27, 2026 [Notes from the Circus]
... The idea that a right must come with a remedy is older than the Republic. When John Marshall wrote Marbury v. Madison in 1803, he reached for it as settled law. “The very essence of civil liberty,” he wrote, “certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws whenever he receives an injury.” He quoted Blackstone: “where there is a legal right, there is also a legal remedy.” And he noted that “in Great Britain, the King himself is sued in the respectful form of a petition.” The government of the United States, Marshall went on, “has been emphatically termed a government of laws, and not of men. It will certainly cease to deserve this high appellation if the laws furnish no remedy for the violation of a vested legal right.”
The trouble is that the Constitution itself never says so. Its Bill of Rights lists what the government may not do to you and says almost nothing about what happens when it does it anyway. Everything that fills that silence was built later, by statute or by courts. Congress passed the law that lets people sue state and local officials, Section 1983, in 1871, to answer the terror of Reconstruction. The Supreme Court recognized a right to sue federal officers in Bivens in 1971. And what Congress and the Court built, the Court can narrow until it is a door painted on a wall.
That is what it has done....
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