Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 16, 2025
By Tony Wikrent
Jaime Raskin Asks Us To Help Make A FOIA Tsunami
Beryl Stone, March 11, 2025 [DailyKos]
From Raskin:
Today I filed a formal demand for access to my personal data obtained by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and Elon Musk. I encourage all U.S. citizens to join me in doing the same.Elon Musk should have been more careful in what he wished for, Carol. DOGE recently dodged lawsuits about its seizure of citizens’ personal data by telling courts that it is a legitimate government agency entitled to extract this information. What Elon Musk apparently did not realize is that this statement triggers DOGE’s obligation to comply with citizen demands to see and—if need be—correct their personal information under the Privacy Act. It also allows every citizen to find out what other agencies or outside parties have been made privy to our information.Last night, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued an injunction commanding DOGE to comply with citizen requests under the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA encompasses the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, which entitles any citizen to access personal information held in any U.S. government records system.By visiting the link on my website HERE, you can fill out the Privacy Act request form and mail it in directly to DOGE. This newly recognized federal agency, which has been systematically accessing government computer data systems, now has an obligation to respond to specific information demands from any of the 340 million U.S. citizens who exercise their legal right to defend their privacy and establish the security of their personal information.
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Trump Orders US Military to Plan Invasion of Panama to Seize Canal: Report
Brett Wilkins, March 13, 2025 [CommonDreams]
U.S. officials familiar with the planning said options for "reclaiming" the vital waterway include close cooperation with Panama's military and, absent that, possible war.
Legal Fight Underway as Trump Invokes Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for Deportations
Jessica Corbett, March 15, 2025 [CommonDreams]
DHS Official Explicitly Equates Protest to Terrorism in 'Stunning' Interview
Julia Conley, March 13, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trump visits Justice Department for speech that breaks all norms
Perry Stein, Jeremy Roebuck, Derek Hawkins, March 14, 2025 [Washington Post, via msn.com]
DHS has begun performing polygraph tests on employees to find leakers NBC News, via Naked Capitalism 03-10-2025]
Trump Is Fighting His Court Losses With a Surprising Legal Tactic
Matt Ford, March 15, 2025 [The New Republic]
...Shortly after Trump issued an executive order in January that purported to end birthright citizenship, federal courts in three different states blocked it from taking effect. All three courts generally held that the order was plainly illegal under both the Fourteenth Amendment and a century and a half of Supreme Court precedent.
On Thursday evening, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene in an unusual way. The administration did not quite ask the justices to overturn the lower court injunctions altogether. Instead it asked them to end the practice of so-called “universal injunctions” against the federal government and rule that the lower court’s injunctions have no effect beyond the litigants themselves….
[Drop Site, via Naked Capitalism 03-10-2025]
[The Intercept, via Naked Capitalism 03-10-2025]
Tightening the Screws: Columbia as Early Focus of Conservative Revenge on Universities
Yves Smith, 03/15/2025 [Naked Capitalism]
[Zeteo, via Naked Capitalism 03-10-2025] From October, still germane.
The Abduction of Mahmoud Khalil
[Unpopular Front, via Naked Capitalism 03-13-2025]
The disappearance of Mahmoud Khalil is a trial run
Jonathan M. Katz, March 10, 2025 [The Racket]
They think they've found a wedge, and they're going to use it….
What the Trump administration is counting on is that millions of Americans will lose those deeply rooted instincts when they see that the detained man in question has an Arabic name, that he is of Palestinian descent, and that the protests he participated in were against the government and his university’s support for Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza.
They are counting on that because their goal—overtly stated today by the president—is that the detention of Mahmoud Khalil will be “the first arrest of many to come.” Those, including some purported liberals, who are cheering right now would do well to pay attention to the president’s specific warning: that they are targeting students who engaged in “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity,” a threat that will loom large as other kinds of protests bubble up among an increasingly restive public….
PROFESSOR AT CENTER OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY DEPORTATION SCANDAL IS FORMER ISRAELI SPY
[MintPress News, via Naked Capitalism 03-13-2025]
Pam Martens and Russ Martens, March 10, 2025 [Wall Street on Parade]
USAID employees told to burn or shred classified documents
[NBC, via Naked Capitalism 03-12-2025]
[TW: If Trump intended to “drain the swamp” by dismantling the Deep State — not just seek retribution on his opponents — he would be keen to find and preserve the documents implicating the Deep State.]
Joyce Vance, March 14, 2025
Judge Beryl Howell held a hearing Wednesday afternoon in Washington, D.C., in the case filed by the Perkins Coie law firm against President Trump over the executive order he signed that is little more than an attack on the firm because Trump doesn’t like some of the clients they’ve represented in the past. That is not what executive orders are for, and Judge Howell pressed pause on this one, granting a temporary restraining order (TRO) that stops its enforcement for now. But the issues under consideration here are bigger than just one law firm….
Finally, Judge Howell found that issuing a TRO was in the public interest. Trump is using the presidency to pursue “what appears to be a wholly personal vendetta” against the firm. Without a TRO, she reasoned, lawyers across the country would live in fear of representing clients whom the president might not like, and that “threatens the very foundation of our legal system.” She explained that courts in other cases have held that our justice system is based on the fundamental basis that it works best when all parties have representation, and the “chilling effect of this EO threatens to undermine our entire legal system and the ability of people to have access to counsel.”….
This executive order is dark, authoritarian stuff. If presidents can, for no reason or for bad reasons, decide that individuals or businesses are operating contrary to the national interest and strip them of their ability to make a living and of other rights, then we are no longer a democracy. So even though this is “just” a TRO, it’s a big win for Perkins Coie, but also for the legal profession, the rule of law, and democracy. Presidents shouldn’t be able to use the power of the presidency to retaliate against people they don’t like and prevent lawyers from representing their clients. Wednesday, a federal judge said so and told Trump no.
Army Corps knew Trump's water release order in California's San Joaquin Valley was a waste
James Ward, [Palm Springs Desert Sun, via USAToday]
The Washington Post reported Friday that the Army Corps of Engineers knew President Trump's order in late Janurary to release San Joaquin Valley reservoir water wouldn’t reach Southern California as he promised.
The President had said the water release would help prevent more Southern California wildfires, but local water experts say that was "virtually impossible."
Around 2.2 billion gallons of reservoir water from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success in Tulare County were sent into the San Joaquin Valley. That water is stored mainly to irrigate crops during the spring and summer growing seasons….
“A decision to take summer water from local farmers and dump it out of these reservoirs shows a complete lack of understanding of how the system works and sets a very dangerous precedent,” said Dan Vink, a longtime Tulare County water manager, in February.
Congressman Jim Costa (D-Fresno), representing parts of Tulare County, and Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) both wrote critical letters about the reservoir water release.
"An unscheduled release of water at this time of year, when there is little demand for irrigation water and a snowpack that is below average, poses grave threats to a reliable water supply this year," Costa wrote. "This could increase the cost of water for farmers for this crop year exponentially due to dry conditions anticipated."….
Heather Cox Richardson, March 13, 2025
...That’s not how Trump portrayed the sudden release of water. After talking to reporters about the upcoming congressional budget fight, he suddenly pivoted to Los Angeles, and from there to water. "I broke into Los Angeles, can you believe it, I had to break in,” he said. “I invaded Los Angeles and we opened up the water, and the water is now flowing down. They have so much water they don't know what to do. They were sending it out to the Pacific for environmental reasons. Ok, can you believe it? And in the meantime they lost 25,000 houses. They lost, and nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But, uh, we have the water—uh, love to show you a picture, you’ve seen the picture—the water’s flowing through the half-pipes, you know, we have the big half-pipes that go down. Used to, twenty-five years ago they used to have plenty of water but they turned it off for, again, for environmental reasons. Well, I turned it on for environmental reasons and also fire reasons but, ah, and I’ve been asking them to do that during my first term, I said do it, I didn’t think anything like could happen like this, but they didn’t have enough water. Now the farmers are going to have water for their land and the water’s in there, but I actually had to break in. We broke in to do it because, ah, we had people who were afraid to give water. In particular they were trying to protect a certain little fish. And I said, how do you protect a fish if you don’t have water? They didn’t have any water so they’re protecting a fish. And that didn’t work out too well by the way….”
Men DOGEbags at Work
Musk Shares Claim That Stalin and Hitler Didn’t Murder Millions: ‘Public Sector Employees Did’
[Haaretz, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
[TW: Foor over two decades I’ve tried to explain that bipartisanship with the other party is impossible because today’s (anti)Republicans are indoctrinated with and fervently believe neo-confederate economic policies—that government is and always has been bad. I have argued that there is no appeasing today’s (anti)Republican Party. They refer to us as “demonrats” and worse.
[But the leadership of the Democratic Party is quite cozy rubbing shoulders with Republicans. They go to events and dinners with Republicans, and chum it up. I was angry but not surprised when Obama yukked it up with Trump at President Jimmy Carter's funeral two months ago. Or when his wife Michelle embraced George Bush in September 2016.
[I’ve had arguments with Democratic precinct captains, county commissioners, county Dem Party chair people, city council people, and a couple people on the state party board and DNC. I once spoke with the chair of the Democratic Party in a nearby County to urge her to run for Congress so that she could face off against Republican fossil Howard Coble, who had been in Congress for 30 years. Her answer was that she simply couldn’t because her family were friends with the Cobles “going back a long way.” I am not making this up.
In 1992 — 33 years ago — Bill Greider wrote Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy. In the “Introduction: Mutual Contempt,” Greider wrote,
...a peculiar dimension has developed in modern politics. Politicians are held in contempt by the public. That is well known and not exactly new in American history. What is less well understood (and rarely talked about for the obvious reasons) is the deep contempt politicians have for the general public….
A Washington lobbyist, a former congressional aide with close relations to influential Senate Democrats, described the perspective with more candor than is allowed to politicians. "This city is full of people who don't like themselves, don't like their jobs and don't like their constituents — and I mean actively don't like their constituents," the lobbyist told me not long ago. "I'm convinced one of the reasons they are in session so long is that members of Congress have gotten used to being here and they don't like going home where they have to talk to a bunch of Rotarians and play up to local leaders who are just dumb as stumps. They prefer to be here, to be around people they know and like and who understand them — lawyers, lobbyists, the press and so forth." (p. 17)
[I’ve personally cornered a couple members of Congress — I grabbed their hands tightly and refused to let go while I told them that there can never be any honest bipartisanship, and that there would never be an economic recovery of widely shared prosperity until Wall Street was destroyed. I did that to Tom Perez when he was DNC chair. They all squirmed and blanched or turned purple and tried to get away asap. The leadership of the Democratic Party is simply not interested in hearing the truth. Let alone fighting for it.
[The leadership of the Democratic Party must be replaced en masse. I used to be against term limits, but I would now support then if term limits would help us discard octogenarian oligarch lackeys like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin. ]
N.S. Lyons, March 13, 2025 [The Upheaval]
...Yet, at least among our ruling classes, this natural reciprocal love between citizen and nation, which sustains our countries and our societies, seems to have long since frayed. This is no great shock, given that in our age the very idea of nationhood is itself decried, or outright denied, the nation-state stripped of the nation, the world reduced to a network of special economic zones. A man cannot love a special economic zone. Nor can its administrators possess any special feeling for its temporary inhabitants.
This grim status quo is no accident, however. It is the result of a deliberate, 80 year conspiracy against love, conducted out of fear. As I’ve argued before, after WWII, with the trauma of war and totalitarianism haunting the world, the American and European leadership class resolved that these evils should never again threaten society. And they concluded that the emotional power of nationalism had been the central cause of the 20th century’s catastrophes, leading them to make anti-nationalism the cornerstone of the liberal establishment consensus that came to dominate culture and politics after the war.
The philosopher Karl Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community writ large, labeling it disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who cherished his particular homeland and history as a “racialist.” Theodor Adorno, who set the direction of American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of the “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man inexorably toward fascism.
But the aversions of the post-war elite ran deeper than a philosophical anti-nationalism. As R.R. Reno writes, the visceral imperative became to fully banish all the “strong gods” that fueled conflict, meaning all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.” Strong bonds and strong loves of any kind – of family, nation, truth, God – came to be seen as dangerous, as sources of dogma, oppression, hatred, and violence. The peaceful and prosperous “open society” the post-war establishment set out to instantiate would, as Reno puts it, “require the reign of weak loves and weak truths,” with all dangerous sentiment subordinate to the rule of cool rationality and tepid impartiality….
DIGITIZING THE FISC (pdf)
Rohan Grey, via Naked Capitalism 03-13-2025]
On the constitutional implications of Trump’s BFS-DOGE takeover.
[ProPublica, via Naked Capitalism 03-13-2025]
These Are the 10 DOGE Operatives Inside the Social Security Administration
Makena Kelly and David Gilbert, March 13, 2025 [Wired, via CommonDreams]
Trump’s Third Rail… The sneak attack on Social Security
Robert Kuttner March 11, 2025 [The American Prospect]
...In the past two weeks, there were four separate sneak attacks. First, plans were announced to cut the Social Security workforce by 12 percent, or 7,000 employees. The Social Security staff is already at its lowest level in decades relative to population….
On March 7, the Social Security Administration also announced that people who inadvertantly get too large a check through no fault of their own will lose 100 percent of their benefits. And the Trump administration briefly tried a bizarre foray in Maine, where parents were told they could no longer register a newborn for a Social Security number at the hospital and instead had to visit one of the state’s eight Social Security offices, according to an email sent to Maine officials. This was reversed after a day.
In addition, detailed testimony released on March 7 in a federal employee union lawsuit, given by former associate Social Security commissioner Tiffany Flick, lays out the extent to which Elon Musk and his pawns have gone in their effort to gain access to confidential Social Security data. This information could be used to violate personal privacy, undermine confidence in Social Security, make selective benefit cuts, or even disrupt payouts, all in the name of looking for largely nonexistent fraud. According to The Washington Post, even Trump’s handpicked acting Social Security commissioner, Leland Dudek, warned senior staff that Musk’s DOGE troops are running roughshod at the agency....
A Federal Judge Roasts the DOJ’s “Sham” Excuses for Trump’s Mass Firings
[Slate, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 03-15-2025]
Eli Hager, March 12, 2025 [ProPublica]
In a recording obtained by ProPublica, acting Social Security Commissioner Leland Dudek portrayed his agency as facing peril, while also encouraging patience with “the DOGE kids.”
Strategic Political Economy
Monopoly Round-Up: The Mar-a-Lago Accord, and Trump Seeks a Google Break-Up
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 03-10-2025]
...a deep dive into two items. The first is the incessant rumors on Wall Street about what is known as the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” a potential Trump initiative to restructure the role of the dollar. The second are some actions the Trump antitrust enforcers took this week to lay out their approach to competition policy, including seeking a break-up of Google and trying to block a private equity roll-up.
What’s surprising about both of them is that they reveal something I didn’t expect about this second term of Trump, which is that this time he doesn’t seem to care about the stock market. I’m not a fan of Trump, but that attitude, if it’s real, is refreshing.
Let’s start with the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” which is the rumor of a deal to solve Trump’s dissatisfaction with the role of the American dollar in the global economy. The basic dilemma comes out of the negotiations after World War Two, during which the U.S. decided to allow most global trade to be conducted in dollars so as to break up the European imperial system. The idea was that instead of having a British or French empire in which trade happened within their systems, trade would be free among all nations. The U.S. served as the security guarantor through its Navy, and as the financial guarantor through the dollar.
When the U.S. was big relative to the rest of the world, and when the U.S. controlled exchange rates through aggressive public power, the fact that the dollar had to serve as the domestic currency and a global currency didn’t matter so much. But starting in the late 1950s, economist Robert Triffin noted what became known as the “Triffin dilemma,” which is that if a country has to supply the global reserve currency, it will become effectively an exporter of money, and that export will be so lucrative it will destroy the rest of the reserve currency nation’s economy….
In 1971, economist Nicholas Kaldor warned the U.S. that its status as a reserve currency provider and its lack of public controls over the global system would have a devastating impact. These policies would, he said, transform “a nation of creative producers into a community of rentiers increasingly living on others, seeking gratification in ever more useless consumption, with all the debilitating effects of the bread and circuses of Imperial Rome." And so it has. It’s not that Americans lost out to foreigners, it’s that U.S. corporate leaders sold out America, with the help of foreigners.
Both Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trump’s Council of Economics Advisor Chair Stephen Miran understand and want to address this problem. Miran wrote a widely cited report on America’s Triffin problem….
On Friday the DOJ had to submit an updated proposal, and this version was the first chance we had to see what the Trump people thought. It was their moment to either roll back what Biden sought, or keep it intact. And largely, the Trump DOJ maintained the aggressive remedy proposal against Google put forward by the Biden administration. As Lee Hepner put it, what was just “filed in US v Google Search shows Trump DOJ digging its heels on Chrome divestiture, removal of all search defaults, and data disgorgement.”….
Meanwhile, the Trump Federal Trade Commission under Chair Andrew Ferguson issued its first merger challenge this week, proposing to block a private equity acquisition of medical device coating maker Surmodics by private equity firm GTCR, which owns a competitor Biocoat. These two entities, if combined, would control more than half the market for “hydrophilic coatings,” which are special coatings that work really well inside the body when maneuvering medical devices. They are used for things like operating within a “blood vessel in the brain, for example—without damaging sensitive tissue or vital structures.”
Wall Street dealmakers are extremely angry at this merger challenge, because they were expecting a more lax regulatory environment….
Neoliberalism and a Healthy Population Are Incompatible
Richard Murphy [Funding the Future, via Naked Capitalism 03-13-2025]
A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System (pdf)
Stephen Miran, November 2024 [Hudson Bay Capital]
Johns Hopkins Plans Staff Layoffs After $800 Million Grant Cuts
Liz Essley Whyte and Nidhi Subbaraman, March 11, 2025 [Wall Street Journal, via Naked Capitalism Coffee Break 03-14-2025]
Local and international health research efforts are already winding down as the university braces for even more potential cuts
Part the Third: Who Funds the Research that Provides the Foundation of Our Healthcare? From 2023, but still germane: Comparison of Research Spending on New Drug Approvals by the National Institutes of Health vs the Pharmaceutical Industry, 2010-2019:
Funding from the NIH was contributed to 354 of 356 drugs (99.4%) approved from 2010 to 2019 totaling $187 billion, with a mean (SD) $1344.6 ($1433.1) million per target for basic research on drug targets and $51.8 ($96.8) million per drug for applied research on products.
This was covered previously in Patents and Intellectual Property in Biomedical Science: A History in Two Tales.
Tipping Point: The Politics of Water Insecurity in the Middle East
[Center for Strategic & International Studies, via Naked Capitalism 03-11-2025]
The Middle East is no stranger to water scarcity and violence. For centuries, conflict has exacerbated water insecurity and vice versa. But the region is now at a tipping point. Groundwater aquifers are running dry or becoming contaminated, populations are exploding, and borders are more hardened than ever, making resettlement—a time-tested survival strategy—impossible.
Why Republican Tax Cuts Always Cause A Financial Crash (updated March 2025)
Tony Wikrent, March 14, 2025 [real-economics.blogspot.com]
[TW: I updated this to include Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which led to a collapse of the repo overnight funding market in September 2019. The Fed moved quickly to limit the damage, and was successful in avoiding any public or Congressional scrutiny as it poured in over $6 trillion in loans over a number of months.]
Global power shift
Trump White House has asked U.S. military to develop options for the Panama Canal, officials say
[NBC News, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
Oligarchy
Tax Cuts Are Theft: An Amplification
Sara Robinson, August 10, 2010 [ourfuture.org]
Dave points to the practical effects of a piece of conservative theology that deserves a bit of deeper drilling. It's this: Conservatives believe that only private individuals should hold wealth. They do not believe in commonly-held public wealth of any kind. And that's why they feel perfectly free to raid the vast legacy that our ancestors have accumulated and stewarded for us over the past 230 years….
...What they've stolen from us and arbitraged away isn't just our own money; it's the vast accumulation of civilizational wealth that was bought with the blood, sweat, tears, endless sacrifice, earnest planning, and bold dreaming of a dozen generations of American ancestors, and then bequeathed to us to ensure our own futures. Each of those generations received it in trust from the one that came before, added its own unique contributions to it, and then passed it on as an endowment to the next. As time compounded the gift, the legacy got richer; and our sense of who was entitled to share in the bounty got broader....
It's only when you think about our common wealth the way the world's richest families do -- as a bequest from a long line of distinguished ancestors, as a vast common resource base that provides us with extraordinary material comfort today, and as a sacred trust that we must manage and multiply on behalf of generations yet to come -- that you can really begin to understand the sheer magnitude of everything they took from us.
The thieves didn't just steal our houses, our retirement funds, our careers, or our tax money. It went far beyond that. They also stole the family jewels -- the vast infrastructure that's been built up for centuries by generations of foresighted Americans, now collapsing into uselessness. They defunded the great universities, crowded our kids into classrooms like factory farmed chickens, and are shutting down the magnificent state and national parks. And they're also stealing our future, committing us to endless debt, sucking the marrow out of our international standing, foreclosing our opportunties, making it impossible to solve looming problems, and forcing us to hand off to our children a far more meager legacy than the one we received….
Here's the irony: the people who did this to us did it precisely because they also understand wealth in these generational terms…. So, if they understand this, where's the disconnect? Why couldn't they respect the public's need to manage our common wealth the same way they manage their own private wealth?
The disconnect is this: In the conservative worldview, it's right and legitimate for private families and corporations to accrue generational wealth, and build great dynasties. But it's absolutely wrong for the democratic masses to accumulate wealth that way; or to collaborate, via the government, to ensure that all of their children will have a birthright sufficient to open the doors to their dreams.
Maggie Thatcher told us outright: "There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families, and their interests." And if there's no such thing as society, then society has no right to accumulate wealth -- via taxes, investment, or any other means. Viewed this way, a conservative might even think it's a virtuous thing to defund and defraud the public out of any capital it does manage to acquire….
The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate — Part 2
Iain Davis, March 13, 2025 [Unlimited Hangout]
In continuing to unpack the ideologies of the oligarchs who are part of the new Trump administration, Iain Davis examines how their ideas are being translated into policy. He considers the consequent infrastructure rollout that is preparing the US and the world for an imminent Gov-corp Technate within a multipolar world.
Mark Carney: Technocrat Superstar and Eco-Warrior Takes the Helm of Canada
Matthew Ehret, March 10, 2025
Mark Carney can best be described as one of the most important insiders and mascots for the oligarchy, serving as the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, former investment banker for Goldman Sachs, World Economic Forum Trustee (alongside fellow Oxford trainee Chrystia Freeland), former governor of the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England and the Chair of the Financial Stability Board from 2011-2018, where he oversaw the growth of the very derivatives time bomb which was designed to take down the trans Atlantic financial system in a future controlled detonation.
In 2024, Carney was even made President of the queen of all think tanks: The Royal Institute for International Affairs (aka: Chatham House,) whose American branch was set up in 1921 as ‘The Council on Foreign Relations’.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Hatching a Conspiracy: A BIG Investigation into Egg Prices
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 03-10-2025]
Fowl Play: How Chicken Genetics Barons Created the Egg Crisis
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 03-13-2025]
Trumpillnomics
Walmart clashes with China after asking suppliers to absorb tariffs
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
China questions Walmart over response to Trump tariff costs
[Nikkei Asia, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
Chinese government agencies, including the Ministry of Commerce, summoned Walmart representatives this week after the U.S. retailer urged suppliers in China to offset President Donald Trump's tariffs with substantial price cuts, according to Beijing's state media.
A post on Wednesday by Yuyuan Tantian, a social media account linked to state broadcaster CCTV, said the retailer was called in the previous day. It said that Walmart's alleged demands on Chinese suppliers risk "disrupting the supply chain and harming the interests of businesses in both China and the U.S., as well as American consumers," and thus may "breach commercial contracts and undermine the stability of market transactions."….
"If Walmart continues down this path," the Yuyuan Tantian post warned, "it may face consequences beyond a government summons."….
"Walmart doesn't want to be the company that Trump calls out for raising prices because of tariffs, so they are trying to force suppliers to eat it to some degree," said Cameron Johnson, senior partner at Tidalwave Solutions, a Shanghai-based supply chain consultancy….
"Once the additional tariffs hit 35%, that's the threshold when companies and industries start to say we have to move out of China completely," Johnson said. "The problem is where else are you going to make those products? We are out of options. Moving supply chains takes years, if not longer."
[TW: Trump has probably destroyed WalMart’s business model.]
Nathan Tankus, [Notes on the Crises]
USDA ends program that helped schools serve food from local farmers
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
Administration cancels meteorologist disaster training
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
Meant to make it clear with the present-tense "is," but my point was that I think an unknown number of serving members of Congress may be getting paid off in crypto, just like the President is.
[The Lever, March 10, 2025]The Senate just voted to exempt crypto from the regular rules. At Big Crypto’s urging, the upper chamber just voted to kill a rule that would have subjected the cryptocurrency industry to the same tax disclosure rules as normal brokers. The 70-27 bipartisan vote shows the power of crypto campaign cash. And reminder: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) promised the industry favors while stumping for former Vice President Kamala Harris at a fundraiser last fall.
Farewell to the Corporate Transparency Act. Trump’s Treasury Department just declared that it will refuse to enforce the anti-money-laundering law requiring shell corporations to tell law enforcement who their actual owners are. Trump’s own Justice Department defended the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act, which was upheld by a Trump-appointed federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court. But now Trump is celebrating as his administration halts enforcement of the law.
Defunding the tax police. As the Internal Revenue Service potentially loses half its staff, employees are warning that the agency’s audits of the wealthy could soon end. For every dollar the IRS spends, it generates between $5 and $12 in revenue — and when the agency audits filers making $10 million or more, it returns $13,000 every hour. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission is dismantling itself as you read this.
Health care crisis
What to know about the new disease outbreaks in central Africa
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 03-10-2025]
America Is Sleeping on a Powerful Defense Against Airborne Disease
Roxanne Khamsi, March 11, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Treating clean indoor air as a public good would have protected Americans against more than COVID-19….
For decades, experts have pushed the idea that the government should pay more attention to the quality of indoor air. In his new book, Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, the journalist Carl Zimmer shows the long arc of this argument. He notes that Richard Riley, a giant in the field of aerobiology who helped show that tuberculosis can be airborne, believed that individuals shouldn’t have to ensure that the air they breathe is clean. Just as the government regulates the safety of the water that flows into indoor pipes, it should oversee the safety of air in indoor public spaces.
More than half a century before the coronavirus pandemic, Riley positioned this idea as an alternative to requirements for widespread masking, which, he said, call for “a kind of benevolent despotism,” Zimmer reports. If cleaner air was the one of the best ways to reduce the societal burden of disease, then the two best ways to achieve it were to push people to wear masks in any public space or to install better ventilation. The latter approach—purifying the air—would mean that “the individual would be relieved of direct responsibility,” Riley reasoned in a 1961 book he co-authored: “This is preventive medicine at its best, but it can only be bought at the price of civic responsibility and vigilance.”….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Meta stops ex-director from promoting critical memoir
[BBC, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
Dodge Chargers Now Have Pop-Up Ads at Every Stoplight… Just What Nobody Asked For
[FuelArc News, via Naked Capitalism 03-12-2025]
Amazon Uses Arsenal of AI Weapons Against Workers
Daniel Boguslaw, March 13, 2025 [The American Prospect]
A study of a union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, shows that the company weaponizes its algorithmic surveillance tools to prevent organizing.
Climate and environmental crises
‘Global weirding’: climate whiplash hitting world’s biggest cities, study reveals
[The Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
Climate whiplash is already hitting major cities around the world, bringing deadly swings between extreme wet and dry weather as the climate crisis intensifies, a report has revealed.
Dozens more cities, including Lucknow, Madrid and Riyadh have suffered a climate “flip” in the last 20 years, switching from dry to wet extremes, or vice versa. The report analysed the 100 most populous cities, plus 12 selected ones, and found that 95% of them showed a distinct trend towards wetter or drier weather.
EPA launches attack on ‘holy grail’ of climate science — and dozens of enviro rules
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 03-14-2025]
New Report Finds Urgent Need to Expand Energy Supply to Meet Rapidly Growing Future Demand
[American Clean Power Association, March 10, 2025]
Electricity demand in the United States is projected to surge by an unprecedented amount over the coming decade, according to data released today by S&P Global Commodity Insights….
The full US National Power Demand Study will describe a critical gap between the current energy supply and future needs. It predicts U.S. electricity demand will surge by 35-50% between 2024 and 2040. This is primarily due to AI data centers and new manufacturing activity in the short-term whereas electric vehicles (EV), space-heating electrification, and broad economic growth underlie the long-term dynamics. This demand is growing faster than the supply of new energy solutions that could power it — data centers and manufacturing facilities, for example, take about three years to build versus development and construction times of typically five or more years for new power generation to come online, creating an urgent need for faster policy action on permitting and grid interconnection and an all-of-the-above energy strategy within the sector....
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
CPKC hydrogen locomotive enters mainline service
Kevin Smith, March 12, 2025 [Rail Journal]
NORTH American Class 1 CPKC has introduced its first high-powered hydrogen locomotive into regular mainline service. The locomotive is hauling bulk freight trains carrying coal mined by Elk Valley Resources as CPKC tests performance in “challenging real-world operating conditions.”
The retrofitted AC4400CW locomotive is based in Golden, British Columbia. CPKC has confirmed on social media that it was successfully refuelled for the first time at a fixed refuelling station, the first installed outside of Alberta, on March 6.
The locomotive is coupled to a prototype hydrogen tender eveloped by HGmotive that can be connected to any compatible hydrogen-powered locomotive. The design is based on a tender for compressed natural gas (CNG) developed by HGmotive in 2019.
Phoenix to build multibillion dollar purification plant to make wastewater drinkable by 2030
Phoenix wants to recycle wastewater into drinking water by the end of 2030 and share it with the Valley.
The plan is to build an advanced water purification facility and treat, then reuse millions of gallons of wastewater that would have otherwise been discharged into the Salt River.
The investment would provide Arizona cities a significant new drinking water supply, which is vital as they work to lessen their dependence on the shrinking Colorado River and diversify their water sources.
The multibillion-dollar technology, called direct potable reuse, or "tap to toilet," by critics, cleans water that goes down a home's drains and sends it back for reuse. It will be added to the 91st Avenue Wastewater Treatment Plant southwest of downtown and purify 60 million gallons per day — enough water for about 200,000 households per year….
Trump’s transactional regime
Blackrock Becomes a Power Player in Global Shipping — With Help from Trump
[WSJ, via Naked Capitalism 03-13-2025]
Analysis Details How Trump's Circle Could Be Profiting From White House Crypto Policies
Eloise Goldsmith, March 14, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Resistance
Seeing Things For What They Are — And not for what they used to be
Hamilton Nolan, Mar 15, 2025 [How Things Work]
...Things have changed in America. There are deep undercurrents that have been exerting pressure from below—the relentless evolution of global capitalism, the growth of inequality, new forms of technology jumbling the world of information—and then there are things that have changed rapidly, closer to the surface. It was possible to use a certain frame of reference that worked pretty well in the American political system for the past 40 years or so. But now that frame is out of date. It is worse than useless. It is misleading. It is detrimental, because the answers it spits out, the explanations it gives, the strategies it recommends for specific situations, are all based upon old data and old wisdom that no longer works. The frame of reference that guides many of the people who, unfortunately, dominate the Democratic Party in Washington is like a flood map that was drawn up before climate change. They keep using these same old formulas that worked back then, ignoring the rising water as it creeps up to their necks.
Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Bush Jr. and Obama all to varying extents did awful things and all to varying extents are responsible for the progression of the state of our politics to this point, but they also all believed themselves to be constrained by a set of guidelines, norms, and political realities that no longer exist. Even their most immoral policies were shaped to maneuver through public opinion and economic demands and historic traditions and laws that have now, effectively, disappeared. The playbook that political veterans used to operate in that old world is a set of directions to a house party that is already over. If you show up there you will only find an empty house. The action is elsewhere now. Chuck Schumer continues to pull up in front of that empty house each morning, blinking vacantly, knocking on the door with a bottle of wine in his hand, wondering what is taking so long.
Here are a few notable ways in which many (not all) of our political and media and business and intellectual leaders have failed to update their priors for current times: The federal government is now controlled by a political party that is nakedly, not bashfully, racist, and hopes to eradicate the past century’s worth of racial progress; economic policy is being dictated, stupidly, by a small group of zealots who do not understand economics; the primary concern of the president now is vengeance, and he is going to use the tools at his disposal to enact vengeance upon his endless list of enemies in a way that could surpass McCarthyism; “civil liberties” mean nothing to those who control the federal government now, and will likely provide little protection from that vengeance in the real world; the law, and the power of the courts to enforce laws that constrict the behavior of the federal government, is very much in question, and it is distinctly possible that within the next year or two the law is exposed as toothless in the face of the president’s will, and therefore the law should not be relied on as the primary guard rail of our democracy now; voter suppression is about to reach extremes not seen in generations, and outright election theft based on shoddy racist claims of voter fraud is extremely likely in upcoming elections at all levels; the US government is going to lose its status as a reliable source of information—economic statistics, scientific data, and more—as official information is manipulated for partisan gain in unprecedented ways, a development that will be devastating for almost all fields of knowledge, and for the economy; the federal government is being run by people who want to eradicate the government’s functions, except to the extent that those functions can be used to crack down on foreign and domestic enemies; many people are going to be jailed and deported and potentially killed unjustly in the very near future, by the president and his loyalists; institutions that imagine themselves to be proud, ethical, important parts of the fabric of America are going to cower in fear and abdicate their responsibilities in ways that their own leaders would scoff at right now. We are not living in “The West Wing.” We are living in “Goodfellas.” It does not have a happy ending….
Trump Ignoring Court Orders Is New Grounds for Impeachment, Says Pro-Democracy Group
Jessica Corbett, March 15, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Nan Levinson, March 13, 2025 [LA Progressive]
...Such responses will undoubtedly involve a variety of approaches. These are likely to range from the immediate to the long haul; from small, local acts to ease individual lives — accompanying immigrants through the legal process when their residency is imperiled, for example — to more traditional activities like lobbying, petitioning, and supporting civil liberties organizations, or even movement-building and large-scale actions aimed at challenging the power of Trump and changing our very political situation.
We’ve already seen individual acts of principle, along with small communal acts of subversion. When someone in the Air Force took the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion purge literally and cut a video about World War II’s Black Tuskegee Airmen from a training course, a senator decried it as “malicious compliance.” In Silicon Valley, there was a “quiet rebellion” when Meta workers brought in certain sanitary products to replace those removed from men’s bathrooms by order of their boss, Mark Zuckerberg. A DOGE hiring site was besieged by mock applications from well-qualified Hitlers, Mussolinis, Francos, and a Cruella De Vil. Then there was that World War II anti-fascism Simple Sabotage Field Manual, downloaded at least 230,000 times since 404Media made it accessible online. Ways to gum up the works suggested there include, “Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks,” and my fave, “Act stupid.”
….Which leads me to Gene Sharp, an unsung but influential theorist of nonviolent resistance, whose pragmatic ideas about peaceful protest were picked up by popular liberation movements around the world in this century. He argued that the power of governments depends on the cooperation and obedience of those they govern, which means the governed can undermine the power of the governors by withdrawing their consent. “When people refuse their cooperation, withhold help, and persist in their disobedience and defiance,” he wrote, “they are denying their opponent the basic human assistance and cooperation that any government or hierarchical system requires.” While his suggestions for challenging power included individual resistance, he advocated a nonviolent insurgency big enough and sustained enough to make a country ungovernable and so force the governors to truly pay attention to the governed.
How big? Political scientist Erica Chenoweth has suggested that about 3.5% of a country’s population participating actively in nonviolent protest can bring about significant political change. If that’s accurate, an effective resistance would need about 12 million Americans taking to the streets. And yes, that’s a lot, but keep in mind that the women’s protest march early in Trump’s first term gathered more than five million Americans on a single day, many of whom were part of a political protest for the first time….
Bill Clinton, The Genesis Of The Corporately-Owned New Dems And The Decline Of The Democratic Party — The Democratic Party Won't Fix Itself— It Has To Be Forced On Them
Howie Klein, March 11, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Right-Wing Donors and Foundations Spent $1 Billion to Keep People From Voting Last Year
Aaron Dorfman, March 12, 2025 [The American Prospect]
In the 2024 election, more people didn’t vote than voted for any one candidate: 36.33 percent of eligible voters nationwide stayed home (or had their vote thrown out); 31.78 percent voted for Trump; 30.84 percent voted for Harris; and 1.06 percent voted for a third-party candidate.
There are, of course, many reasons why so many eligible voters didn’t vote. Right-wing funding of election deniers and anti–voting rights organizations are definitely part of the answer. Millions of people wanted to vote but were prevented from doing so. Others did vote, but their vote was wrongly rejected and was never counted.
That didn’t happen by accident; it was planned for and funded. In just three years—2020, 2021, and 2022—more than $1 billion flowed from more than 3,500 foundations and high-net-worth donors to about 150 nonprofits that advocate purging people from the voting rolls, restricting vote-by-mail or early voting, removing drop boxes, and other ways of making it harder for people to vote.
Using internet research and Form 990 keyword analysis, researchers at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy assembled a list of organizations that:
- promoted fabricated or overblown threats to election integrity such as noncitizen voting, voter fraud, and corrupt voter registration drives;
- were mentioned in Project 2025’s implementation plan;
- were linked to state preemption policies, which prevent duly passed municipal and county laws from being enforced; or
- were linked to policies criminalizing protest at the state or local level.
Based on this list of nonprofit names, we used Python and compilations of IRS Form 990 data published by Giving Tuesday to match filings by these anti-democracy organizations to filings by their institutional funders….
At The Very Heart Of Trumpism— An Overt Celebration Of Unadulterated Corruption
Howie Klein, March 13, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Yesterday, Don Moynihan noted that Trump and Musk, veering from ideological targeting to cronyism, are building a new spoils system. He wrote that a fundamental democratic norm is that laws are implemented as written and applied equally to all. Yet under Trump— and encouraged by Musk— we see a blatant erosion of this principle. He withheld emergency aid from blue-leaning areas, and now his administration has institutionalized this approach, turning budget implementation into a spoils system. Republican lawmakers are able to protect their districts from cuts, while Democratic areas bear the brunt. DOGE (and other departments) openly favor GOP requests, making government services contingent on political loyalty.Trump and his allies have also embraced impoundment— illegally withholding appropriations to reshape spending in alignment with their own priorities. This unconstitutional power grab effectively nullifies congressional authority. Republicans in Congress, despite knowing that Trump is stripping them of their power, go along with it because they benefit politically. “While they publicly decry government spending,” wrote Moynihan, “they privately ensure their own districts are spared from cuts. DOGE is accepting requests from Republican officials to reverse cuts in their jurisdictions. It is a form of spoils system in reverse: your pet projects will be spared from elimination.
Arlington Cemetery website drops links for Black, Hispanic, and women veterans
Matt White, March 13, 2025 [taskandpurpose.com, via DailyKos]
The website for Arlington National Cemetery "unpublished" links to lists of notable graves, walking tours and educational material pertaining to Black, Hispanic and women veterans, as well as some Medal of Honor recipients….Cemetery officials confirmed to Task & Purpose that the pages were “unpublished” to meet recent orders by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth targeting race and gender-related language and policies in the military.
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
The Justice Department issued a notice Thursday to Mayor Brandon Johnson over alleged antisemitism on Chicago campuses, the latest escalation of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on liberal cities and educational institutions.
A Justice Department-led task force requested Johnson and the mayors of New York City, Los Angeles and Boston discuss with federal officials their responses to antisemitism at their cities’ schools and colleges over the past two years, according to a news release. The statement says the mayors “may have failed to protect Jewish students from unlawful discrimination, in potential violation of federal law.”….
