Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 09, 2025
By Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Franklin D. Roosevelt, State of the Union Message to Congress, January 11, 1944
[TW: In this speech, FDR proposed an economic bill of rights]
...a noisy minority maintains an uproar of demands for special favors for special groups. There are pests who swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington, representing these special groups as opposed to the basic interests of the Nation as a whole. They have come to look upon the war primarily as a chance to make profits for themselves at the expense of their neighbors- profits in money or in terms of political or social preferment….
One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of "rightist reaction" in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called "normalcy" of the 1920's—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home….
The Business Community Is Extraordinarily Stupid. Is a dictatorship good for business?
Hamilton Nolan, February 05, 2025 [How Things Work]
...People often criticize business as greedy. Yes. It is greedy, as water is wet. Understanding corporations as anything other than soulless robots seeking profit is a mistake. This is why it is wise to tightly regulate them and unwise to allow them to do whatever they want. In a related sense, people often say, “Hey, wouldn’t it be in the self-interest of business to pay more taxes and subject themselves to more regulations and and generally push for more progressive values because it would help to create the stable and happy society outlined above, which is good for business in the long run?” Well, sure, but this question misunderstands the fact that the political actions of the business lobby assume that they will always be pushing against some force that is pushing back, and that the progressive forces they are pushing against will be enough to protect the basic structure of democratic society, even as businesses try to undermine it just enough to put money in their own pockets. Businesses want to pick up pennies in front of the steamroller, but they don’t want the steamroller to run them over.
Well fuckers, you have miscalculated. You rats.
The business lobby’s many years of selfish conduct and support for deleterious public policies have produced so much inequality and undermined our democratic institutions so successfully that we are now watching a strongman seize control of our government. Smooth move, you fucks. You grasping roaches. Your efforts have gotten us here. All the Koch Brother/ Federalist Society types who invested so much money in capturing the courts for the right wing have gotten us here. All the nice Chamber of Commerce types who supported the Republican Party even as it radicalized further and further because they wanted those tax cuts have gotten us here….
Thomas Neuburger, February 07, 2025 [God's Spies]
What we’re seeing is not a new autocracy, but the old coup, the one called “neoliberalism,” the one we’ve been watching since Reagan: the complete dismantlement of government-by-the-people till only the rich have rights. It’s not the removal of the big FDR state, but its slow, then faster replacement by an equally muscular state responsive to wealth….
….Carl Biejer highlights this point in a recent paid-only piece, “The shock doctrine comes to America.”
Beijer’s point: This isn’t a new autocracy he’s creating, but the same old tried-and-true shocking. The war’s not being waged by Trump, but by “capital” writ large….
“This is what neoliberals have done over and over again to dismantle the state in other countries.…
“The neoliberals are taking an axe to the government rather than a scalpel, and this means that the left could very well see all kinds of programs related to US empire and the security state undergo some significant defunding. But we should not have any illusions about what is driving this: neoliberal austerity”
The Logic of Destruction, and how to resist it
Timothy Snyder, Feb 02, 2025
What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.
The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.
For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.
The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.
Constitutional crisis
Nathan Tankus, February 4, 2025 [Notes on the Crisis]
I try to keep emotion out of this newsletter. I have always tried to write Notes on the Crises in a calm, detached tone so that the information I highlight shines through. However, I must be honest with readers: I’m absolutely terrified…. There is nothing more important on the entire planet than getting Elon Musk and DOGE out of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service and allowing career civil service employees to run the Treasury’s internal payments system without capricious and self-serving interference from billionaires and their allies….
Musk and his cronies are clearly aiming to redesign the payments system to serve their agenda. The most chilling sentence is this one from the Wall Street Journal:
“It couldn’t be determined what DOGE representatives intended to do with their access to the payment system. Musk and his team think the payment system should be overseen by political appointees selected by President Trump, the people said.”
This is not the attitude of people who are trying to simply technocratically make the payment system more “efficient.” They have a very clear and specific agenda, which involves unilaterally cutting spending, particularly spending they perceive to be going to their ideological foes. Is “Wokeness,” the “Green New Deal,” “Marxism,” and “Gender Ideology” going to be the new definition of an “improper payment"? ….
The data the Treasury collects could not possibly be more sensitive. We are talking about hundreds of millions of Social Security numbers, as well as a raft of other specific identifying information….
This system collects between “10,000 – 99,999” social security numbers along with identifying “business” information, including sensitive financial records and “business” bank accounts. Does anyone think that if Musk could get his hands on this information, whether directly or indirectly, he would not use it to go after, say, nonprofits he dislikes? At 3:14am Sunday, Musk pledged to shut down "illegal payments" to Global Refuge, a faith-based organization that exists to provide "safety and support to refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants from across the world." Musk messing with ASAP is no hypothetical at all….
In some ways, as enormously alarming at this all is, it’s somehow not the biggest concern that I have been thinking about. For the past 36 hours (writing these words at Midnight on Saturday) my mind has returned over and over to the idea that they have been asking for “source code information” to the Treasury’s internal payments system….
COBOL is the lingua franca of mission critical legacy IT in use since the 1960s and too many systems have been too important to abandon it. “Modernization” has instead been built around making COBOL function somewhere besides a mainframe. The “modernization” of the Treasury’s IT payments infrastructure seems to have constituted a combination of rooting out Assembly code and a basically completed transition of “mainframe” COBOL to an “internally-developed RM COBOL” running on Linux servers. RM COBOL is an update on mainframe COBOL “designed for optimum performance and wide portability across a broad diversity of computers and operating systems.” Most notably, the Treasury’s transition to RM COBOL seems to have involved harmonizing more than 30 different COBOL systems which had evolved separately. It was 30 “dialects” they managed to get to speak one standardized language.
Does Elon Musk understand any of this? Does he have any grasp of the scale and complexity he is trying to reach into and exercise “influence”? Currently the most urgent and profound danger is not what he intends to make this sprawling apparatus do. The most immediate danger is what might break in the process of trying to get this apparatus to do what he wants.
At every step of modernizing this system they have run systems concurrently to make sure the “new” functions as well as the old. Redundant systems are only phased out over long time periods after they have enough data on system functioning to feel confident in the “modernized” infrastructure. This is expensive, time consuming and absolutely necessary to make sure this system functions 100% of the time. Elon Musk, however, has never shown respect or understanding of the concept of a mission critical IT system. All he sees is “inefficiency” because he doesn’t understand that there are some things in this world that need to function no matter what and you spend the additional money to make sure it runs, including when it's being updated….
Musk Cronies Dive Into Treasury Dept Payments Code Base
Josh Marshall, February 4, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
A 25-year-old DOGE operative named Marko Elez in fact has admin privileges on these critical systems, which directly control and pay out roughly 95% of payments made by the U.S. government, including Social Security checks, tax refunds and virtually all contract payments. I can independently confirm these details based on conversations going back to the weekend. I can further report that Elez not only has full access to these systems, he has already made extensive changes to the code base for these critical payment system.
Day Five of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025: Not “Read Only” access anymore
Nathan Tankus, February 5, 2025 [Notes on the Crisis]
One source explicitly said that they were only reporting to me because there was no one left in the Federal Government to report security breaches to:
”I do not wish to harm my agency in any way. I loved working here. We did some of the most important work in the country and barely anyone knew who we were. In normal times, I would report insider threats to the appropriate security channels inside the government- but there is no one left for me to report it to.” ….
There is specific code which tells you where to direct specific payments in specific ways and the structures, and why they are structured the way they are, requires deep contextual knowledge. This is “business logic”. The entire issue with COBOL and why it has been such a struggle to maintain it is that COBOL systems (both private and public) developed for decades with very little documentation, have a million different path dependent coding choices. Mar Hicks 2020 article in Logic Magazine “Built to Last” is worth a read on this topic.
This is what I meant yesterday when I referenced that 30 different COBOL systems at Treasury had developed their own “dialects” and they launched Payment Application Modernization (PAM), which among other things, unified them. What they unified was the business logic of those systems (as well as likely other factors, most notably the physical architecture of the systems they ran on). Part of me wishes they didn’t modernize with PAM because those 30 different and distinct systems would have been more secure from their infiltration. PAM processed 4.7 trillion dollars of payments in 2024.
"I’m absolutely terrified" Musk is breaking Treasury's payment system”
Tony Wikrent, February 03, 2025 [DailyKos]
[TW: this post reports on the Tankus reports above. But I point your attention to the many comments by active and retired IT specialists who discuss their experiences working with legacy COBOL and other systems, amplifying and confirming Tankus’s warnings. In particular this comment, on Musk’s disregard for proper IT practices. ]
Musk is an idiot! Anybody read the articles about musk the move of the Twitter server farm from Sacramento to Portland, that he was too impatient and stupid to follow established procedures for doing that and as a result, that server farm at Twitter, now the failing sesspool called X, has never worked right, has caused problems with the company ever since, and probably always will until the company goes bankrupt. I have worked in technology, either in computers or telecom almost my whole life and have seen stupid people like him destroy companies and people over and over and over. It's too bad musk was so stupid and arrogant that just because he had previously successful in business, he thought he could be successful in something he knows nothing about, and given unchecked, unconstitutional, and illegal power by the psychopathic toddler.
The 24-Hour Reality Check: Musk’s Impossible Power Grab And America’s Crisis
Mike Brock [TechDirt., via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
The conflict-of-interest at the heart of Musk’s position as DOGE director represents more than just an ethical concern—it strikes at basic principles of constitutional governance. Federal conflict-of-interest laws weren’t created arbitrarily; they emerged from centuries of understanding about how democracy can be corrupted when private interests capture public authority. These laws establish bright lines between public service and private gain precisely because such separation is essential for maintaining democratic accountability.
Consider how this plays out across Musk’s various roles. As DOGE director, he has significant authority over federal contracting and procurement. Yet he simultaneously controls SpaceX, which receives billions in government contracts for national security launches. This means he’s effectively sitting on both sides of the negotiating table—representing both the public interest in efficient contracting and his private interest in maximizing profit. This isn’t just inappropriate; it’s explicitly prohibited by federal law.
The conflict becomes even more profound when we examine his control of X/Twitter while serving as a government official. A platform that plays a crucial role in public discourse is now effectively under government control through Musk’s dual position. We’ve already seen how this creates direct First Amendment violations—when Musk uses the platform to censor discussion of government employees, he’s acting simultaneously as platform owner and government censor. This is precisely the kind of merger of private and public power that constitutional safeguards were designed to prevent.
Tesla presents another stark example of illegal conflict. As a federal official with broad authority over government efficiency and procurement, Musk oversees policies that directly affect the electric vehicle industry. Yet he simultaneously runs the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in America. This means his official actions—whether about environmental regulations, government fleet purchases, or infrastructure decisions—inevitably affect his private interests. Federal law prohibits this arrangement because it makes it impossible to determine whether decisions are being made for public benefit or private gain.
The foundational law here is 18 U.S.C. § 208—Acts affecting a personal financial interest. This criminal statute prohibits federal employees from participating in matters that affect their financial interests. The law is crystal clear: A federal employee cannot participate in any “particular matter” that affects their financial interest or the interests of their companies. Every time Musk makes decisions about government efficiency or procurement while controlling Tesla, SpaceX, or his other companies, he’s potentially violating this criminal statute….
Through DOGE, Musk has gained access to incredibly sensitive government systems and information—including Treasury payment systems, classified materials, and internal agency data. This means every conflict-of-interest statute is triggered at its highest level of concern. Here’s why:
When Congress passed 18 U.S.C. § 208, they were imagining scenarios where federal officials might have access to some information that could affect their private interests. But Musk’s situation goes far beyond anything the drafters likely contemplated—he has gained access to the actual machinery of government while simultaneously running multiple companies directly affected by that machinery.
Consider what this means in practice: Through DOGE, he has access to sensitive Treasury data while running public companies whose stock prices could be affected by that information. He can see classified materials while controlling SpaceX, which competes for national security contracts. He has visibility into federal agency operations while owning a social media platform that shapes public discourse about those agencies….
We’re watching the illegal seizure of government power by private interests in real time. Full stop. There’s no complex legal theory that makes this okay. No presidential waiver or executive order can override these fundamental conflict-of-interest laws any more than they can make two plus two equal five.
This isn’t about government efficiency or reform— it’s about converting public institutions into instruments of private power.
Trump Purges Inspectors General Investigating Musk’s Businesses
[The Lever, February 7, 2025]
At the Department of Agriculture, where the inspector general’s office was probing alleged animal abuse at Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink, inspector general and 22-year USDA veteran Phyllis Fong was escorted out of her office by security guards last Monday. Department of Defense Inspector General Robert Storch was fired just months after he reportedly opened a review into repeated failures by Musk and his rocket company SpaceX to properly disclose their contact with foreign leaders.
The Department of Transportation, which oversees the National Transportation Safety Board, had its inspector general fired as safety regulators oversaw several open probes into Tesla, Musk’s electrical vehicle company, over its remote and self-driving vehicles. The same goes for the Environmental Protection Agency, where investigators have settled multiple lawsuits with Tesla in recent years over Clean Air Act and hazardous waste law violations.
Trump also fired the inspector general at the Department of Labor, which oversees the National Labor Relations Board. The board has 17 open investigations against Musk’s companies Tesla and SpaceX for alleged unfair labor practices, safety violations, and discriminatory work practices.
A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System
[Wired, February 4, 2025]
Why DOGE’s meddling at Treasury could have catastrophic consequences for the US economy
Liz Fong-Jones, February 6, 2025 [Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists]
Individual engineers experimenting directly upon real, live systems without first validating their changes or seeking peer review violates every best practice for controlling risk in the industry. Elon Musk says he wants to run the government more like a business, but no business operates this way. For instance, every public company must implement Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) controls to ensure no single developer can tamper with their financial data and systems. The vast majority of private software companies adhere to Service Organization Control Type 2 (SOC2), and the government’s own Authorization to Operate (ATO) protocols, which likewise prescribe testing processes and forbid employees from unilaterally making changes.
Musk’s Treasury Incursion Puts Entire Financial System at Risk
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2025]
The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 02-03-2025]
‘Things Are Going to Get Intense:’ How a Musk Ally Plans to Push AI on the Government
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Musk’s Junta Establishes Him as Head of Government
[Doomsday Scenario, via Naked Capitalism 02-02-2025]
Imagining how we'd cover overseas what's happening to the U.S. right now
Elon Musk’s Takeover Is Causing Rifts in Donald Trump’s Inner Circle
Jake Lahut, Feb 5, 2025 [Wired]
[Propublica, Feb. 6, 2025]
[TW: Short bios of 22 people working for DOGE, including the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller]
The Elite Lawyers Working for Elon Musk’s DOGE Include Former Supreme Court Clerks
[ProPublica, Februrary 7, 2025]
All three — Keenan Kmiec, James Burnham and Jacob Altik — have DOGE email addresses at the Executive Office of the President, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.
Trump Has Disturbing Response to DOGE’s Massive Overreach of Power
Edith Olmsted, February 7, 2025 [The New Republic]
During a press conference Friday, Trump was asked about the Department of Government Efficiency’s unfettered access to trillion-dollar payment systems such as the U.S. Treasury Department, as well as the personal information of millions of Americans, including their Social Security numbers, home addresses, and bank account numbers.
“Why does DOGE need all of that?” asked one reporter.
“Well, it doesn’t, but they get it very easily,” Trump admitted. “I mean, we don’t have very good security in our country, and they get it very easily.”
Trump appeared completely unbothered by the massive intrusion on the privacy of U.S. citizens—in fact, he seemed to suggest it was the fault of government agencies for not better concealing this information from Musk’s goons.
[Zeteo, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2025]
It's Grim at the Department of Labor: One DOL staffer explains what we stand to lose.
Hamilton Nolan, Feb 08, 2025 [How Things Work]
The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified
[The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-07-2025]
“Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis…. The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, ‘I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.’ Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical.”
DOGE targets Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as Musk tweets ‘RIP’
[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2025]
[Lambert Strether notes “The CFPB is funded by the Fed, not Congress, although it was set up by Congress. The Fed has not been bowing to Trump.”]
Elon Musk Has Broken the Constitutional Order
Matt Ford, February 5, 2025 [The New Republic]
Trump and Musk hope to dismantle this post–Gilded Age system altogether. The president’s hatred of the “deep state” of D.C. bureaucrats, whom he blames for his first term’s failures, pairs easily with Shadow President Musk’s hatred of any regulatory constraints that could limit his businesses. “Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said recently in a group chat hosted on Twitter. “Not default there: default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
Musk acknowledged in that pseudo–town hall that he hopes to deal as much damage as possible as quickly as possible. “If it’s not possible now, it’ll never be possible,” he told his allies, including two Republican lawmakers. “This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. And if we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen, so we’re going to do it.” (Musk has previously suggested that a Trump administration would engineer an economic crisis as a matter of course, promising supporters a period of “economic chaos, a crashing stock market and financial hardship”—the prospects of which become much more realistic now that he controls the federal government’s purse strings.)
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-06-2025]
“The messages indicate that, under Elon Musk’s leadership, DOGE is actively taking steps to make sure its communications and records are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, a records transparency law commonly used by journalists and lawyers to hold government accountable. Instead, DOGE is asserting that rather than reporting up through the Office of Management and Budget as the United States Digital Service did for years, it is reporting through the Executive Office of the President and to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Under OMB, it was generally subject to FOIA. Under the White House Chief of Staff, records it creates are generally not subject to FOIA.”
Red states pursue their own DOGE-style reforms
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2025]
Anti-republicanism
Mike Brock, February 08, 2025 [Notes From The Circus]
As I write this in early 2025, a quiet revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. This isn't a spontaneous coup—it's the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be “disrupted.” To understand how we reached this critical moment, and why it threatens the very foundation of democratic governance, we need to trace the evolution of an idea: that democracy is not just inefficient, but fundamentally incompatible with technological progress….
On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, marking the largest failure of an investment bank since the Great Depression. This event catalyzed the global financial crisis, leading to widespread economic hardship and a profound loss of faith in established institutions.
In the aftermath of the crisis, several key figures emerged who would go on to shape a new movement in American politics.
Curtis Yarvin, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, had been developing a critique of modern democracy on his blog Unqualified Reservations since 2007. As the financial crisis unfolded, Yarvin applied his unconventional analysis to the economic turmoil.
In a 2008 post, “The Misesian explanation of the bank crisis,” Yarvin wrote….
For decades, libertarian thinkers had argued that free markets, left unrestrained, would naturally outperform any system of government. But what if the problem wasn’t just government interference in markets—what if the very concept of democracy itself was flawed?
This was the argument put forward by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a student of Mises's protégé Murray Rothbard, who took libertarian skepticism of the state to its extreme conclusion. His 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed landed like a bombshell in libertarian circles. Published at a moment when many Americans still saw democracy as the “end of history,” Hoppe argued that democracy was an inherently unstable system, one that incentivized short-term decision-making and mob rule rather than rational governance. His alternative? A return to monarchy.
But this wasn’t the monarchy of old. Hoppe envisioned a new order—one where governance was privatized, where societies functioned as “covenant communities” owned and operated by property-holders rather than elected officials. In this world, citizenship was a matter of contract, not birthright. Voting was unnecessary. Rule was left to those with the most capital at stake. It was libertarian thought taken to its most extreme conclusion: a society governed not by political equality, but by property rights alone….
2008 did not just destroy the economy—it shattered faith in democratic institutions themselves. Libertarians saw an opportunity. And in Silicon Valley, a new belief took hold: democracy wasn’t just inefficient—it was obsolete. Over the next decade, the ideas incubated in this period would evolve into a coherent challenge to the foundations of liberal democracy, backed by some of the most powerful figures in technology and finance.
As millions of Americans lost their homes and jobs in the years following the crisis, these ideas began to gain momentum. The Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, channeling populist anger against government bailouts and the Obama administration's response to the crisis.
As the Tea Party gained momentum, it fostered a broader cultural shift that primed many Americans to be receptive to alternative political and economic theories. This shift extended beyond traditional conservatism, creating an opening for the tech-libertarian ideas emerging from Silicon Valley.
The movement’s emphasis on individual liberty and skepticism of centralized authority resonated with the anti-government sentiment growing in tech circles. As a result, concepts like cryptocurrency and decentralized governance, once considered fringe, began to find a more mainstream audience among those disillusioned with traditional political and financial systems.
Peter Thiel, one of the most outspoken erstwhile libertarians in Silicon Valley, put this sentiment in stark terms in his 2009 essay The Education of a Libertarian: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” ….
Figures like Yarvin didn’t just critique democracy—they sought to undermine the very conditions in which democratic deliberation is possible. By weaponizing media fragmentation, they hacked the cognitive foundations of democracy itself, ensuring that political power would no longer rest on reasoned debate but on the ability to manipulate information flows....
Heather Cox Richardson, July 19, 2024 [Milwaukee Independent]
OMB head Russell Vought takes over as CFPB as acting head, DOGE team deletes X account
Matt Egan, February 8, 2025 [CNN]
Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-Constitutional’ vision for second term
Beth Reinhard, June 8, 2024 [Washington Post]
A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.”
Russell Vought, September 29, 2022 [The American Mind, Claremont Institute]
We are in a post constitutional moment in our country. Our constitutional institutions, understandings, and practices have all been transformed, over decades, away from the words on the paper into a new arrangement—a new regime if you will—that pays only lip service to the old Constitution. Our system is now much more like an unwritten constitution which operates based on precedents, like the English system. No constitutional amendments have been passed to enact this, but new legal paradigms have been introduced—a “living constitution,” independent agencies, permanent, “expert” civil servants—that have changed the underlying separation of powers at the core of our system.
[TW: Vought is comically ironic, because movement conservatives, before they were brought to power by Trump, used to proclaim the need to respect norms, mores, and traditions developed by societies over long periods of time. They used to argue for strong limits on government, incremental change, and institutional stability. What they are doing now, using the unitary executive to eliminate entire agencies of government, contradicts the primacy accorded to Congress in the Loper Bright decision they celebrated just a year ago.
[And their argument about originalism is shown to be sham by the absence of any discussion of how the founders worried about the ill effects of political parties, and wanted to prohibit them. All the dangers the founders foresaw we are now experiencing as the Republican Party supports Trump’s unitary executive actions over the heads of Congress, destroying the founders’ scheme of having an independent legislative branch check the executive. ]
Ben Tarnoff, February 7, 2025 [The New York Review]
... It is not just the fires, floods, zoonotic diseases, and other insignia of ecological emergency. It is also the discomfiting spectacle of a leadership class so extravagantly unfit for the task at hand. Incompetent rulers are nothing new. They are one of human history’s main themes. What feels more specific to our time is the extent to which our leaders have responded to a moment of severe and proliferating crisis by regressing into a childlike state, and encouraging their followers to do the same….
But Trump is poorly cast for the part of patriarch. While he glowers in his official portraits, his political style is more silly than stern. He babbles. He is a creature of impulse and instinct, fickle and dysregulated. His humor is that of the schoolyard; his train of thought is, at minimum, haphazard. If you have ever heard a toddler tell a story, it sounds like Trump: digressive, bizarre, filled with tonal shifts, often hilarious. His inner circle exudes a similarly infantile affect. Elon Musk is nothing if not a smirking preadolescent….
The desire to be carefree is integral to the psychic allure of Trumpism. It is pleasurable to disinter one’s deepest resentments, to worship power, to go berserk with rage, to be floridly conspiratorial, to know nothing, to hallucinate Marxists under the bed, to picture the people you hate in tears and in chains. But the unifying principle, the rind that envelops and coheres these delights, is the abdication of adulthood’s defining obligation: to take responsibility for oneself and others. It is precisely this responsibility that Trump and his set refuse….
No picture of Trumpism would be complete without the Democratic Party bumbling about in the background, and here too the logic of Big Baby finds a foothold. The counterpart to the feral puerility of American conservatism is a senescent American liberalism whose grandees are well into their second childhood....
It cannot be banished by banishing Biden, as it is a more general condition. The party is run by sundowning seniors who refuse to cede the driver’s seat even though they pose a danger to themselves and others: recall Dianne Feinstein berating a room full of literal children for politely asking her to do something about climate change….
Nobody went to jail for the Iraq War or the 2007–2008 financial crisis. In a time of mass criminalization, when children can be tried as adults, the worst adults are never punished. Creating a culture of elite impunity has been a bipartisan affair, and it has bred the cynicism on which Trumpism feeds. Equally bipartisan is the state’s decades-long divestiture from the obligation of caring for its citizens, a process that the scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.”
Earlier generations of social movements were able to force the creation of institutions that, however imperfectly, bore a degree of responsibility for our collective wellbeing. The story of the last half-century is the corrosion of those institutions, with prisons, private equity, and other toxins oozing through the cracks. It is a sign of how antisocial our society has become that the basic values one learns in kindergarten—to share, to be kind, to tell the truth, to reciprocate and cooperate—are so vilified in our political life.
Nation Shrugs as Godzilla Eats Washington
Matt Taibbi, Racket News [Center for Renewing A
Resistance
What Are Democrats Supposed to Do?
Josh Marshall, February 3, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
Right now in Washington, DC, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dominating literally everything. That will start changing quickly, at least in a limited way, in the courts. But the overriding need is for Democrats to get a seat at the table. And they can do that in several ways. The biggest way is that Republicans will need help to pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling. The rubber starts meeting the road on that front next month. Real soon. You can talk as much as you want. But the White House and congressional Republicans absolutely need that help. And Democrats need to be crystal clear that the answer is absolutely no help — without meeting their conditions. That’s where you get the seat at the table….
The crisis part of this is that Trump needs to stop breaking the law. The nonsense of trying to unilaterally shut down whole parts of the government, cancer research and everything else has to stop. The whole Musk operation. No more breaking federal laws. There’s a budget. The President can’t ignore the law. How to make that argument? Musk gave a bunch of kids access to your monthly Social Security check and all your financial data. They can stop anyone’s check at any time. That’s the central message. That has to stop. The larger political message is that Trump is taking away your health care and starting a trade war to jack up your prices all so that he and his billionaire friends can get huge tax cuts. Remember that the clearest poll data we’ve gotten since the inauguration is that “billionaire advisors” are super unpopular and Musk specifically is very unpopular. That’s the outline of the whole message. You’re about to lose a lot of stuff — your health care coverage and a bunch of money to inflation — so Elon and Trump and their pals can get a tax cut….
So what should or can someone individually do? If Democrats are starting to ask, why should we help?, I would want to send the message that they absolutely shouldn’t. This isn’t a hard message. Get your hands off my parents’ Social Security checks and stop looking at their financial data. No help on anything until the law breaking stops. Period. No debt ceiling help. No budget help. And remember — Democrats can grind the Senate to a halt at any time by refusing unanimous consent to new business. No help on anything until the law breaking stops, and hands off the parents’ Social Security checks. Or yours. That’s a strong message.
Global power shift
Chinese cars at smartphone prices
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Chinese cars at smartphone prices: Revolutionizing the budget car market February 5, 2025 In China, the prices of new cars have reached incredibly low values, which are comparable to the prices of modern smartphones. Chinese automakers have managed to offer vehicles at prices ranging from just $610 to $1,714, making them the most affordable models in the world.
Did a Trump executive order just cripple the global US regime change network?
Kit Klarenberg, January 31, 2025 [thegrayzone.com]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Trump spoke to Egyptian president about plan to evict Palestinians from Gaza
[Axios, via Naked Capitalism 02-02-2025]
‘Existence is resistance’: Palestinians tell Trump they won’t leave Gaza
[Defend Democracy, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2025]
Did You Notice? They Admitted Possibly Killing Almost a Million Palestinians
[BettBeat, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2025]
The truly chilling aspect was not just the numbers, but the casual manner of their delivery. Between discussions of real estate opportunities and vague promises of regional stability, the two leaders outlined a vision of Gaza stripped of its indigenous population, reimagined as a playground for investors and developers. The banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt observed, often comes dressed in bureaucratic language and economic projections.
The press corps sat silent. Markets continued trading. The machinery of state ground forward. Yet in that moment, through a simple numerical admission, we witnessed the acknowledgment of one of history's most rapid and devastating campaigns of population elimination.
Oligarchy
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 02-05-2025]
Carole Cadwalladr
@carolecadwalla
Britain: we have to understand wtf we’ve done. We’ve allowed one of Trump’s closest allies have access to our entire NHS data systems. This is the CEO of Palantir telling shareholders that ‘when it’s necessary to scare enemies & on occasion kill them’
Quote
Evan
@StockMKTNewz
·
Feb 3
Palantir $PLTR CEO Alex Karp just said this to retail shareholders
[TW: The Palantir CEO openly saying they sometimes kill their enemies reminds me that "doge" was the title of the leader of the oligarchy of Venice. "Doge" is Venetian dialect for "duke." The best commentary I ever read about the Venetians calling themselves a "republic" was James Fenimore Cooper's "Introduction" to his 1831 novel The Bravo. The Wikipedia entry does not even summarize the story, which is about a highly skilled swordsman being blackmailed by the Venetians to be an assassin (his father has been imprisoned by the Venetians).
[The Bravo to Palantir: the more things change, the more they remain the same.
[We have to expect the worst from Musk's seizure of control of the US government. ]
Trumpillnomics
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S TARIFFS ARE A NECESSARY SOLUTION
[The White House, via Naked Capitalism 02-03-2025]
[TW: I read this, and gawked at how basically incompetent it was. It’s just a pastiche of campaign talking points, many of them not even related to tariffs or trade. For example, there are repeated references to fentanyl trafficking. How are tariffs going to be applied to an illegal substance? And there is no discussion at all about making sure the banking and financial system support the goal of increasing economic capacity, rather than the present focus on achieving maximum short term “profit.” ]
Restoring balance to the economy
On Having a Maximum Wealth A small thought experiment.
…The idea that, in a world of scarcity, there is a level of wealth that is enough is both common sense and kryptonite to capitalism. The fact that there is not and has never been a serious discussion of capping wealth or incomes in America—despite the accompanying fact that even a child can understand that at some level, gaining additional wealth becomes unnecessary—goes to show how central the concept of unlimited wealth accumulation is to everything that happens here….As long as the people who control AI and its corporate underpinnings are allowed to make an unlimited amount of money from it, making a large amount of money for those people will be the underlying goal of the AI industry. That is the logic of capitalism, so fundamental to everything in America that it tends to disappear in the background. This is the default. This is why on the internet, for example, websites like Wikipedia and Craigslist, which operate with “usefulness to the public” as their goal, are the exceptions, and pop-up ads designed to rip you off and hidden scams to steal your data are the rule. It is easy to imagine Facebook as a useful public utility; instead, it is a trashy den of extremism and slop. That is because the company makes its decisions in service of making money rather than in service of being useful to the public. Despite the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of more than $200 billion, far more than his descendants could ever spend in several generations, he continues to make his primary product worse because it will make him more money. This, though we do not always think of it this way, is the consequence of having no limit to the accumulation of wealth….Progressives spend their lives fighting for laws and regulations and reforms to try to counteract this trend. I would argue that capping the accumulation of wealth would be the easiest and most direct way to achieve the things we are trying to achieve….Such a limit on net worth would eliminate the incentive of every single tech CEO, already rich, to get richer. By default, the AI industry would need another goal. The question guiding the evolution of the technology could be, “How do we use this powerful technology to make lives better?” The new drugs it discovered would be distributed with an eye towards the public good rather than towards the infinite generation of profits. The drudge work that it automates could be paid back to the public in the form of shorter hours for the same pay, rather than having those gains taken by CEOs and investors, while workers were stuck with fewer jobs. And on, and on. All I am suggesting here is that there is shortcut to the goals that communists were going for, that does not require full revolution. Simply capping how rich people are allowed to get could radically reorient the goals of society by removing the (insane!) thing that our mighty corporations now work towards like insatiable robots of doom.
Stop Worshiping the American Tech Giants
Lina M. Khan [New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 02-05-2025]
Is Trump Serious About Trying to Close the Private Equity Carried Interest Loophole?
Yves Smith,February 7, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
[TW: If Trump and the (anti)Republicans really want to help working people, a top priority would be abolishing the carried interest loophole and cutting private equity down to size. For example, tariffs won’t bring much manufacturing back if the financial and banking system is not refocused from short term profits to long term increases in industrial capacity.]
...we expect this to be at most Mexico-Canada tariffs 2.0: that even if Trump presses forward in a serious manner, he’ll declare victory after getting minor concessions, or here, tax code changes….
Disrupting mainstream economics
Julia Steinberger [via Naked Capitalism 02-05-2025]
[TW: A review of the Movement for Socialism event in Zurich, “a lovely gathering of leftists in the context of resisting the World Economic Forum in Davos” by a friendly attendee. Gives you a good idea of how politically sterile and useless the left has become. ]
Does the Far Left have a way ahead?
Mike Shelby, January 24, 2025 [Gray Zone Research]
...there are six factors by which to judge an insurgency, or in this case another national insurrection:
Appeal of Program
Popular Support
Quality of Leadership & Troops
Internal Unity
Operational Terrain
Sanctuary….
The operational terrain has shifted. Geographically, of course, nothing has changed. But the Operational Environment — the human terrain, politics and governance, law enforcement’s stance against political violence — has changed drastically. The conditions favorable to violent and disruptive direct action from 2020 don’t exist anymore. And surveillance cameras and security systems combined with artificial intelligence will almost certainly make detection and tracking faster and easier.
Additionally, one of the largest drivers of Far Left organizing from 2015-2021 was actually right wing organizing. Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, and other right wing groups regularly organized, held meetings and rallies, and had a public events for which there necessitated so-called antifascist opposition. This is one of the largest changes in operational terrain, because those groups either don’t exist anymore or they don’t hold public events. The lack of right wing street action — easily identifiable and accessible in urban settings — is one of the largest reasons for the disappearance of left wing street action. Pending a return of right wing street groups, the Far Left has fewer accessible targets.
Health care crisis
What is Long COVID? A Beginner's Guide
Julia Doubleday, Feb 07, 2025 [The Gauntlet, via Naked Capitalism 02-08-2025]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Add F*cking to Your Google Searches to Neutralize AI Summaries
[Gizmodo, via Naked Capitalism 02-03-2025]
...if people are regularly finding techniques to disable AI summaries in Google searches, perhaps that means they do not want them in the first place? Google search results have never been perfect, of course—there is still a lot of poor information across the web. But AI summaries present users with a prominent blurb at the top of their search that looks authoritative when it just risks compounding the misinformation problem with more erroneous slop….
...this is all being forced on users whether they like it or not. From Google Docs to X and Instagram, there are AI buttons and search boxes and dropdowns everywhere now, because every tech company needs to have an AI strategy. Is a basic keyword search too much to ask?
Climate and environmental crises
[Business Insider, via Naked Capitalism 02-06-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
Alex Shephard. February 5, 2025 [The New Republic]
...Meanwhile, the Democrats, who ostensibly don’t get to take a break from this, have, in characteristic fashion, taken the wrong lessons from his reelection and seem to have spent much of the last two months paying the same consultants who lost the election to tell them how they can be more like Trump. Despite the takeover of the Treasury they are, incredibly, still voting for some of his nominees. (Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, was confirmed as energy secretary with seven Democratic votes on Tuesday.)
Why Are Dems Surprised? [podcast]
[The Intercept, February 7, 2025]
On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, foreign policy analyst and Voices contributor Sunjeev Bery says it has a lot to do with who makes up the party leadership. “I’ll say that from my perch, what I’m seeing is a window into the broader culture of the elected officials of the Democratic Party. They are not organizers, by and large. They are not people who build and channel power to extract concessions from the powers that be. They are ladder climbers and aggregators of pre-existing power. And that’s why the Democratic Party is losing. You have folks like Chuck Schumer, he’s not a critic of concentrated wealth. He’s a product of concentrated wealth.”
Trump’s transactional regime
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War and / or Pandemonium
[TW: reference is to John Milton’s Pandemonium in "Paradise Lost" Book I : The Capital of Hell ]
How Civil Wars Start, Part 1 — Here's some background on the biggest development since the 2020 coup
Mike Shelby, January 29, 2025 [Gray Zone Research]
Implications: First, this is not simple political warfare. This is an intra-elite conflict over control of state resources and cultural institutions, and it’s important because intra-elite conflict historically leads to civil war and state breakdown.
Intra-elite conflict is seen in the lead up to the French Revolution and English Civil War, where the counter-elite faction attacks the elite’s monopoly on power. It's also seen prior to fragmentation in the late Roman Republic and inter-war Weimar Germany.
If the Trump administration is successful, then progressive NGOs will see a reduction in employment, organizing capability, and influence-building through social services. This is an existential crisis for establishment elites. These are the roots of their power and influence.
Jack Crosbie, February 4, 2025 [The New Republic]
As critics focus on Trump’s attacks on the media, his administration is preparing a larger assault on the First Amendment.
The Far-Right Group Building a List of Pro-Palestine Activists to Deport
Jonah Valdez, February 6 2025 [The Intercept]
The premise behind Trump’s more recent order is rooted in Project Esther: a treatise by the authors of Project 2025. The document was billed as “a blueprint to counter antisemitism” and offered strategies to target and silence critics of Israel, including deportation. A fact sheet about the executive order related by the Trump administration mirrored language from Project Esther and laid bare the order’s intent to “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses,” vowing to deport “all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests.”
Such ideas are increasingly gaining purchase in conservative discourse. Pledges to deport supporters of Palestinian rights were a key part of the Republican Party’s platform. A congressional bill introduced last May called for similar measures.
Caribbean Matters: ICE raids target Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico
Denise Oliver Velez, February 08, 2025 [DailyKos]
Oklahoma’s Mental Health System Under Threat: A Deep Dive into House Bill 1343
[Dissent Speaks, via Naked Capitalism 02-03-2025]
“….proposes to completely dissolve the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (ODMHSAS) and transfer all its functions to the Department of Corrections.”
Trump says he’s firing Kennedy Center board of trustees members and naming himself chairman
Will Weissert, February 8, 2025 [AP]
