Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 09, 2025
By Tony Wikrent
Men DOGEbags at Work
Understanding Trump’s War on Research Funding & The Future
[Pandemic Accountability Project, via Naked Capitalism 03-05-2025]
...The gutting of federal funding for scientific & medical research completely destroys America's position as a global science leader - sending a clear signal to the best and brightest in other countries who now no longer have a reason to immigrate here. China is being handed the rest of the century on a silver platter, along with the rest of BRICS, whilst America regresses into an irrelevant, backwater shithole that is the world's laughingstock….
As the Obama-Biden Administration wasted the 2010s foolishly letting themselves be bamboozled by Silicon Valley, who flagrantly broke the laws governing industries such as taxis and hospitality by deciding that having an app and calling yourself a tech company meant you could do whatever you want, the economy would be fundamentally reshaped in a siege on what remained of labor protections. The result was a significant transfer of power to a few select billionaires over the American economy….
The National Institute of Health's (NIH) process to disperse funding, while imperfect, empowered scientists to pursue research that may lead to significant medical and scientific breakthroughs - free from corporate meddling. The justification for the slashing of federal research funding that Vinay Prasad is currently cheerleading is that the American taxpayer shouldn't be paying for "useless" studies, and that only wealthy interests, such as corporations or tech billionaires, should be able to dictate to scientists what they research. It is in fact much closer towards a regression towards feudalism, forcing our best and brightest to instead placate the whims of the wealthy nobles whose patronage becomes essential as a source of research funding….
What we are witnessing is a significant transfer of power, humiliating hardworking scientists and forcing them to grovel before the ownership class, so they can relish in exploiting America's brightest minds for profit. Scientists, understand this: Your corporate boss will own the intellectual property of your research, and will be the only one to profit from it - not you - leaving you out to dry with nothing but crumbs. This is the vision of "economic growth" that Trump, Elon, and their billionaire friends share for America. Of course, the current business mindset of short-term infinite growth at all costs (line go up) is completely incompatible with how scientific development actually functions. As Reddit user "throwawayainteasy" explains:
"Some of the most important scientific breakthroughs are things that we won't really understand the value of until 10-20 years from now or more...No for-profit company would fund the first 20 steps in that process, because there's no clear path to profitability until the end. That's why governments across the world are the primary funders of pure research."
We Found Elon Musk’s DOGE Email Address and We’re Fighting to Reveal His Messages
Shawn Musgrave, March 6 2025 [The Intercept]
FOIA works best when requests are as specific as possible. The U.S. government sometimes plays games with journalists, researchers, and other watchdogs, rejecting asks it considers too vague — such as requests for correspondence that fail to include an official’s government email address.
That’s why The Intercept is publishing Musk’s government email address.
According to a source, Musk has been assigned the email address erm71@who.eop.gov. The email address reflects his attachment to the White House Office, the Executive Office of the President, and, apparently, Musk’s full initials plus his birth year, 1971. This differs from the standard format for EOP emails, which typically include the staffer’s full first and last name.
The Intercept has already filed more than a dozen FOIA requests for Musk’s emails using this information.
[TW: I sent two questions directly to Musk: “Why do you want to kill us?” And, “How many injunctions and court rulings are needed until you understand you are violating the law? Either you respect the rule of law or you don't. Calling for the impeachment of judges who make rulings you don't like only solidifies the conclusion you are an authoritarian bully intent on destroying the rule of law in the United States.” ]
Leaked List Shows DOGE Is Lawyering Up
Shawn Musgrave, March 5 2025 [The Intercept]
A list of DOGE staffers reviewed by The Intercept shows Elon Musk’s quasi-agency has brought in at least four more attorneys.
[Vox, via Naked Capitalism 03-07-2025]
DOGE staffers bring U.S. Marshals to small federal agency that denied them access
Brianna Tucker, March 7, 2025 [Washington Post]
Employees of the U.S. DOGE Service, the organization overseen by Elon Musk that is tasked with slashing the size of the federal government, successfully gained access to the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF) headquarters in downtown Washington on Thursday, a day after the small aid agency blocked the group from entering.
The DOGE employees returned to the USADF offices around 10:30 a.m. Eastern time, according to several agency officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to prevent professional retribution.
About an hour later, Pete Marocco — director of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance and acting deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — arrived with five U.S. Marshals and a handful of DOGE employees, according to several USADF staffers outside and video obtained by The Washington Post. Much like the scene Wednesday, the group demanded access to the 10th floor where the foundation’s offices are….USADF is a nonpartisan, independent agency established through the African Development Foundation Act of 1980 with a mission to support and invest directly in African-owned and African-led enterprises that improve the lives and livelihoods of people in underserved communities in Africa, according to the agency’s website.The U.S. statute that created the agency states that the foundation “shall have perpetual succession unless dissolved by an Act of Congress,” underscoring that only congressional action and not an executive order can dissolve it, raising broader questions among legal experts about whether Trump’s executive order to eliminate it and efforts by the U.S. DOGE Service violate constitutional law….
Here Comes Trump's Privatization of the Social Security Administration
Jessica Corbett, March 04, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trump's Social Security Lies in Speech to Congress Seen as 'Prelude to Vicious Cuts'
Jake Johnson, March 05, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Trump and Musk’s Plan to Destroy Social Security Started Tuesday Night
Thom Hartmann, March 6, 2025 [The New Republic]
...Republicans and their morbidly rich donors have hated Social Security ever since it was first created in 1935. They’ve called it everything from communism to socialism to a Ponzi scheme, which Musk just called it this week (“the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” no less).
In fact, it has been the most successful anti-poverty program in the history of America, one now emulated by virtually every democracy in the world.
But the right-wing billionaires hate it for several reasons.
The first and most important reason is that it demonstrates that government can actually work for people and society. That then provides credibility for other government programs that billionaires hate even more, like regulating their pollution, breaking up their monopolies, making their social media platforms less toxic, and preventing them from ripping off average American consumers.
Thus, to get political support for gutting regulatory agencies that keep billionaires and their companies from robbing, deceiving, and poisoning us, they must first convince Americans that government is stupid, clumsy, and essentially evil….
How Social Security Administration Cuts Affect You
David Dayen, March 6, 2025 [The American Prospect]
It turns out that we’ve seen this exact same scenario before. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration embarked on a large-scale staff reduction at SSA, intended to cut staffing levels by 21 percent. Just like today, Reagan officials insisted that service to the public would not be affected, and that technological innovations would pick up the slack. Just like today, policymakers and former SSA employees were skeptical.
A remarkably timely research paper actually looked at this very time period. Sydney Gordon, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine, wanted to study whether federal workforce downsizing had an impact on access to benefits. What she found at the SSA between 1985 and 1990 should serve as an eerie warning to Trump’s hatchet job on the federal workforce.
This paper, published just last week, estimated that for every 10 percent decrease in field office employees in a particular county, there was a small reduction (0.06 percent) in enrollment for traditional Social Security, and a larger reduction—about 0.32 percent—in enrollment for Supplemental Security Income (SSI), intended for people with disabilities and older, poor adults.
This translated nationwide into 79,027 eligible people not receiving benefits over this period who otherwise would have been enrolled. And in 1990, there were only 39 million Social Security beneficiaries, compared with 73 million today—for which reason, many more people would be potentially subject to a loss of benefit access from SSA’s current downsizing than were affected in the 1980s.
Eloise Goldsmith, March 07, 2025 [CommonDreams]
The Social Security Administration briefly required parents in Maine to register their newborns for a Social Security number at a Social Security office, instead of checking a box on a form at the hospital, before reversing course on the directive on Friday.
The initial move was panned as burdensome and potentially dangerous—and some observers speculated that it could have been a form of retaliation against Maine's Democratic governor, who last month had a public confrontation with U.S. President Donald Trump.
Strategic Political Economy
Rich People Are Firing a Cash Cannon at the US Economy—But at What Cost?
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
Over the past few years, I have fielded versions of the same question from readers again and again: Who, exactly, is buying all of this stuff?The confusion is fair. Recent economic headlines do not add up to a coherent picture: Since 2020, Americans have spent lavishly on discretionary goods and services, even as the cost of necessities has soared. Consumer debt has ballooned right along with prices, and Americans are now defaulting on their credit cards at rates unseen since the Great Recession. Wages growth has been strong, but inflation has thwarted its ability to help most Americans get ahead. So who’s booking all those first-class airline seats and tables at fancy restaurants? Why are tickets for concerts and major sporting events so expensive and also so sold out?A recent analysis of consumer spending from Moody’s Analytics, first covered in the Wall Street Journal, provides an answer… The wealthiest 10% of American households—those making more than $250,000 a year, roughly—are now responsible for half of all US consumer spending and at least a third of the country’s gross domestic product….GRAPH
When you put a huge proportion of a nation’s total resources in a small number of hands, that distortion also plays out in the everyday economy. Consumer-facing companies want earnings growth and need ways to hold on to their profit margin if components or labor become more expensive. An easy way to do that is by going upmarket to find buyers who are spending freely. You can see how this has played out in the car market: Automakers have pushed to develop more of the big, pricey SUVs that wealthier buyers prefer and devoted fewer resources to smaller, more affordable models. That’s helped push the average sale price of new cars up more than 50% since 2014, according to a Cox Automotive analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average new car in the US now costs almost $50,000. When the math on producing goods and services only pencils out when you’re selling to the rich, it doesn’t just change the availability of designer handbags or hotel suites; it affects how entire industries organize themselves….
Letting so many of the country’s economic resources accrue to so few people, Zandi says, risks a lot more than just the economy—it eats away at social cohesion in ways that have leaked into other areas of American life and politics. It breeds distrust and recrimination among individuals and groups of people, as well as toward the systems and institutions we’re supposed to trust to make society work in ways that are at least minimally fair. The end result is a combination of economic fragility and social disaffection that eventually even high earners might not be able to buy their way out of.
David Sirota, January 07, 2025 [The Lever]
As we welcome in 2025, it’s worth noting that this year is the 20th anniversary of the release of the so-called Plutonomy Memos — a series of Nostradamus-like reports that predicted much of the world we live in today.
The memos written in 2005 and 2006 came from Citigroup, and they effectively admit that Wall Street and its neoliberal political allies were creating a feudal American economy. These documents — which you can find here, here, and here — survive on economist Brad DeLong’s blog and in a few old media mentions, book references, and tweets but barely exist on the internet (Citigroup reportedly worked to get them memory-holed off the Internet).
Capitalism in Decay: Whom the gods would destroy, they first give too much money
Thomas Neuburger, March 4, 2025 [God’s Speies]
1. Poverty exists because we cannot satisfy the rich.
Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich….3. Fascism is capitalism in decay.
Fascism is capitalism in decay, revealing its core function: maintaining the dominion of wealth through physical force. When consent can no longer be manufactured for capitalist crimes, repression takes over. Fascism is the system functioning as intended: forcing consent when consent is no longer given….
... the rich don’t sit still for long; desire for great wealth is a poison that dissolves their humanity and produces hubristic monsters. Thus every state of extremes sees eventual collapse.
That’s where we are now, ruled by monstrous men using both political parties to work their will….
Mass Layoffs: The Breakfast of Billionaires
Les Leopold, March 4, 2025 [Wall Street's War on Workers]
The destruction of jobs, both public and private, creates billionaires. But most working people don’t know that, and the Democratic Party is afraid to say it.
Why? Because billionaires who have killed jobs of all kinds, dominate both political parties with their ill-gotten gains. Money buys silence.
The power of billionaires is rising as their numbers increase. In 1990, there were 66 billionaires in the United States. In 2023 there were 748. And in the U.S. alone, billionaire wealth in 2024 increased by $l.4 trillion, that’s $3.9 billion a day.
How did that happen? ….
To become a billionaire, you have to be willing to kill jobs with reckless abandon. It is one of the most effective ways to extract money from working people.
The carnage started with the deregulation of Wall Street in the late 1970s, widened during the Reagan years, and was then adopted as the mantra of the Clinton administration during the 1990s.
The deregulation of Wall Street allowed companies to buy each other up with few constraints, often using borrowed money and putting the debt on the books of the acquired company. Layoffs are used to pay off that debt.
Deregulation also led to the legalization of stock buybacks, which allowed companies to repurchase huge amounts of their own shares and drive the share price up. Wall Street investors and CEOs, who were increasingly paid with stock incentives, became fabulously rich as the price of their shares rose, though their company was no more profitable. Layoffs are used to finance those buybacks.
Before deregulation, corporate leaders were ashamed if they had to lay off workers. They saw that as a sign of their own failure as managers. CEOs then thought themselves to be in the service of their employees, their communities, and their shareholders.
But free-market ideologues in the 1970s waged a successful campaign to favor shareholder supremacy above all -- jobs, workers and communities be damned! (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers, for the details)
That new cutthroat Wall Street mindset has led to approximately 18 million involuntary layoffs per year, year after year, since the 1990s.
But wait, you probably thought most job loss was caused by new technologies, like those that caused the disappearance of elevator operators and horse and buggy drivers?
Nope. Technological change, even AI, changes overall job composition slowly, over many years, even decades. Newness is expensive, so changes are adopted incrementally as costs come down.
But Wall Street-driven job destruction happens in a flash. All it takes is a stock buyback, a merger, or a private equity purchase, and jobs will be cut overnight to pay for the deals….
Edward Zitron, July 1, 2024
...These stories explain the often-paradoxical motivations of modern capitalism, where those who make short-term decisions (that invariably result in long-term pain and, in many cases, decline) are rewarded, whereas those who build sustainable businesses that actually innovate, and don’t treat their customers and employees like dirt, are ignored — if not actively maligned. ….
Think Small: End Billionaires. There are only 3,000 of them. A thought experiment
Jim Stewartson, March 4, 2025 [MindWar]
...If you have a billion dollars and all you can think about is making more money at the expense of other people, something is wrong with you. A billion dollars is enough to live in palaces for the rest of your life — and make all your kids rich forever. Yet you persist.
If you have ten billion dollars and more money is still your goal, you are deeply sick. You can change the world with that money and you’re not doing it. You are a misanthropist.
If you have a hundred billion dollars and you will still not stop collecting more, while rolling over great swaths of humanity in the process, by definition, you are evil incarnate….
It’s not a coincidence that these are the same people who enslaved our citizens in digital prisons through constant bombardment of psychological warfare and propaganda. These are the vipers who have built great cathedrals of lies and disinformation, all to keep Americans trapped in suicidal alternate realities that deceive and impoverish them. Why are we allowing it?
So, it’s a simple question. What good do these people — this very, very, very small minority of people — do for the rest of us? And why do we keep them around when they are so manifestly bad for us?
Concerning New Study Reveals That We Are No Longer Living Longer
[SciTech Daily, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
Global power shift
Macron’s Remarks on Possible Use of Nuclear Arms a Threat to Russia – Lavrov
[DefendDemocracy.Press, 07/03/2025]
How China came to dominate the world in renewable energy
[Washington Post, via The Big Picture March 8, 2025]
China now eclipses every other country in the world — including the United States — in the green technologies of the future. Here’s how it achieved this lead.
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israel says it is stopping the entry of all aid and supplies into the Gaza Strip
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
State of Siege: Israel is conducting its largest mass expulsion campaign in the West Bank since 1967
Mariam Barghouti, March 06, 2025 [Drop Site]
Archiving Gaza: The Race to Save Evidence of War Crimes and Mass Destruction
Lila Hassan, March 4, 2025 [Drop Site]
Israel strengthens ties with Russia in bid to curb Turkish influence in Syria
[Ynet, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
Oligarchy
Man, proud man: Dress'd in a little brief authority
Jonathan M. Katz, March 05, 2025 [The Racket]
...In 1990, the political scientist Mark J. Gasiorowski summarized “personalistic authoritarian regimes” like this: “Those in which heads of government rule arbitrarily, exercising authority mainly through patronage networks and coercion rather than through institutions and formal rules.” ….
That’s who was on the dais last night. The longest State of the Union-style speech in American history was a grandiose exercise in personal score-settling and personal rule. Trump opened with a laborious recap of his electoral victory, lying about the size of his “mandate” and popular vote margin. That he even mentioned the win is notable in itself: As far as I can tell no previous incoming president has ever so much as bragged about having won the last election in his first address to Congress: Biden didn’t. Obama didn’t. Reagan, who started the tradition of incoming presidents addressing a joint session of Congress in February (as opposed to the outgoing president giving a last speech in January) didn’t even mention the words “election” or “Carter.” Our most vainglorious imperial presidents until now played up the aww-shucks, we’re in this democracy together thing in their post-victory addresses: Lyndon Johnson greeted his old friends in Congress and talked about “a new quest for union” in 1964. Nixon didn’t even give a speech in 1973—the first after he cheated and burgled his way into a truly historic re-election landslide1 —submitting a series of written letters to Congress instead.
Then, after likening himself to George Washington, he chastised the Democrats for refusing to affirm him with cheers or applause….
The subtext here is text: Ally with and subordinate yourself to the king, and you may get favors showered on you. Your injuries may be healed, your children avenged, your place in the sun secured—whether as a West Point cadet, the namesake of some piece of agitprop, or a member of his cabinet. Turn on him, betray him, hinder his aspirations, and you will pay the price: You will be hunted by his DOJ and FBI. (“Pam, good luck. Kash, wherever you may be, good luck.”) You will be blamed for his failures. (“Good luck, Marco.”) You will get nothing.
"Here we arrive at the central feature of personal rule,” wrote the authors of Personal Rule in Africa. “It is a dynamic world of political will and action that is ordered less by institutions than by personal authorities and power; a world of stratagem and countermeasure, of action and reaction, but without the assured mediation and regulation of effective political institutions.” The United States was founded to be the opposite of that; for all its founding sins and crimes it was in most ways what John Adams called “a government of laws, and not of men.” Each day without effective opposition or a gameplan to stop it, this nation lurches farther, perhaps irretrievably, toward the reverse.
Trump Donors Try to Buy Pittsburgh Mayor’s Race
Akela Lacy, March 3 2025 [The Intercept]
Elon Musk’s quest for power has a new target: Wisconsin’s supreme court
[The Guardian, via downwithtyranny.com 03-03-2025]
The Secret Cabal That Owns The World
Lee Camp, February 22, 2025 [via Avedon’s The Sideshow]
The answer as to who controls most of the world is the top asset management firms—AKA “shadow banks.” And they have unimaginable wealth.
The top 5 asset management firms are:
BlackRock: $11.6 Trillion! (!!!)
Vanguard: $9.3 Trillion
UBS: $5.7 Trillion
Fidelity: $4.9 Trillion
State Street: $4.7 Trillion….
….the number one killer of humans around the world is unclean water - because people can’t afford to get it. New estimates on how much it would cost to give the world safe, clean water are about $114 billion per year.
BlackRock alone could do that 88 times over. They could do it, and then do it again, and do it and do it and do it and do it and do it and then, after saving the lives of millions of people, they’d still have 9 trillion dollars left over….
The propaganda networks that tell us all of this is fine: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc. Other than the Murdoch family, the biggest shareholders in Fox News are Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Their top shareholders - Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. NBC and MSNBC are now owned by Comcast. Biggest shareholders? Did you guess it? Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. Okay, I'll stop listing every industry, but Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street are also the biggest stakeholders in big pharma, private prisons and policing, deforestation, dystopian surveillance software, AI, the big car companies, big ag, big banks, chemicals, Amazon, Walmart, UBER — Anything you can think of! Literally anything. Go ahead, think of something. …Ok, you got something in your mind? The top shareholders are BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street."
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
[Review of African Political Economy, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
U.S. Cattle Inventory Smallest in 73 years
[Farm Bureau, via Naked Capitalism 03-04-2025]
Trumpillnomics
CHAINSAW DIPLOMACY: JAVIER MILEI’S ARGENTINA DESTRUCTION IS NIGHTMARISH MODEL FOR MUSK, DOGE
[Mintpress News, via Naked Capitalism 03-02-2025]
...Upon his assumption of the presidency, Milei immediately removed rent controls, leading to the cost of housing in Buenos Aires increasing by 135% in one year. Price controls on key goods were also rescinded, leading to food becoming unaffordable to millions of people, who are now forced to scavenge in the streets. Utility rates have exploded: spending on gas for cooking and heating, for example, increased by 715% between December 2023 and October 2024.
The outcome has been mass destitution. Poverty has risen to 53% of the population, the highest seen in decades. New pro-business laws currently being considered would increase the workday from eight hours to twelve and allow companies to pay workers not with cash but with tickets that can only be redeemed in certain supermarkets or shops.
Milei and his supporters argue that this shock therapy is a necessary medicine to cure the country of its longstanding economic problems. Nevertheless, the policies have led to deindustrialization and a brain drain, as those with the skills and opportunity to leave the country have often done so.
A recent poll found that 72% of Argentinians consider themselves worse off under Milei. And yet, the president has managed to hold on to approval ratings of above 40%. “It is complicated because the ones who voted for him say that the president is making all these crises happen because it is all part of his plan,” Javier Gomez, an Argentinian influencer and political communicator, told MintPress, adding that a common conception among those sympathetic to him is that, “We need to suffer first, in order to pay the debts from previous governments. And so, anything that he does that may be wrong, stupid, or make people poorer, they say that it is fine. That is exactly what we expected.”
BlackRock strikes $23 billion deal to place Panama Canal ports under American control
[CBS News, via Naked Capitalism 03-05-2025]
Starlink benefits as Trump admin rewrites rules for $42B grant program
[Ars Technica, via Naked Capitalism 03-07-2025]
[Fortune, via Naked Capitalism 03-05-2025]
Elon Musk’s Next Potential Self-Enrichment
David Dayen, March 05, 2025 [The American Prospect]
His Starlink internet service could benefit from a proposed Republican fire sale of the government’s wireless spectrum.
The U.S. Is Cutting Off Foreign Aid. My Youngest Patients Are Paying the Price
[Time, via The Big Picture March 2, 2025]
On the orders of the world’s richest man, USAID halted its operations seemingly overnight. It was the only supplier of ready-to-use therapeutic food in many countries like Burundi. In the wake of this startling termination, those of us working on the front lines are left with only what was already in our stores. Although feeding dying babies should surely qualify for the vague foreign aid waiver issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the salaries of the staff and the cost of the fuel to get the therapeutic food to hospitals like mine are not. Without USAID employees, nobody can open the warehouses where the life-saving packets from the American people are stored. Seeming indifference, from the American people.
Lynn Parramore, March 5, 2025 [Institute for New Economic Thinking]
'Dangerous Union-Busting': Trump Rescinds Collective Bargaining for Air Safety Union
Predatory finance
CRYPTO ADVOCATE ADVISES THE COMMON MAN TO SELL A KIDNEY
[Futurism, via Naked Capitalism 03-05-2025]
Walgreens agrees to be acquired by private equity firm for almost $10 billion
[AP, via Naked Capitalism 03-07-2025]
The "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" is an Absurd Idea
Matthew C. Klein, Aug 09, 2024
It is understandable why BTC owners would want the U.S. government to bid up the price of their assets. That does not make it good policy.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
US Treasury Department says it will not enforce anti-money laundering law
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 03-03-2025]
How Trump’s Crypto Move Will Mine Your Retirement
Veronica Riccobene, March 3, 2025 [The Lever]
Welcome to the United States of Crypto. Trump just announced plans to create a federal cryptocurrency reserve, which involves the government buying cryptocurrencies, fortifying their prices, and incentivizing taxpayers to fund any future cryptocurrency bailouts. The news boosted flagging crypto prices — a boon for Trump’s crypto czar, who is heavily invested in crypto. It’s also a boon for crypto donors, who dropped more than a quarter of a billion dollars on the 2024 election. Along with a federal initiative, the industry is pushing states to start their own reserves — and this year’s legislative sessions are chock full of crypto bills.
By the rich, for the rich. Large amounts of crypto are held in the hands of very few wallets — so Trump’s move will likely be an upward wealth transfer. Even though there are an estimated half a billion crypto investors worldwide, research suggests most of the crypto power is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. Of all the globe’s millionaires, 71 percent are crypto investors, compared to just 6.8 percent of the general population. And just 2 percent of wallets own more than 90 percent of the total Bitcoin in circulation.
Your retirement fund is next. Crypto lobbyists see a potential gold mine in public workers’ retirement systems, which manage $6 trillion worth of assets. Those systems are already pouring a quarter of their money into risky “alternative” investments — and are now eyeing crypto. Last year, Michigan and Wisconsin pensions invested $106 million in Bitcoin.
- Crypto proponents are also aiming to crack the $9 trillion 401(k) market. Some companies are already opening up their employees’ savings plans to crypto, even though federal auditors just warned that regulators are not adequately monitoring these “uniquely volatile” assets, which “come with considerably high risk.” The 401(k) push has the blessing of crypto booster Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who chairs the new Senate crypto committee.
CFPB drops lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo over Zelle fraud
[CNBC, via Naked Capitalism 03-05-2025]
After mass firings, the IRS is poised to close audits of wealthy taxpayers, agents say
[ICIJ, via Naked Capitalism 03-05-2025]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Steve Keen, Mar 07, 2025 [Building a New Economics]
Advocates of the Endogenous Money model—which I prefer to call Bank-Originated Money and Debt, or BOMD for short—reject the Loanable Funds model as structurally incorrect. Banks are not intermediaries, they assert, but loan originators. This was a minority and non-mainstream position in economics, until it was endorsed by some Central Banks after the Global Financial Crisis {McLeay, 2014 #5066;Deutsche Bundesbank, 2017 #5312}. In a paper entitled “Money creation in the modern economy”, The Bank of England rejected both the Loanable Funds and the Money Multiplier models….
The Bundesbank “The role of banks, non- banks and the Central Bank in the money creation process” made similar assertions, based on bank accounting….
There is, therefore, no fiscal crisis of the State from the mere fact that its spending exceeds taxation. There can be other problems, including inflation and trade deficits, which I explore later, but government spending in excess of taxation is a feature, not a bug, of a mixed fiat-credit monetary system.
But the State has helped trigger credit crises in the past, by attempting to eliminate its debt. Arguably, a major factor in such crises—in addition to the destruction of part of the money supply—is that, in the absence of government debt and deficits, the private non-bank sectors of the economy must be in negative financial equity.
It’s Kind of Fitting That Musk Now Wants to Cook the Books on GDP
Kate Aronoff, March 7, 2025 [The New Republic]
Gross domestic product is a controversial metric. Heterodox economists have long criticized politicians’ maniacal obsession with GDP growth, pointing to its relatively recent creation as a measure of national accounts and its limits as a catch-all indicator of a country’s economic health….
The Trump administration seems to want to mess around with GDP for a totally unrelated reason: They’re worried that measuring it accurately might make Trump look bad….
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Google Starts ‘Silently’ Tracking Your Phone—How To Stop It
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 03-05-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
Playbook: Democrats in despair
Politico, via Naked Capitalism 03-04-2025]
...In early February, a group of moderate Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials and party leaders gathered in Loudoun County, Virginia, for a day-and-a-half retreat where they plotted their party’s comeback.
The gathering — organized by Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank, and operated by Chatham House Rules — resulted in five pages of takeaways, a document Playbook obtained from one of the participants. (Not all attendees endorsed each point.)
“In the wake of this election, where it became so evident that the things that the left was doing and saying deeply hurt Harris and down-ballot Democrats, a lot of people are looking to us, not just Third Way, but the moderates in the party, and saying, ‘We got to do it your way, because the other way ain’t working,’” said Third Way’s Matt Bennett, who helped organize the February retreat.
[Among their conclusions:]
- Democrats should “ban far-left candidate questionnaires and refuse to participate in forums that create ideological purity tests” and “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate”;
- They should “push back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging”
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
Justice Amy Coney Barrett ignites anger on the right after ruling against Trump
Ann E. Marimow, March 6, 2025 [Washington Post]
The Supreme Court’s closely divided decision this week to reject the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid unleashed a torrent of vitriol from the president’s supporters largely aimed at a single justice — Amy Coney Barrett.
On podcasts and social media, conservative allies of President Donald Trump called the former law professor and appeals court judge “evil,” a “closet Democrat” and a “DEI hire.”Barrett and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court’s three liberals in backing a federal judge’s order that requires the administration to begin repaying global health groups nearly $2 billion for completed work….
Will MAGA & Musk Be Able To Intimidate Federal Judges Into Compliance With The Project 2025 Agenda?
Howie Klein, March 02, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
America’s Mummy: Haldeman’s Ghost Takes Marine One: Maye Musk and the revenge of the Afrikaners
Jim Stewartson, March 3, 2025 [MindWar]
Last night, the President of the United States arrived at the White House on Marine One with the man who bought the presidency, Elon Musk, his son X Æ A-Xii, and his mother Maye Musk.
While this may seem like a fairly mundane scene, given the current power structure of the US government, Maye Musk has a very significant influence on her son, and therefore, disturbingly, the world at large.
Maye Musk is the daughter of Joshua Haldeman, a pro-Hitler, antisemitic racist who moved his family to apartheid South Africa in 1950. Below is a short compilation of her complaining about people describing her son as a “billionaire” because “he’s the genius of the world.”….
Joshua Haldeman was a Canadian leader of “Technocracy, Inc.” — a movement to replace world government with a group of “technocrats” — experts, scientists and engineers — who would alleviate the population of the need of making decisions for themselves. But importantly, as I’ve written, he also wanted a “Technate of America” spanning Greenland to Colombia….
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Alito's ominous USAID dissent overshadows the win
sabrina haake, March 07, 2025 [DailyKos]
In a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court disparaged Trump’s claim that presidents can do whatever they want, by ordering the administration to disburse $2 billion in USAID grants in compliance with the rulings of US District Judge Amir Ali.
Although the narrow ruling has been widely applauded as at least a temporary victory for the rule of law, as I see it, the victory is overshadowed by ominous signaling in the dissent.
In response to a one paragraph ruling, Justices Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch wrote a lengthy and strident dissent….
In a dissent that reads like a partisan diatribe from a Trump/Vance/Musk social media post, Alito wrote an eight page rant that blatantly misrepresents the court record….
Lee Fang, Mar 6 2025
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Civic republicanism
What exactly is a republic anyway?
Christy DeSmith, March 4, 2025 [The Harvard Gazette]
Daniel Carpenter, the Allie S. Freed Professor of Government…. Carpenter’s spring 2025 “What is a Republic?” The Gen Ed offering, also available online via Harvard Extension School, has struck a chord in the current political moment. Enrollment has quadrupled since Carpenter last taught the course two years ago, with more than 250 in this semester’s class….
One text that left a big impression was Niccolò Machiavelli’s “Discorsi,” with the Italian Renaissance political philosopher drawing lessons from the gradual rise and less-gradual fall of Rome’s republic….
One thing that can hinder this pursuit, Carpenter told the class, is clinging to ideas formed by the politically charged realities of 21st-century America. His first lecture touched on the “lazy trope,” ubiquitous on social media and within certain think-tanks, that America is a republic, not a democracy — or a democracy, not a republic.
He chalked it up to a mix of partisanship and presentism. “It’s a historical accident that one of our political parties happens to be named Republicans — and the other happens to be named Democrats,” ….
