Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 14, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
Process knowledge is crucial to economic development
Henry Farrell, Sep 02, 2025 [Programmable Mutter, via The Big Picture, September 12, 2025]
... I’m fascinated by process knowledge and manufacturing because I spent a chunk of the late 1990s talking to manufacturers in Bologna and Baden-Wurttemberg for my Ph.D. dissertation.
I was carrying out research in the twilight of a long period of interest in so-called “industrial districts,” small localized regions with lots of small firms engaged in a particular sector of the economy. Paul Krugman’s Geography and Trade (maybe my favorite of his books) talks about some of the economic theory behind this form of concentrated production: economic sociologists and economic geographers had their own arguments. Economists, sociologists and geographers all emphasized the crucial importance of local diffuse knowledge about how to do things in making these economies successful. Such knowledge was in part the product of market interactions, but it wasn’t itself a commodity that could be bought and sold. It was more often tacit: a sense of how to do things, and who best to talk to, which could not easily be articulated. The sociologists were particularly interested in the informal institutions, norms and social practices that held this together. They identified different patterns of local institutional development, which the Communist party in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, and the Christian Democrats in the Veneto and Marche, had built on to foster vibrant local economies….
I spent a lot of time on workshop floors, listening to small-scale founders talking about their lives. I’ll never forget a particular conversation with a manufacturer of teabag-packing machines** about the technical ingenuity required to figure out how to reliably staple on the threads attached to some fancy tea bags, which allow you to pull the teabag out without either scalding your fingers or rummaging around for a spoon. The machinery for accomplishing this apparently simple task was quite complex and fantastical: it was a surprisingly difficult engineering problem….
A lack of appreciation for physical process knowledge helps explain why America is in trouble. Breakneck criticizes the first Trump and Biden administration’s belief that they could strangle China through export controls, riling up Chinese companies to “break free of American restrictions.” However, Dan’s criticisms go way further. It isn’t just that America focuses so much of its “entrepreneurial dynamism” on stuff that doesn’t necessarily do much good, and may plausibly do significant harm to American society: crypto, the metaverse and perhaps AI. It’s that for decades, American policy makers sat back as manufacturing moved overseas, not understanding what the long term consequences for process knowledge might be….
[TW: Regular readers will recall the number of times that Ian has written about the folly of free trade and that technological advances will more likely occur where the manufacturing is physically located. Or, As I wrote in The Obama administration as “managed democracy" (May, 2010):
...as an industrial enterprise grows and matures, its trained and skilled employees make the surrounding community a pool of technical talent that is highly conducive to the creation of other industrial enterprises that use the same or similar skills. That’s why certain towns and cities become known as centers for specific industrial products. Sheffield in England was known for its highly specialized alloy irons and steels. Delft in Holland is known world-wide for its blue pottery. The Hocking River valley in southern Ohio became known in the 1800s as a center of brick manufacture. The Connecticut River valley was known for almost a century as “Precision Valley” because it was a center of designing and making high-precision metal-working machine tools. Detroit became known for making automobiles. Today, almost every high-speed, high-volume printing press in the world comes from Heidelberg, Germany. The southern part of the San Francisco Bay area became known as Silicon Valley.
How much is it worth to have a locale or city renowned for the technical excellence of its local enterprises and workers? What value can be assigned to having a few hundred wizened old men around who can train entire generations of new, highly-skilled workers? Or who have a few different ideas than their boss, and decide to start up their own company?
Exactly these kind of links are traced out by David R. Meyer, a professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Brown University, in his 2006 book, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America. This is important because it details how the USA machine tool industry developed - and the USA machine tool industry is the foundation of the modern industrial mass production economy.
The Silicon Valley Consensus & the “AI Economy”
Edward Ongweso Jr. [via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
The “AI economy” is less a story of productivity or innovation, then an attempt to graft a new political-economic order—let’s call it the Silicon Valley Consensus—that is ostensibly concerned with building our stillborn God. A coalition of hyperscalers, venture capitalists, fossil fuel firms, conservatives, and reactionaries are engaged in a frenzy of overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in compute infrastructure. Their goal is not to realize AGI or radically improve life for humanity, but to reallocate capital such that it enriches themselves, transmutes their wealth into even more political power that imposes constraints on countervailing political forces, and liberates capitalism from its recent defects (e.g. democracy), consolidating benefits to its architectures regardless of the actual social utility of the technologies they pursue….
Building out generative AI’s compute infrastructure and energy supply is an incredibly capital-intensive enterprise (McKinsey expects $7 trillion will be spent by 2030)….
2. The primary capital source for this infrastructure buildout isn’t external debt, but internal cash flows—primarily at hyperscalers—that dominate our stock market. Their profitability is so extreme that they can put “oodles of oodles of money” towards such an ambitious project without touching risky financing options, even if revenues and profits have yet to materialize….
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
AI-Capex is the everything cycle, now Just under 50% of GDP growth is attributable to AI Capex
Alex Krainer, Sep 07, 2025
… But the true nature of the Western empire has been carefully concealed from us behind the glossy façade of the Western “civilization.” Today’s empire is a reincarnation of the undead British Empire, whose DNA it still carries. The more we learn about this empire, the uglier it looks. As an example, it seems that many, if not most of the famines recorded in history weren’t natural disasters nor consequences of wars but results of deliberate policy aimed at subjugating populations and forcing them to accept colonial control and slavery.
This may seem like an exaggeration, but British statesman and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli explicitly said as much himself. He explained that the objective of the British Empire was to
“Gain and hold territories that possess the largest supplies of the basic raw materials. Establish naval bases around the world to control the sea and commerce lanes. Blockade and starve into submission any nation or group of nations that opposes this empire control program.” (Knuth, E.C. “Empire of the City,” 1946, p. 57)
There’s much evidence that the Empire really did use starvation as a weapon of war against disobedient groups and nations and that they did so relatively frequently. Take the example of India: during the 120 years between 1757 and 1878 when she was under direct British rule, India experienced 31 serious famines (Mike Davis, “Late Victorian Holocausts, El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World” - London: Verso, 2002).
Even in absence of outright famines, much of India’s population lived in chronic food insecurity. While this was concealed from the British public, Britain’s ruling establishment was well aware of it.
Economic historian Robert C Allen found that, during the 19th century, famines became more frequent and more deadly as extreme poverty increased from 23% in 1810 to more than 50% in the mid-20th century. The period from 1880 to 1920, the height of Britain’s imperial power, was particularly devastating for India. By the 1910s, life expectancy collapsed to 21.9 years….
In April 1974, Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's Secretary of State and National Security Adviser sent out a classified memo to select cabinet officials. The title of the memo was, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests," and it was commissioned on the recommendation of John D. Rockefeller III and came to be called, more famously, NSSM 200, for National Security Study Memorandum 200.
In it, Kissinger addressed the difficulty of controlling resource rich areas of the world against the social pressures borne of growing world populations and went on to suggest the kinds of coercive measures the US should consider. He bluntly stated that food aid should be considered as "an instrument of national power," and that the US should ration food aid to "help people who can't or won't control their population growth."
The NSSM 200 made depopulation in foreign developing countries an explicit, if secret, national security priority of the United States for the first time. In that, the policy of the British Empire was simply grafted onto the US foreign policy. If anything changed between Disraeli and Kissinger, it's the slick framing of policy goals: “rationing food” to “help people” is the sanitized version of “starving them into submission.” But the language amounted to recommending genocide, at least as defined under the UN Convention of 1948.
Peter Turchin, Sep 13, 2025 [Cliodynamica]
According to my US Political Violence Database (USPVDB), the five years from 2020 to 2024 saw seven assassinations. This is higher than the previous peak during the 1960s, although only half as large as that of the late 1860s:
….It's important to note, that by themselves political assassination and terrorism don’t overthrow the established elites (at least, I can’t think of any examples). An assassination of the state ruler may serve as a triggering event for a revolution or an onset of civil war, but it still requires a well-organized and committed counter-elite party. The failure of Alexander Ulyanov and ultimate success of his younger brother illustrate this principle perfectly.
The significance in the rising frequency of such instability “micro-events” is that they signal that something is deeply broken within the social system in which they happen. I tried to draw attention to the rising frequency of shooting rampages back in 2008 (you can read about it in my 2012 blog post, Canaries in a Coal Mine). A canary dropping dead in a miner’s cage is not the cause of the explosion to come, but rather an advance warning.
Similarly, the increasing incidence of assassinations and terrorism tells us that we aren’t out of the woods yet, by a long stretch.
Trumpillnomics / Felonomics
Data shows energy bills soaring as state and federal Republicans cut price-savings programs
Richard Eberwein, 9/04/25 [WCPT 820 Radio, via Clean Power Roundup]
Energy bills have been steadily increasing since President Donald Trump took office in January, partially thanks to state and national Republicans ousting Biden-era clean energy policies and prioritizing nonrenewable energy sources.
According to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), residential electricity bills have increased by nearly 10% nationally since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, despite his campaign pledge to slash electric bill prices….
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law on July 4, is also expected to increase energy costs for consumers even more. A report from Climate Power published last month found that 64,000 jobs have already been lost or stalled since Trump took office, with 56% of them located in congressional districts represented by Republicans. The report also says the cuts to clean energy have reduced the total energy supply, which have contributed to the higher bills experienced by consumers….
US Interior Secretary: ‘No Future for Offshore Wind Under This Administration’
Adrijana Buljan, September 12, 2025 [offshorewind.biz, via Clean Power Roundup]
Trump administration axes $679M in offshore wind infrastructure funding
[esgdive.com, via Clean Power Roundup]
The U.S. Department of Transportation is withdrawing or terminating $679 million in funding for 12 port and infrastructure upgrades that would support offshore wind projects, it announced Friday.
2025 farm income projections paint grim picture for farmers trying to break even
[WHO13, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
Coffee Prices Post Largest Annual Jump Since 1997
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2025]
Treasury bonds aren’t the safe haven they’ve been in the past — and taxpayers will pay a price
[Market Watch, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
Homeless organizations note uptick in homeless families living in cars
[Spectrum News 13, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
More Trump Administration Circular Firing Squad with Investor-Spooking ICE Raid on Hyundai-LG Plant
Yves Smith, September 9, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
...And keep in mind that despite the concern, which may be justified, about mistreatment of Koreans doing construction work at the plant, some (we don’t know how many) were skilled workers necessary to get the equipment installed and shake the operations down. Although it is an entirely different type of production, my father was one of the most seasoned managers/executives in the paper mill industry in running startups and major expansions. They were not easy. A successful startup would take two years and burn 20% of the capital cost. An unsuccessful one would hemorrhage cash pretty much forever. And all of these startups required bringing in experts from the vendors to help with design, installation, and training….
South Korea in Deadlock Over $350 Billion Investment Fund
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 09-09-2025]
Richard Murphy, September 13 2025 [Funding the Future]
In this video, I explain why Trump's economic policies are a disaster — and why the UK should take note as the far-right tries to copy them….
This man is an outright disaster.
Far-right politics is an outright disaster.
We've always known that, but now we can see the evidence. And it's critical that we do see a note and talk about that evidence, because the threat from the far-right is real elsewhere, including here in the UK.
The far-right has no known answer to any known problem.
Its hatred of migrants solves nothing. We are living in an interdependent world, and to pretend otherwise is just absurd.
To pretend that we can live in glorious economic isolation is just absurd.
To pretend that we can run an economy on the basis of giving tax cuts to the rich, and increasing, in effect, taxes on everybody else by imposing tariffs is absurd because the net result is a lack of spending power….
Trump steals $400b from American workers
Cory Doctorow, September 09, 2025 [Pluralistic]
Trump's stolen a lot of workers' wages over the years, but this week, he has become history's greatest thief of wages, having directed his FTC to stop enforcing its ban on noncompete "agreements," a move that will cost American workers $400 billion over the next ten years:
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Pentagon Official: Trump Boat Strike Was a Criminal Attack on Civilians
Nick Turse, September 5 2025 [The Intercept]
The lethal strike on a boat in the Caribbean on Tuesday was a criminal attack on civilians, according to a high-ranking Pentagon official who spoke to the Intercept on the condition of anonymity.
The Trump administration paved the way for the attack, he said, by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force earlier this year.
“The U.S. is now directly targeting civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but they aren’t combatants,” the Department of Defense official said. “When Trump fired the military’s top lawyers the rest saw the writing on the wall, and instead of being a critical firebreak they are now a rubber stamp complicit in this crime.”
Trump on Trials: How Our Legal System Shouldn't Work
Joyce Vance, Sep 12, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
...Also on Fox and Friends, Trump weighed in on how criminal cases should proceed. He said prosecutions should move more quickly and that the United States should become more like China. “We have to have quick trials,” he said on “Fox & Friends.” “I call it quick trials because in China, they do have quick trials. You know, they don’t wait six years.” ….
“What happens here is you go through seven, eight years,” he said. “And by the time it ends, and then they say, ‘Well, you know, he had a reason to do it, because he wasn't treated right in grade school, and it's his teacher's fault, and it's the government's fault.‘”
Trump was discussing the response to the tragic stabbing death of a young woman riding on public transportation in Charlotte, North Carolina. He said, “That guy should be — he should have a trial the following day.”
Trump’s Phony “Cartel” Plot to Invade Venezuela
[mintpressnews.com, September 12th, 2025]
Trump’s Immigration Police State Is Growing at Warp Speed
Ian Gordon, September 13, 2025 [Mother Jones]
...On Friday, ICE hit a new milestone: The agency has now signed more than 1,000 so-called 287(g) agreements nationwide. These agreements, which deputize local police and jails to perform certain immigration enforcement functions, have exploded under Trump. At the end of the Biden presidency, ICE had just 135 287(g) deals in place; now there are 1,001—a 641 percent increase.
These Immigrants Became Immigration Court Judges. Trump Just Laid Them Off
[THE CITY, via Naked Capitalism 09-10-2025]
More Trump Administration Circular Firing Squad with Investor-Spooking ICE Raid on Hyundai-LG Plant
Yves Smith, September 9, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
...The open question is what this self-sabotage implies about Trump priorities. It’s not hard to surmise that normalizing violent repression is more important than any other aim. And if one is cynical, the reason for targeting a Korean plant is that there would be less of a reaction to hauling off individuals with more social status than, say, workers at meatpacking plants, if they were foreign. In other words, this is moving up the food chain in terms of who the authoritarians are targeting….
Josh Kovensky, Nicole Lafond, Kate Riga, Layla A. Jones and Emine Yücel, September 13, 2025 [Talking Point Memo]
...President Donald Trump dismissed congressional Democrats’ demands in exchange for their votes just weeks ahead of the deadline to fund the government for the next fiscal year. A failure to do so, of course, would result in a government shutdown.
“Don’t even bother dealing with them,” President Trump said of congressional Democrats during a Friday Fox News interview. “We will get it through because the Republicans are sticking together for the first time in a long time.”
DOGEbags at work
The Untold Saga of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security
ProPublica
Insiders Describe the Trump FBI Clown Show in Vivid, Buffoonish Detail
David Kurtz, September 11, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Trump told a court his Epstein 'letter' didn't exist. He lied.
Hunter Lazzaro; September 8, 2025 [unchartedblue.com]
Evidence keeps growing that Trump didn't just know about Epstein's crimes, but was complicit….
the letter Trump claimed was "nonexistent" was handed over to Congress by Epstein's own estate. Trump make a false claim to a court.
You might, if you are over a certain age, recall that a Republican Congress attempted to impeach President Bill Clinton in the 1990's over evasive testimony Clinton provide a court. It was, Republicans asserted, a high crime and/or misdemeanor that required removing a president from office.
That was before a seemingly unending stream of Republican congressmen got exposed as serial adulterers, sex traffickers, and pedophiles, of course….
Donald Trump was "best friends" with the nation's most notorious and prolific child molester and sex trafficker. He wrote a letter that by all appearances seems to reference and endorse that abuse, drawn over a seemingly underage torso, while now claiming that he knew nothing of his "best friend's" crimes and never writing such a letter.
He lied, of course. But at this point it's becoming increasingly implausible to argue that Trump was not an active participant in the abuse—as some accusers have come forward to allege.
We need to start taking those accusations far more seriously. And we need to treat the Republican Party as what they are: Co-conspirators in everything Trump has done, from renditions to violent coup to these cover ups. It is a crime ring masquerading as a party.
Heather Cox Richardson, September 9, 2025 [Letters from an American]
As Last writes, the material in the 238-page book reveals that the friends of the convicted sex offender described him as a “super-rich” man who liked “having sex with very young girls.” But rather than recoiling from his predatory habits, they celebrated those crimes. As Last writes: “Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle knew. They knew that Epstein was a predator. They believed that his pathology defined him. And they joked about it, encouraged it, and egged him on.”
An in-depth article in the New York Times Magazine yesterday by David Enrich, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg detailed how top bankers at JPMorgan Chase ignored the many red flags around Epstein’s financial activities to keep the wealthy and well-connected man as a treasured client. It was only after Epstein was arrested the second time, federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking, and he died in his jail cell that JPMorgan filed a report retroactively flagging 4,700 transactions totaling more than $1.1 billion as suspicious….
Retired Navy captain Jon Duffy encapsulated where this kind of thinking leads in an op-ed published today in Defense One, which covers issues of national security. Examining the administration's strike against a small vessel in the Caribbean last week, Duffy warned that “[t]he United States has crossed a dangerous line” into “lawless power,” operating without regard to the law.
Duffy reminded readers of the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling in Donald J. Trump v. United States that the president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed while exercising official duties. At the time, he notes, experts warned that the decision would “give the commander-in-chief license to commit murder,” but a majority of the court waved those concerns away. “Now,” he writes, “the president has ordered killings in international waters. Eleven people are dead, not through due process but by fiat. The defense secretary boasts about it on television. And the president will face no consequences.”
“This is no longer abstract,” Duffy writes. “The law has been rewritten in real time: a president can kill, and there is no recourse. That is not strength. That is authoritarianism.”
Duffy notes that Trump has already used the exact same logic when he sent National Guard troops into U.S. cities: “redefine the threat, erase legal distinctions, and justify force as the first tool.” He warned that “the commander-in-chief of the most destructive military power in history has been placed beyond the reach of law.”
How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 09-09-2025]
[Lever Daily, Sep 9, 2025]
The reporting reveals that bank officials flagged Epstein’s illicit activities for over a decade, but bank leaders overrode the objections while the institution processed more than $1 billion in suspicious transactions.
Dean Obeidallah, Sep 09, 2025
...what we’ve learned over the past week from the Trump written birthday card, the brave words of the Epstein survivors together with facts we already knew, these two men were the kind of very close friends who shared everything. And that makes sense given they had so much in common.
That is why it’s simply impossible to believe Trump did not know what Epstein was up to with his sex ring—and increasingly difficult to believe Trump was not involved….
Oligarchy
The Carving Up: The Post-WWII World Order Is Over
Jim Stewartson, Sep 10, 2025 [MindWars]
At the end of 2024, I wrote an article about an alliance emerging between three ideologies: Aleksandr Dugin’s Eurasianist imperialism; the desire of the PayPal Mafia (represented by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel) for total control; and the extreme religious right that has taken on the mantle of “anti-communism”—and taken control of the Supreme Court.
The ultimate goal of this alliance was—and is—to destroy global liberal democracy as a viable form of government. The parties to this informal agreement have different reasons for their shared project, but they share a central desire—to remove the U.S. federal government as an impediment to their different plans for conquest….
The billionaire class want you thinking Israel controls the West
Jonathan Cook [via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]3
Robert Kuttner September 9, 2025 [The American Prospect]
With all of Trump’s alarming moves toward authoritarianism, it’s easy to overlook that he is also an ordinary plutocrat.
Climate and environmental crises
5 forecasts early climate models got right – the evidence is all around you.
[The Conversation, via The Big Picture, September 13, 2025]
The earliest climate models made specific forecasts about global warming decades before those forecasts could be proved or disproved. And when the observations came in, the models were right. The forecasts weren’t just predictions of global average warming – they also predicted geographical patterns of warming that we see today.
US Property Insurance Costs Hit New High as Disasters Worsen
[Insurance Journal, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
[Phenomenal World, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
Subsidies for Fossil Fuel Firms Have Doubled Since 2017, Now $35 Billion a Year
[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
THE LEGAL FIGHT TO MAKE CORPORATIONS COVER CLIMATE LOSSES
[Atmos, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
Global power shift
Trump Pivots to the ‘Homeland’: Neocon Deathblow? Or Simply Imperialism Repackaged?
Simplicius [via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2025]
China’s New Sword: The ultimate hypersonic and nuclear deterrent
[CGTN, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
China pulled off high-orbit refuelling and may beat US to moon, ex-space officials say
Ling Xinin, 5 Sep 2025 [South China Morning Post]
China closes biotech gap with US as new drugs, R&D pipelines top 30% of global total
[SCMP, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israeli Strikes on Media Offices Kill At Least 25 Journalists in Yemen
Kyle Anzalone, September 12, 2025 [news.antiwar.com]
The Disappearance of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya
Amel Guettatfi, Sep 12, 2025 [dropsitenews.com]
He tried to keep Kamal Adwan hospital open as Israel invaded. He has been imprisoned ever since.
‘There will be no Palestinian state,’ Israel’s PM says as he signs West Bank settlement plan
[Euronews, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2025]
Russia / Ukraine
Treasury secretary says U.S. and European Union must partner to ‘collapse’ Russian economy
[NBC News, via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2025]
The Baltic Sea as an Arena of Undeclared Hybrid War
[Kommersant, via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2025] (machine translation)
The Neo-Nazi Who Knew Too Much?
Kit Klarenberg [via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Trevor Jackson, September 25, 2025 issue [The New York Review]
Reviewed:
by Ezra Klein and Derek ThompsonAvid Reader, 288 pp., $30.00Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown
by Andreas Malm and Wim CartonVerso, 401 pp., $29.95...The financial crisis of 2008 did not recover the future so much as reveal that its absence was an ideological project. Writing in the aftermath of the crash, the radical cultural critic Mark Fisher diagnosed a phenomenon he called “capitalist realism,” meaning “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Elsewhere he wrote that the future had been “foreclosed,” and the metaphor was apt: we had been evicted from it, and now it belonged to the banks….
Abundance, by two American journalists, provides one answer. American liberals in positions of governance should commit to deregulation, which the authors believe will unleash the power of the market and of technology to provide cheap and plentiful housing, energy, and medicine. They define the “abundance” they seek as a “state in which there is enough of what we need to create lives better than what we have had,” and they believe it is “important to imagine a just—even a delightful—future and work backward to the technological advances that would hasten its arrival.”
Overshoot, by two Swedish academics, has a very different answer. The planet is already several years into the “overshoot conjuncture,” which they define as the time when “officially declared limits to global warming are exceeded—or in the process of being so—and the dominant classes responsible for the excess throw up their hands in resignation and accept that intolerable heat is coming.” The authors “attempt to gauge the power of the forces that destroy the conditions of life on Earth and that must be contended with in the coming years, if any such conditions are to be preserved.” They are not coy about their political project or what depends on it: there is “no path to a liveable planet that does not pass through the complete destruction of business as usual.”
[In Klein and Thompson] The evidentiary core of each chapter consists of a summary of the academic work of a few experts, usually economists, with frequent and lengthy quotations, as well as the occasional interview, whose conclusions are repeated uncritically. (To take one example, they quote without scrutiny the claim of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that he is requiring employees to work in person in order to foster trust, rather than to impose discipline or to recoup the costs of commercial real estate.) They give no sense of the unruly literatures on their subjects, the ranges of disagreement, the difficult problems and mutually exclusive solutions. They claim to set an agenda for a new liberal political order, but what they have done is read some economists and argue, again, for deregulation….
Overshoot breaks neatly into two thematic portions. The first is a bleak climate history of 2020–2023. Already by 2021
the world had seen at least 1.1°C of global warming, six IPCC reports, twenty-six COPs and immeasurable suffering for the most affected people and areas, and yet it generated the largest surge in absolute emissions—the input that directly determines the rate of warming—in recorded history.
They anatomize the world-record profits of the five big oil companies, the immense investment (over $5 trillion, they estimate) by banks in fossil fuel projects, and the ongoing global construction of pipelines and gas terminals. Despite all the disasters, all the models, and all the conferences, in 2022 there were at least 119 oil pipelines in development around the world, plus 447 gas pipelines, 300 gas terminals, 432 new coal mines, and 485 new coal power plants….
Having recognized that there wasn’t going to be any meaningful mitigation of carbon emissions and that all climate targets were unreachable, the group that Malm and Carton call “the dominant classes” began to argue that it was actually permissible to overshoot the targets because it would be easier in the future to do a lot of mitigation very quickly, thanks to inevitable technological progress and economic growth….
Central bank independence is a neoliberal con trick
Richard Murphy, September 09 2025 [Funding the Future]
Predatory finance
The Simple Truth About America's Housing Crisis
Steve Keen, Sep 09, 2025 [Building a New Economics]
When people ask me what's causing house prices to remain sky-high while most Americans can't afford to buy, I give them the same answer I've been giving for two decades: The banks did it…. According to Bank of International Settlements data, real house prices in America have risen 2.5 times since 1970.
Think about that: Baby boomers paid just 40% of what you're paying today for the exact same house, adjusted for inflation….
The main factor that's made housing unaffordable in the United States—and most of the rest of the world—is too much mortgage lending by banks. This is a common phenomenon in any country that has deregulated its financial sector.
Gen Xers and millennials can't afford housing not because supply is inadequate (the excuse conventional economists and politicians love to peddle), but because banks have been allowed to lend too much money for housing….
Instead of letting banks base lending on borrower income (which they routinely manipulate), we should limit lending to a multiple of the property's rental income—say, 10 times annual rental income.
This would end housing bubbles by:
Making lending based on actual economic value, not speculation
Preventing banks from pouring unlimited borrowed money into housing
Returning houses to what they should be: shelter, not speculative assets….
US Firms Racing Through $1 Trillion Buyback Spree in Record Time
Joel Leon, August 27, 2025 [Bloomberg, via The Lever]
GRAPH — Announced Buyback Value so far this year, by company
How Wall Street Broke The College Bookstore
Katya Schwenk, Sep 10, 2025 [The Lever]
For years, textbook prices have been rising many times faster than inflation, burdening students already struggling with loans and sky-high tuition costs. A single course textbook can cost $400; the average hardcover textbook is closer to $100. Used textbooks and e-books aren’t always much cheaper.
How did the college textbook market become so broken, forcing some students to skip meals and work overtime just to afford course materials? One culprit, advocates say, is Wall Street’s increasing control over a staple campus institution: the college bookstore.
There are more than 4,000 campus bookstores across the country, and over half of them are operated by just two firms: Barnes & Noble Education, a publicly traded company that was spun off in 2015 from the Barnes & Noble bookstore empire, and Follett Higher Education, a bookstore operator now backed by the personal private equity fund of Tony James, the billionaire that once led Blackstone.
Restoring balance to the economy
Venezuela Overcomes Economic War and Reaches 90% Food Self-Sufficiency
[Telesur, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
Brock Hrehor, Sep 13, 2025 [The Lever]
A municipal grocery store will soon open in downtown Atlanta, aiming to provide nutritional assistance to one of the city’s many food deserts. This development is part of an initiative across a growing number of cities nationwide to open publicly owned and operated grocery stores as a viable solution for food insecurity.
Publicly owned grocery stores are operated by city and state governments, as opposed to private companies. Unlike their for-profit counterparts, publicly run stores don’t have to generate a profit and therefore have much greater leeway to lower prices. They also offer a potential solution to food deserts, which form in part because low-income neighborhoods don’t always have the purchasing power to sustain for-profit stores….
Disrupting mainstream economics
Quantum economics, part 5: Speculation, Potential, and Energy
Richard Murphy, September 11 2025 [Funding the Future]
To continue our exploration of a quantum economics metaphor, consider the possibility that every balance in a bank account represents potential. It is, in other words, stored energy, waiting to be released. That release might come through consumption, by buying goods and services. It might come through investment, by creating productive capacity. Or it might be channelled into speculation by gambling on the future prices of assets.
Each route uses the same potential, but with very different effects.
Consumption sends ripples through the economy.
Investment creates lasting change.
Speculation, however, often traps energy in sterile loops that can quite easily be destructive.
The same monetary potential, deployed differently, leads to profoundly different outcomes….
Richard Murphy, September 10 2025 [Funding the Future]
In this first podcast style interview between me and Steve Keen, the author of 'Debunking Economics', Steve recounts how early encounters with neoclassical and neoliberal economics, and the realities of firm behaviour, led him to reject economic fairy tales and become a rebel.
His politics shifted too, from Vietnam-era conformity to organising for a political economy curriculum.
Today his priority is climate change. Economists' models have trivialised existential risk and hobbled action with myths about government finance.
Steve broadly agrees with MMT's “spend first, tax later,” but challenges Warren Mosler's theories on trade, all of which mean that in the longer term he plans a wider assault on comparative advantage….
Quantum economics, part 3: Entanglement and Double-Entry Bookkeeping
Richard Murphy, September 09 2025 [Funding the Future]
Quantum entanglement is one of the strangest and most important discoveries of modern physics. Two particles, once linked, cannot be described independently of each other. Measure the spin of one, and you know the spin of the other, even if they are separated by light-years. Their states are not separate but relational.
This is not a world of isolated objects but of deep connections. And if that sounds alien, it should not. Accountants have known about entanglement for centuries. They call it double-entry bookkeeping.
Every transaction has two sides. Every debit has a credit. Every asset has a liability.
This is not an optional convention. It is a structural truth. The debit cannot exist without the credit. They are entangled….
The entanglement metaphor is not just clever wordplay. It reveals something profound about money:
Money is never a thing in isolation. It always exists as part of a relationship.
Every asset has a counterparty. My deposit is your debt. Your bond is my investment.
There is no such thing as money without context. To imagine money as a commodity in itself is to forget its entanglement.
This is why the household analogy for government finances is false. When governments spend, they create deposits in the banking system. These are entangled liabilities of the state. The so-called “national debt” is nothing more than the other side of the public's financial assets….
Health care crisis
With Premiums Set to Rise, a Reminder: ‘Medicare for All Would Save $650 Billion’ Annually
Brad Reed, Sep 12, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
[Editor & Publisher, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
We risk a deluge of AI-written ‘science’ pushing corporate interests – here’s what to do about it
[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
[Blood in the Machine, via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2025]
US Investment in Spyware Is Skyrocketing
[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
Hamilton Nolan, Sep 10, 2025 [How Things Work]
...The basic activity of finding out and publishing true things has always sat uneasily in the context of business. Separate and apart from journalism is a business that we will call Media, which makes money by attracting audiences. These audiences pay money to see the media, and they also pay attention, which the media companies sell to others.
Media is a truth-agnostic business. If you can get an audience by publishing true information about the world, great. If you can get an audience by publishing fairy tales, fiction, or propaganda, also great. Journalism is one sliver of the media business, and not the most lucrative one.
From the perspective of journalists and their audiences, protecting the integrity of the news is very important. From the perspective of the media business, it is only important to the extent that it makes money. And sitting above the media business is a layer that we can call Powerful Interests, for whom the media business itself is only important to the extent that it can be used to influence people in service of the powerful interests. For those who make up this top layer of society, the integrity of news—the truth of it—can be a liability.
Thus the news, which is a social good that must exist in order to have any semblance of a healthy and functional society, is at all times at risk of being squashed, polluted, manipulated, or wiped out by various forces….
CBS News is also a prestigious news organization with a rich history. Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite and all that. Not any more. With stunning swiftness, the network was bought by the son of the second-richest person in America, and, in order to win the Trump administration’s blessing for the deal, the kid has forced the network’s news division into a humiliating series of shit-eating, unjournalistic actions that have undermined all of its credibility. They paid Trump $16 million to settle a bullshit lawsuit, as a bribe; they have announced they will not edit(!) interviews with lawmakers, to forestall whining from administration liars; they are hiring, haha, Bari Weiss to, I don’t know, suggest dreary mediocre right wing news ideas; and they are installing a right wing think tank guy as ombudsman(???). I do not want to exaggerate here, but: CBS News has, in a matter of months, put itself on par with Fox News on the Journalism-to-Propaganda scale of credibility.
The speed with which both of these robust news organizations have had their reputations sacrificed on the altar of strongman politics is shocking. Thousands and thousands of journalists spent decades, entire generations of careers, painstakingly doing the work that built the reputations of those companies. And two billionaires have bought them and thrown those reputations in the trash in order to protect their own unrelated business interests. Kind of a shit thing to watch! There are still many fine journalists at both of these organizations. But they are on borrowed time now….
Like other journalists, I think often about how to Make Journalism Exist. The real answer to this is “Public funding of journalism, because it is a social good and should not be subject to the harmful predations of capital.” But you could also say that about health care, and neither of those things are likely to get fixed soon. So, how else? ….
Democrats' political malpractice
Should Working-Class Politics Move Beyond the Democratic Party?
Les Leopold, Sep 12, 2025
You are invited to join our webinar featuring Shawn Fain, the President of the UAW. It’s the coming out party for a new survey of 3,000 voters in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The report brings new insights into the difficulties facing the Democratic Party, the issues working people most care about, and why they (spoiler alert!) want a new political party. I am sure you will be interested and amazed at the findings.
Howie Klein, September 11, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
...Jacobson is the walking embodiment of everything that’s rotten in Democratic politics. She’s not so much a strategist as a middleman for the billionaire class. Her job is to siphon corporate cash, run it through a PR machine, and deliver Democrats who sound like Republicans but vote like lobbyists. For decades she’s been feeding this poison into the bloodstream of the party— from her days in the DLC, to founding No Labels (the most nakedly corrupt dark-money hustle in modern politics), and now by smearing Mamdani on behalf of the developer-and-Wall Street crowd that’s terrified of losing its grip on New York.
This isn’t about “socialism vs. moderation.” It’s about democracy vs. corruption. Mamdani stands with tenants, nurses, and working-class New Yorkers. Jacobson stands with real estate speculators, union-busters, and the war machine. Holly Page is no different— a career profiteer who mistakes shilling for big money as some kind of civic duty. Never forget; these people don’t build movements; they build invoices.
And look at their heroes, like Josh Gottheimer, who openly boasts about his Wall Street connections while gutting the party’s agenda for childcare, housing, and climate. These are the “role models” Jacobson and Page hold up for Democrats? Please. These are grifters with office stationery. Here’s the truth they can’t say out loud: Mamdani is a threat because he represents something money can’t buy. He doesn’t need their consultants, their donor lists, or their backroom deals. He’s got people power. And for operators like Jacobson and Page, that’s the ultimate nightmare— a Democrat who can win without selling his soul. Jacobson, Page and their allies are parasites feeding off a host they’ve been slowly killing for decades. The “Republican wing of the Democratic Party” isn’t just a joke line anymore— it’s the greatest threat to the party’s survival. They’d rather lose with Cuomo or Adams than win with Mamdani, because winning with Mamdani would mean the end of their gravy train.
The Unspoken Dimension of the Shutdown Fight
Josh Marshall, September 10, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
...you’re not going to go from the March 2025 Democratic Party to something dramatically different when Democrats get some actual power. This is obvious but important to focus on. The muscles and muscle memory Democratic elected officials will need in power are going to be built in opposition….
The system all of us were raised in has been shattered. It can’t be reinstituted. You will have to build a new system which blocks the paths to this kind of dictatorial presidency. That’s going to be really hard. It will start by requiring a flurry of new laws to prune the statute book of the laws which genuinely give a president open-ended and generally unreviewable paths to big power grabs. It will absolutely require abolishing the filibuster. It will require breaking the power of the corrupt Supreme Court majority….
If you are this worried about a two- or three-month budget standoff and shutdown that you may take some short-term political hit from, you aren’t going to have the stomach to do any of those things. And if you’re not, this new system in creation under Trump II is not going anywhere. We need elected officials who are as ruthless on behalf of civic democracy as their opposites are on behalf of authoritarianism.
In Search Of The DCCC’s Worst 2026 Candidate— Like In 2022 & 2024, Let’s Start In The Central Valley
Howie Klein, September 10, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
CA-22 is one of the 5 congressional districts, California Democrats are targeting to make up for Trump’s Texas mega-gerrymander. But Democrats don’t need a counter-gerrymander in that district— just a great candidate… which they finally have in Randy Villegas. Unfortunately, the DCCC couldn’t leave well enough alone— despite Villegas being endorsed by all 3 country party chairs. So Suzan DeBene had her team sniff out a state Capitol officeholder as bad as Salas, Jasmeet Bains, and then recruited her to run against Villegas. Here’s her Courage Score, exactly the kind of “F” you would expect from a DCCC recruit….
Meanwhile, the alternative couldn’t be more obvious. Randy Villegas isn’t some Beltway concoction. He’s a local, he’s authentic, and he’s already secured the support of the party grassroots. He’s talking about real issues— working-class wages, healthcare, climate resilience in an agricultural economy— that actually resonate with the voters….
It’s a grim but familiar lesson: the DCCC would rather lose with a corporate shill than win with a progressive. CA-22 could be the seat that flips the House in 2026. Or it could be another cautionary tale about how conservative Democrats sabotage their own party’s majority to keep power in the hands of lobbyists, consultants, and corporate donors. Please consider helping Randy flip Congress by contributing here.
Democrats can’t escape their toxic co-dependency with Trump
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 09-07-2025]
The Elephants in the Room: Why Big Tech Oligarchs Love Abundance
[Liberty and Power, via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2025]
Resistance
The Anti-Trump Strategy That’s Actually Working: Lawsuits, lawsuits, and more lawsuits.
Michael Scherer, September 2, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
On political violence — We're going from bad to worse
Jonathan M. Katz, September 12, 2025 [The Racket]
...On the night of the killing Trump issued a rare Oval Office address, an event which for generations was reserved for epochal historical events like the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Challenger explosion, not only to memorialize Kirk but to vow revenge on his behalf. “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.” Today, he went on Fox News and upped the ante even more, seemingly endorsing far-right extremist violence (not for the first time), and thus the growing calls on the right for a full-scale “civil war.”
Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Is Part of a Trend: Spiking Gun Violence in Red States
Alain Stephens, September 12 2025 [The Intercept]
It’s not Washington or Chicago but Republican-run, reliably right-wing states that lead the nation in gun violence rates.
“I’ll see you in Valhalla” — The FBI Director DARVOs a political murder and signals to neo-Nazis.
Jim Stewartson, Sep 12, 2025 [MindWar]
...In Old Norse mythology, Valhalla is Odin’s hall for warriors who die in battle (the einherjar), feasting and training until Ragnarök—the Norse equivalent of the End Times or the Kali Yuga. Valhalla has been idealized in Norse mythology and gave Scandinavians a widespread cultural belief that there is nothing more glorious than dying in battle…. The phrase “See you in Valhalla” has been used by military combat veterans for decades as a brotherly call to bravery in combat. However, it has also been increasingly used as a signal between white supremacists as a call to racial holy war….
[Picture of headline of Ezra Klein op-ed, “Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way”]
This is the fundamental error too many privileged liberals and Democrats make—that we are still engaged in “politics.” Charlie Kirk was engaged in a holy war against America, against the Constitution, against Black & brown people, against women, against LGBTQ+ people—and against everyone who didn’t look like him.
You cannot only vote your way out of this scenario. The government has every intention of following through with its plans to dismantle the Democratic Party and democracy. We’re going to have to stand up, and put ourselves at risk, to be fearless in telling the truth no matter what they threaten us with.
[Notes from the Circus, via Naked Capitalism 09-11-2025]
This dishonest attribution serves a purpose beyond partisan point-scoring: it creates the permission structure for using state power to eliminate political opposition while claiming to protect democracy from extremism. When only violence from the left counts as political violence, when only progressive rhetoric gets treated as incitement, when only liberal politicians get held responsible for individual extremists—you’ve created a framework where authoritarian crackdowns become necessary responses to terrorism that somehow never applies to actual right-wing terrorism.
HBCUs face campus threats following Charlie Kirk shooting
[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 09-12-2025]
Bomb threats target homes of state Democratic Senate and House leaders Wirth and Szczepanski
[Source NM, via Naked Capitalism 09-12-2025]
Nothing about Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer Tyler Robinson seems to be adding up
[Ricky Hale and Council Estate Media, via Naked Capitalism 09-13-2025]
Oliver O'Connell, 13 September 2025 [The Guardian]
“Just Kill ‘Em” — FOX News says genocide is the solution to homelessness and mental illness
Jim Stewartson, Sep 13, 2025 [MindWar]
...The sadistic, dehumanizing rhetoric, combined with action steps to imprison homeless and mentally ill people—only to murder them by injection—is a carbon copy of Hitler’s Aktion T4 program, which killed some 70,000 people the Nazis labeled “life unworthy of life”—including the so-called the “work-shy”—and paved the way for the murder of hundreds of thousands more through the end of WWII….
These kinds of comments don’t come from nowhere. It was either a concept that Kilmeade had personally been considering—“I’d just kill ‘em”—or it was something that he had been asked to “float.” ….
As if to ensure their status as state television for the Fourth Reich, a single Fox reporter, Brooke Singman, citing a “source” with access to FBI inside information alleges that Charlie Kirk‘s killer’s roommate is transgender.
This is the fourth or fifth different narrative to come out of the regime desperately trying to tie transgender people to this killing. Each of the previous lies was debunked. Nevertheless this story is exploding across social media as if it were some kind of “gotcha.” ….
Nothing Will Stop Trump From Weaponizing Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Attack the Left
Natasha Lennard, September 11 2025 [The Intercept]
Miller Says He and Trump Will Use Law Enforcement to ‘Dismantle’ the Left After Kirk Shooting
Stephen Prager, September 13, 2025 [CommonDreams]
...In a rant on Fox News, Miller—the architect of Trump’s mass roundups and deportations of immigrants—shouted that the best way to honor Kirk’s memory was to carry out a political purge against the left, which he called a “domestic terrorism movement in this country.” ….
He did, however, cite many examples of harsh, but nevertheless First Amendment-protected, speech that he considered an incitement to violence, including that “the left calls people enemies of the republic, calls them fascists, says they’re Nazis, says they’re evil,” and claimed that many people online were “celebrating” Kirk’s assassination.
“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven,” Miller said, was, “that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence, and we are going to do that.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership,” Miller vowed to shut down these unspecified leftist groups.
“I don’t care how,” he said. “It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection. But we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence.”….
New ‘Thought Policing’ Bill May Let Rubio Strip Passports from US Citizens Over Political Speech
Stephen Prager, Sep 13, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Ohio’s Stolen Democracy — How Gerrymandering Silenced Millions And Turned Elections Into Theater
Jerrad Christian, September 12, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
There are few Ohioans alive that know what a fair election looks like. Ohio has been gerrymandered for decades, but the modern— industrial strength— version started in 2010. Since then, none of us have had a voice in our representation….
Courts told the Ohio legislature again and again that their maps were unconstitutional. Multiple times they struck down state maps. They threw out congressional ones. And what did the politicians do? They shrugged, redrew nearly identical lines, and dared anyone to stop them. The Ohio Supreme Court said no— that they said it violated the constitution Ohioans themselves had amended in 2015 and 2018 to demand fairness. The politicians ignored it. The farce continued. In the end, the state ran elections on maps already declared illegal. That is “democracy” in a gerrymandered state….
We know what happens when politicians run in lines they drew themselves. They stop listening, schools crumble, healthcare rots, opioids tear through towns while legislators hold hearings on culture-war bullshit. People scream about jobs leaving, about poisoned water, about rents they can’t afford, and nothing changes. Why would it? There’s no risk. No threat to the unearned power. No accountability. Gerrymandering has eaten our power— and Ohio Republicans have grown fat on it.
Seventy-two percent of Ohioans voted for reforms in 2015, seventy-five in 2018. Three out of four citizens said enough, draw maps that are fair. The politicians spit on that too.In 2024, when citizens put Issue 1 on the ballot to create a truly independent commission, the establishment sabotaged it with legal tricks and misleading language. It failed, and the GOP chair had the audacity to boast that “confusing Ohioans was a good strategy”. That is the level of contempt for us all, even their own party members….These issues are bigger than party. They are a fraud upon the people. An illusion of freedom sold by men and women too cowardly to face us in a fair fight. They hide behind these lines knowing they cannot stand in front of us…..
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Ideas Have Consequences The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice
Elliott Ash, Daniel L Chen, Suresh Naidu, 26 August 2025 [The Quarterly Journal of Economics, via Naked Capitalism 09-08-2025]
This paper empirically studies the effects of the early law-and-economics movement on the U.S. judiciary. We focus on the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges, an intensive economics course that trained almost half of federal judges between 1976 and 1999. Using the universe of published opinions in U.S. Circuit Courts and 1 million District Court criminal sentencing decisions, we estimate the within-judge effect of Manne program attendance. Selection into attendance was limited, as the program was popular among judges of all backgrounds, frequently oversubscribed, and admitted participants on a first-come, first-served basis. We find that after attending economics training, participating judges use more economics language in their opinions, rule against regulatory agencies more often, and impose more severe criminal sentences. We argue that economics, as a rigorous social science, was especially effective in persuading judges.
Dred Scott to Noem: SCOTUS Creates a Permanent Brown Underclass
Jim Stewartson, Sep 08, 2025 [MindWar]
The United States is in the midst of a full authoritarian coup being carried in plain sight, with a fully complicit Judiciary and Congress. Today marked one of the darkest days I have experienced—in terms of the sheer breadth of damage to the constitutional order in the United States, to the freedoms we all should cherish, and to decency and humanity as a fundamental goal of the federal government.
The Supreme Court, on an emergency docket, took Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, a case from DHS to stay an injunction on one of the most plainly unconstitutional practices imaginable: rounding people up based on race, accent and socioeconomic class. Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion that it’s “common sense” to round up all the brown people at any Home Depot, factory, or front yard that ICE decides might have “illegals.” ….
This ruling is in many ways worse than Korematsu v. United States, which upheld that because of WWII and “military necessity,” Japanese-Americans could be put into internment camps in West Coast “exclusion zones” just on the basis of their ancestry. Korematsu is rightly thought of as one of the worst decisions in Supreme Court history….
(anti)Civic republicanism
[Tracking the very bad ideas and philosophies that have led us to this point, on the brink….]
You Can’t Worship God and Money — Theological Abominations in Trump’s America
Liz Theoharis, September 9, 2025 [TomDispatch]
The Debate We Still Need To Have
William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Sep 13, 2025 [Our Moral Moment]
In December of 2019, when Jonathan published a book arguing that religious nationalists were misusing the Bible to justify the MAGA movement, Charlie Kirk challenged Jonathan to a debate. Kirk had joined Jerry Falwell, Jr., then President of Liberty University, to launch an academic center on the role of faith in American public life. Though they did not know it, we were in conversations at the time that would lead to us launching the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School three years later. We thought it was important for Christians to have an open and honest conversation about how Jesus calls us to live out our faith in politics.
ICE is Eating the Soul of America
Garrett Graff, September 9, 2025 [Doomsday Scenario]
Silicon Valley Ideologies as a Lens for Viewing Current Events
Nat Wilson Turner, September 10, 2025 [Naked Capitalism]
Cory Doctorow, September 10, 2025 [Pluralistic]
The wellspring of enshittification isn't poor consumption choices, it's poor policy choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn't their personal moral failings, it's the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions
Henry Farrell, Sep 11, 2025 [Programmable Mutter]
...One book on the list argues this and more. James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual cheered on the dynamic, wealth-creating individuals who would use cyberspace to exit corrupt democracies, with their “constituencies of losers,” and create their own political order. When the book, originally published in 1997, was reissued in 2020, Thiel wrote the preface….
When Corporate America Set America Down a Dark Path
Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism
The political violence we are seeing today is a result of a torn social contract. And that didn't start on partisan terms, it started in corporate America.
