Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 14, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
White House Refuses to Rule Out Summary Executions of People on Its Secret Domestic Terrorist List
Nick Turse, December 12 2025 [The Intercept]
The Trump administration ignored questions about whether it would order the killings of those on its NSPM-7 list — even while answering our other queries.
Hegseth Ousted Head of US Southern Command Who Raised Concerns About Boat Strikes
[defenddemocracy.press, 12-07-2025]
FBI Making List of American “Extremists,” Leaked Memo Reveals
Ken Klippenstein, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2025]
SCOOP: Trump Admin Is Preparing to Revoke Visas of Critics of Elon Musk’s Twitter
Prem Thakker and Asawin Suebsaeng, Dec 11, 2025 [Zeteo]
Trump officials are considering revoking the visas of former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton and Imran Ahmed, of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
[Amnesty International, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2025]
[Migrant Insider, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2025]
The Data Doesn’t Lie: How ProPublica Reports the Truth in an Era of False Claims
Stephen Engelberg, December 6, 2025 [ProPublica]
Trump pardons major drug traffickers despite his anti-drug rhetoric
[Washington Post, Dec 8, 2025]
The president has granted clemency to about 100 people accused of drug-related crimes during his time in office, a Post analysis shows.
Stephen Holmes, Dec 9, 2025 [project-syndicate.org]
The pardon power is the only authority the US Constitution places entirely in the president’s hands, immune from legislative override or judicial review. For Alexander Hamilton, who assumed that shame would restrain abuse, Donald Trump is the nightmare scenario….
Hamilton was wrong. He did not anticipate a shameless president.
Hamilton’s case for the pardon was political, not moral. He barely mentioned mercy. The power’s core purpose was emergency peace-making: “in seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a welltimed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.” ….
Trump’s Ethnonational Security Strategy
Michael Burleigh, Richard Haass, Stephen Holmes, and Zaki Laïdi, Dec 9, 2025 [project-syndicate.org]
The United States’ new National Security Strategy is a tissue of populist ideology that reflects no understanding of the real challenges facing the country and views the main threat as liberal democracy itself. The result will be bad for most Americans and their European allies, but highly beneficial for financiers, tech billionaires, racists, and authoritarian powers, especially Russia and China.
Jim Stewartson, Dec 10, 2025 [MindWar]
Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It
[404 Media, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2025]
How Donald Trump Jr’s Fortune Jumped Six-Fold In A Year
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2025]
Eric Trump Has Gotten 10 Times Richer Since Dad’s Election
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2025]
Strategic Political Economy
Local Spies with Lethal Gear: How Israel and Ukraine Reinvented Covert Action
[Wall Street Journal, via The Big Picture, December 13, 2025]
A potent new fusion of old-style human spycraft with cutting-edge technology is having a big impact on high-stakes conflicts.
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, December 13, 2025]
Human history can be told as a series of advances in warfare, from chariots to crossbows to nuclear-tipped missiles, and we are living through what may be the fastest advancement in weaponry ever. Ask any five veteran national security experts and you will hear about five different emerging technologies with the potential to change the world of combat. Swarms of robotic aircraft that work in unison to find and kill targets without any human oversight. Advanced cyberweapons that can immobilize armed forces and shut down electrical grids across the country. A.I.-designed bioweapons engineered to kill only those with certain genetic characteristics.
Global power shift
Poland: From Potential Eurasian Bridge to NATO’s Emerging Hybrid Rampart
[Near Eastern Outlook, via Naked Capitalism 12-09-2025]
Eastern Europe is undergoing a profound strategic transformation. For years, Ukraine has functioned as a Western platform of confrontation, created by Washington to advance its geopolitical interests, but its capacities are now exhausted. Its role as an anti-Russian instrument is coming to an end.
Looking at the current situation — the November Geneva peace talks under the Trump administration, where Ukraine agreed to a 19-point plan while Russia stood firm on its demands — the conflict is moving toward a conclusion in which Moscow is likely to achieve its objectives. In this cold, geopolitical calculus, a new, more stable platform is needed. That platform is Poland.
The country fits this role perfectly — already securely anchored within NATO structures, minimizing the risks associated with defending a state outside the alliance. Polish society, after years of relentless media and political campaigns, has largely internalized anti-Russian narratives. The political class still believes that “loyalty to the West” in itself guarantees success, as if a magical formula could transform subordination into prosperity….
During the Cold War, the US recognized that to compete with the Soviet Union it needed more than weapons and alliances. It required minds capable of understanding its adversary’s history and worldview. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were among several prestigious institutions that poured millions in funding to build Area Studies centers at universities like Harvard, Columbia and Berkeley. These institutes trained generations of scholars who became advisers, analysts and diplomats. Among the most notable were George Kennan, Robert Tucker, Jack Matlock and Stephen Cohen who embodied the “scholar-statesman” ideal - intellectually rigorous, linguistically trained and able to explain Russia to Americans in Russia’s own terms.
That generation has faded away. Today’s policy community is dominated not by historians or linguists but by lawyers, political consultants and think-tank operatives whose expertise lies in managing narratives, not in understanding nations….
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Israel remained leading killer of journalists in 2025: RSF
[Al Jazeera, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2025]
Israeli 'Predator' Smartphone Spyware Exposed
Kit Klarenberg, Dec 11, 2025 [Global Delinquents]
New research published by Amnesty International exposes the disturbing internal workings of Intellexa, and its constellation of digital espionage products. This includes ‘Predator’, a highly invasive resource linked to grave human rights abuses in multiple countries. Intellexa’s menacing technology allows government customers to access target smartphones’ cameras, microphones, encrypted chat apps, emails, GPS locations, photos, files, browsing activity, and more. It’s just the latest example of an Israeli-linked spyware specialist acting with no consideration for the law - although one wouldn’t know that from Amnesty’s probe.
Intellexa is among the world’s most notorious “mercenary spyware” purveyors. In 2023, the company was fined by Greece’s Data Protection Authority for failing to comply with its investigations into the company. An ongoing court case in Athens implicates Intellexa apparatchiks and local intelligence services in hacking the phones of government ministers, senior military officers, judges and journalists.…
Shaun King, Dec 10, 2025
In a normal society you would not be hearing this from me, but from CNN and The NY Times, but they are all bought and paid for….
When tech people say “geofencing,” I want you to picture an invisible electric fence drawn on a map.
You take a real place – your church, your college campus, a conference center – and you draw a digital boundary around it using GPS and cell-phone location data. Every time a person’s phone crosses that boundary – when they park, walk into Bible study, drop their kids off at youth group – that phone can be silently tagged and added to a list.
From there, whoever owns that fence can follow the people on that list all over the internet, serving them specific ads, videos, and “news” stories designed to shape how they think and feel.
In the FARA packet, Show Faith By Works lays it out in their own words. They boast that their “Targeted Geofencing Strategy” will:
“create a digital perimeter around key Christian gathering places”
deliver “targeted pro-Israel content and sympathetic anti-Hamas messaging to engaged audiences”
become “The largest Christian Church Geofencing Campaign in US History”
“Target Christian Churches on Sundays, and Christian Colleges on weekdays… Ads will continue to track those who entered our target zones.”
7653-Exhibit-AB-20250927-1
Elsewhere, they state plainly that they will “geofence same targeted churches running digital ads that are both pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian” and then “geofence attendees of our events to follow up with social media advertising.”
Oligarchy
Convenient Delusion: Money = Intelligence
Jim Stewartson, Dec 08, 2025 [MindWar]
...The richest man in the world publicly agrees that money and intelligence are essentially the same: Elon Musk thinks being poor means you have “low intelligence and low self control.” The implied corollary, of course, is that people with money, like him, are automatically smarter—and commit less crime.
This is the underlying delusion driving the broligarchy, the PayPal Mafia, or whatever label you choose for the Silicon Valley fascists that helped give us Donald Trump: Musk, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, David Sacks, Curtis Yarvin, and their collaborators.
It’s not just white supremacy they’re promoting. It’s capital supremacy: money equals intelligence. It is often the delusion of the powerful to make themselves believe that they were just born better.
To evaluate this claim, here is a compilation of clips from Musk, Thiel, Yarvin, and the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp. These are not particularly smart men; they are just high-functioning psychopaths willing to be the most amoral operators….
Trump‘s recent comments about Somalians being “garbage” because their country is fraught with poverty and violence is another example. This was followed up by Stephen Miller who said openly that Democrats have a plan for the “Somalification of America.”….
Media Dance Around the Big Story: How, Under Trump, the Rich Run the Country
[Going Deep with Russ Baker, Dec 07, 2025]
… Take how the Republican tech billionaire Michael Dell and his wife have donated $6.25 billion to fund investment accounts for at least 25 million American children. Sounds like kindhearted philanthropy, right?
But here’s the background:
As part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the Treasury will put $1,000 into so-called Trump Accounts for every US citizen child born between January 2025 and January 2029. (Both parents and the baby must have Social Security numbers) These are supposed to be investment accounts that parents will manage on behalf of their children.
What’s wrong with it? To begin with, calling them “Trump Accounts” is transparently shameless bribery of the public: Vote for us, and Trump gives you money.
Even worse is when the wealthy, in this case Dell, come to Trump’s rescue by covering an additional group — many born before January 2025, ages 10 and under, who would get $250, depending on their zip code.
The Dells’ net worth is $147 billion, and their gift will cost them only 4 percent of that. Not a lot of skin off their nose. While it’s still a lot of money combined, I suspect that, from the point of view of the individual recipients — it is close to nothing….
Towards a Deeper Understanding of Our Age of Monsters and Predators
Josh Marshall, December 12, 2025 [Talking Points Memo]
Jim Stewartson, Dec 07, 2025 [MindWar]
Narcissism is a complex phenomenon but, generally speaking, there are two types: grandiose narcissism (of the type we all recognize in Donald Trump) and vulnerable narcissism. Vulnerable narcissism can lead to narcissistic rage—and there is increasing evidence that narcissists can fluctuate between the two types….
Vulnerable narcissism is fragility. It is a shame-management system where status becomes emotional oxygen. Bigotry becomes a shortcut to status. And self-love becomes outgroup hate.
We are seeing an explosion of fragility around members of the broligarch class—a fountain of narcissistic rage coming from their vulnerable egos.
Elon Musk is one of the most racist accounts on his own platform. His bigotry is constant and unavoidable, by design. But of late he has dropped all pretense about his internal model of the world. His paranoia about protecting white people has become his primary focus….
Aaron Schaffer and Clara Ence Morse, Dec 11, 2025 [Washington Post]
Common Dreams
Extreme inequality – and what to do about it
Michael Roberts [via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2025]
[Oligarch Watch, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2025]
Felonomics
New Unemployment Claims Jump to Highest Level in Months as Trump Economy Teeters
Jake Johnson, Dec 11, 2025 [Common Dreams]
[Economic Policy Institute, December, 11 2025 [via Common Dreams]
Despite pledging to fix the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), President Trump’s trade policies have failed to put North American workers first, according to a new Economic Policy Institute report.
Trump replaced NAFTA with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2020. But Trump’s USMCA has not fixed the intense downward pressure on jobs and wages that has plagued U.S. manufacturing economies in the generation since NAFTA.
Manufacturers across the country have shed or furloughed more than 576,000 jobs since he signed the agreement, EPI’s analysis shows. The U.S. trade deficit with Mexico and Canada has more than doubled from $125 billion in 2020 to $263 billion in 2025….
[Yahoo!, via Naked Capitalism 12-09-2025]
Trump signs executive order limiting states ability to regulate AI
[UPI, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-2025]
Gary Marcus [via Naked Capitalism 12-12-2025]
...Anything that goes wrong, from AI-fueled cybercrime to bioweapons attacks facilitated by AI to teen suicides apparently linked to GenAI will be on his hands, and his reputation. And because he has become so tight with Silicon Valley he will also be closely tied to any AI-tinged economic debacle that happens on his watch.
As Adam Billen, Vice President of Public Policy at Encode AI put it in an email to many of us who have been tracking all of this, The White House is now “doing it [preemption via Executive Order] because they know they can’t get what they want in Congress.”
Whether the Executive Order survives constitutional challenges is another story, as LawAI’s analysis of a prefinal draft (not that different from what was declared today) makes clear….
I Factchecked Trump’s Big Politico Interview – Because Politico Didn’t!
Mehdi Hasan, Dec 09, 2025 [Zeteo]
Interviewer Dasha Burns allowed the president to tell lie after lie, and also failed to push back on his racism. So here is a rebuttal from Zeteo.
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
[University of Massachusetts Amherst, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2025]
...Using the pre-pandemic sectoral price volatility and the price changes from early 2022 as the price shocks for our simulations, we show that a small set of sectors in energy, food and agriculture, healthcare, chemicals and, to a lesser extent, wholesale trade and housing, have a disproportionate capacity to increase inequality when their prices rise. We find a substantial overlap between the sectors that are systemically significant for inflation and those that are significant for inequality....
The affordability crisis is an inequality crisis. When prices spike in key sectors, it's not just inflation—it's a massive redistribution shock that hits poor households hardest. In our **new working paper**, we identify the sectors that matter most.
Health care crisis
I’m an Infectious Diseases Doctor. Our Pipeline of Experts Is in Distress.
[MedPage Today, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2025]
Every December, physicians across the U.S. who entered the National Resident Matching Program fellowship match learn whether they've secured a position for the next stage of their training. For most specialties, Match Day is a moment of excitement. For infectious diseases (ID) in recent years, it has simultaneously become a moment of quiet dread as we brace for how many fellowship positions will go unfilled.
Once again, we watched an already-fragile pipeline weaken further this year: only 272 physicians matched into adult ID programs, and colleagues in pediatric ID fared even worse, with only 44 physicians matching into open training spots. More than half of programs went unfilled. This is not a blip and represents a sustained contraction of a critical workforce.
As an ID physician who loves this work and would choose it again without hesitation, these numbers are deeply troubling…. A graduating internal medicine resident fresh out of training can take a job as a hospitalist and earn around $300,000 annually. Someone who elects to pursue ID, especially in academic medicine or within a public health department, may earn half that or less after completing 2-3 additional years of training….
But compensation is only part of the picture. The broader environment in which ID physicians work has deteriorated dramatically. Over the past several years, ID specialists have become convenient targets or "human piñatas" for political frustrations related to the pandemic, vaccines, and public health measures. The hostility directed at the field has been unlike anything we've seen in decades….
Meanwhile, the structural supports for the field are eroding. Federal research funding for ID is being cut at a moment when emerging pathogens and antimicrobial resistance demand more innovation, not less. The CDC and other public health agencies are in crisis, crippled by political interference and years of underinvestment. Public health as a profession has been repeatedly undermined and dismissed as irrelevant by people with no understanding of what it takes to keep populations healthy. These attacks do not occur in a vacuum, and they shape how trainees view the future viability of the field….
Is It Cold, Flu or Covid? What to Know About Symptoms and Testing.
Dani Blum, Nov. 25, 2025 [New York Times]
If you feel ill but your symptoms are only above the neck — a stuffy nose, a bit of a sore throat — you could just have a common cold, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.But a hacking cough, muscle aches and full-body fatigue likely indicate a viral infection like flu or Covid. Even infectious disease specialists struggle to tell which virus is which from symptoms alone.Both flu and Covid can induce coughs, shortness of breath, fatigue, runny noses, head and body pains, sore throats and gastrointestinal issues like stomach pain and diarrhea. The illnesses can also blunt people’s sense of smell — although with influenza, that typically happens because of nasal inflammation, while Covid can impact nerves that help people smell….One key differentiator, though, is the onset of symptoms. Covid often comes on gradually: your head clogs with congestion one day, your throat aches the next. With flu, people frequently describe feeling like they’ve suddenly been “hit by a dump truck,” ….
Nick Keppler, Dec. 5, 2025 [New York Times]
Predatory finance
The New Private-Equity Billionaires Who Are Taking Over Wall Street
[Barron’s, via The Big Picture, December 13, 2025]
Private-market institutions are taking over from old-line legacy banks. The names to watch—and the dangers to watch out for.
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2025]
Mounting debt crisis means global South governments are spending on average 15% of their revenue servicing external debt. This figure has doubled since 2010. More than 3.4 billion people now live in countries that spend more on interest payments than on health or education.
They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals
Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices Across the Economy
Matt Stoller, Dec 13, 2025 [BIG]
The Trump FTC tried to hide a complaint showing Pepsi forced shoppers to pay higher prices everywhere but Walmart. But now it's unsealed. And the politics of affordability are explosive.
How a Cryptocurrency Helps Criminals Launder Money and Evade Sanctions
[New York Times, via The Big Picture, December 13, 2025]
Restoring balance to the economy
We Have to Create a New Form of Society
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Dec 13, 2025 [Common Dreams]
Our job is to recognize the problems are real and to put the finger on the real cause of the problem, which is the greed of the oligarchs in this country.
[Lever Daily, Dec 10, 2025]
A battle over the ballot. In a win for campaign finance reform, the attorney general of Colorado wants to use state law to redefine corporate powers and circumvent the Supreme Court’s efforts to torpedo campaign finance laws. The move follows a Montana ballot initiative that seeks to ban corporate political spending. This comes as several conservative SCOTUS members appear poised to side with Republicans and repeal what remains of party-coordinated spending limits — including Justice Samuel Alito, who argued yesterday that the court’s Citizens United decision opening the door to dark money, which he voted for, was “unfairly maligned” during recent arguments on the matter.
- Data collected by Michael Beckel at Issue One reveals individual donors can give nearly 3,000 percent more to the national political parties today than they could at the time of the Citizens United ruling, thanks to further campaign finance deregulation.
[TW: We have reached peak hypocrisy: Trump and the oligarchs’ conservative movement are about to eliminate birthright citizenship. Why should we allow corporations to be citizens? ]
Phil Weiser and Javier Mabry, December 10, 2025 [Denver Post, via Lever Daily, Dec 10, 2025]
...We don’t have to wait for the Supreme Court to overturn Citizens United to fix the mess we are in. Citizens in Montana are now advancing a ballot initiative to get corporate money out of politics. While the measure cannot overturn Citizens United, it proposes the next best step, removing corporations’ authority to engage in political activities in the first place. Defining in state law what corporations are allowed to do is not a new principle; it has existed in American law since the dawn of our republic.
Colorado should join Montana and advance a similar concept to change Colorado law. And it can be done by a bill from the legislature–amending our laws to make it explicit that corporations are not human beings, and, therefore, do not possess the rights of human beings.Colorado’s law listing out corporate powers granted by the General Assembly sets out a range of powers corporations wield — like the ability to sue and be sued, to lend money, to dissolve, and so on. And it provides corporations “the same powers as an individual.” The legislature not only has the constitutional authority to modify these powers, but it has done so often — like it did in 1996, 2000, 2003, and 2019….
[TW: In “Incorporating the Republic: The Corporation in Antebellum Political Culture” [Harvard Law Review, Vol. 102, No. 8 (Jun., 1989)], an anonymous author identifies the adoption by the States, beginning with Connecticut in 1837, of laws of general incorporation, as a major shift in the public treatment of corporations, and by extension, the republican views of concentrated economic power, and the distribution of wealth. It was, if not an abandonment altogether, then a major modification, of the traditional republican suspicion of incorporation being a process by which the government bestowed unequal privileges and favors on a cabal that would become more dangerous to civil liberties and public virtue as it became more powerful. Part of the argument made at the time was that general incorporation laws were necessary to democratize, in the Jeffersonian sense, the need to pool private capital for ever more complex economic forms of organization involving increased specialization.
[“By substituting simple registration procedures for the requirement of asking state legislatures for special charters, general incorporation laws represented the antebellum period’s major contribution to the development of the private corporation as the standard form for engaging in business. On the practical level, they made the corporate form more widely available than it had previously been; on the ideological level, they abandoned the implication that corporate privileges should be granted for special, public purposes.
[This had dramatic effects, the anonymous author notes, on the classic republican “anxieties about the relation of “commerce” to “virtue.” On the one hand, there were fears about the development of a new aristocracy dependent for its wealth on government privileges and therefore with an interest in corrupting government by diverting it from the public good. On the other hand, there were concerns that the competitive advantages resulting from these privileges would lead to the destruction of a class of economically and politically independent small entrepreneurs and farmers.” (I.e., Jefferson’s idealized yeomanry.)
[“….While Democrats were quick to see the granting of special legal privileges by such charters as a source of both political corruption and economic inequality, Whigs argues that corporations were models of how commerce and virtue could be linked by involving citizens in mutual projects for the public good.”
[The author does not proceed from there, but the observation must be made that the Democrats failed largely because they were unable or unwilling to confront the problem of slavery, while the Whigs failed to understand how powerfully insidious the profit motive would be once unleashed from corporate charters which included explicit specifications as to the activities to be undertaken and the civic obligations to be met.
[Yet, the republican ideal of civic duty, while crippled, had sufficient strength to linger for another century and act as an ideological barrier that constrained most, but not all, egregiously selfish corporate behavior. As late as 1916, the Pennsylvania Railroad – for decades the largest corporation in America in both revenues and employment – would boast in the Foreword to PRR’s official history, Seventy Years of America's Greatest Railroad: The Pennsylvania, 1846-1916, [Strong, Sturgis & Company, New York, NY]:
The greatest industrial achievement of the United States is its railroad system.
Other countries have achieved greatly in manufacturing, in farming, and in mining. But in no country in the world has a transportation system been developed equal to that of the United States.
The railroads in this country carry their freight at a cheaper rate, they pay higher wages to their labor, they pay out a greater percentage of their earnings in the form of taxes, than the railroads of any other country in the world….
[Try to imagine one of our largest corporations today bragging that it paid the highest wages and highest rate of taxes.
[At the end of “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765-1900” (The American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 4, Oct., 1993), James L. Huston argues that the American Revolutionaries’ republican ideal of equal distribution of wealth being vital to political health of the republic was discarded in the period of 1880 to 1900:
“The agent of its demise was the emergence of the large-scale corporation, the rise of Big Business, in the form of the trust movement in the 1880s and then the merger wave of 1898-1904.” I think it is important to understand that what Huston is referring to here is the seizure of large American industrial companies which were locally based, into nation-wide trusts that were tightly controlled by a small group of financier-rentiers led by the House of Morgan. Before this trustification and merger wave, urban areas had their own steel company, their own railroad company or companies, its own shoe manufactory; their own machine tool and precision instrument makers (though these last three were, like textiles, concentrated, but not exclusively, in New England along the river fall line), their own carriage works, and so on. Trustification was a major reorganization of the American economy that fundamentally altered the political economy of the United States, the most damaging of which was, as Huston argues: “Simply put, the corporation killed the republican theory of the distribution of wealth and probably ended whatever was left of the political theory of republicanism as well.” ]
Economic questions: the James Tobin question
Richard Murphy, December 10, 2025 [Funding the Future]
James Tobin, a Nobel laureate, advisor to presidents, and one of the most respected economists of the twentieth century, proposed a simple idea with extraordinary implications: a tiny tax on foreign exchange transactions, representing just a fraction of a per cent, and so small that long-term investors would barely notice, but significant enough to discourage the rapid-fire speculation that destabilises economies and enriches speculators while creating nothing of social value.
Tobin's proposal emerged in the early 1970s, just as financial markets were supposedly being liberated from the Bretton Woods constraints and global capital mobility was exploding. He saw what others refused to confront: that unconstrained finance was becoming an international casino, and society would end up paying the bill when the bets turned bad.
His logic was straightforward: if finance is going to extract wealth from society, society has a right, and even a responsibility, to reclaim a portion of it for public purpose.
Hence the James Tobin Question: If a small tax on financial speculation could curb destructive short-termism and fund the public good, why have governments allowed the financial sector to veto it for half a century?
….The James Tobin Question reveals a stark truth: the obstacle to a fairer financial system is not complexity, but power….
To answer Tobin's question is to ask a more fundamental one: who governs our economy? Is it public institutions accountable to citizens, or private interests accountable only to themselves?
If democracy means anything in economics, the Tobin Tax should already exist.
New glossary entry: Spahn taxation
Richard Murphy, December 10, 2025 [Funding the Future]
The Spahn tax is a proposed system for taxing foreign exchange transactions in order to reduce harmful financial speculation. It was developed by German economist Paul Bernd Spahn as an alternative to the Tobin tax, or an addition to it.
Spahn argued that a flat-rate transaction tax, as James Tobin proposed, risked penalising routine, low-risk currency trades that facilitate international trade and long-term investment. Instead, he suggested a two-tier system….
Richard Murphy, December 10, 2025 [Funding the Future]
...Thatcher did two things: first, she used an Order in Council to switch off exchange controls in 1979; then, eventually, she scrapped most of the legal framework.
She also removed the “Corset” (Supplementary Special Deposit Scheme), which was the Bank of England mechanism designed to restrict the growth of the broad money supply between 1973 and 1980 by penalising banks that lent too much, as well as relaxing hire purchase rules and deregulating Building Societies to allow them to lend more. Thatcher's changes were widespread.
Ever since, those who benefit from an open-door system have pretended that this history makes capital controls impossible. It doesn't. It just means we have to legislate again.
First, we would need a new Capital Management Act. That would give the Treasury powers to require registration and reporting of cross-border financial positions, to impose quantitative limits or charges on classes of flows (for example, short-term wholesale funding), and to direct the Bank of England and the regulators to use their tools to achieve those aims. The old Exchange Control Act is a precedent: it shows Parliament has done this before….
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
US scientists design first highway that wirelessly charges electric trucks on the go
[Interesting Engineering, via Naked Capitalism 12-10-2025]
Disrupting mainstream economics
Silvia Secchi, December 11, 2025 [Notes on the Crises]
...We count as small family farmers people who (totally legally, I want to make clear) personally benefit from being considered farmers, but who have no interest in operating a commercial enterprise. Their inclusion in the Census of Agriculture masks the level of consolidation in US agriculture, by lowering the value of aggregate statistics, and bolsters the number of small farmers. The last census of agriculture gave another assist to the agricultural lobby by eliminating the correspondence between one primary operator and a farm (that had existed since the 19th century). That means from now on we will likely see increases in the number of operators, even as the number of farms decreases.
To give a sense of the dimensions of this problem, in the latest Census of Agriculture 20% of farms sold less than $1,000 worth of agricultural products, and another 20% sold between $1,000 and $4,999. A full 65% of US farms sell less than $25,000. More than half the farms in Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia sell less than $2,500. In Arizona, a whopping 70% of farms sell less than $2,500 worth of agricultural products. This is clear evidence that ranchette owners are largely counted as farmers: 55% of Arizona farms are below nine acres. In contrast, the state’s crop extension budgets are based on a 1,500-acre farm with 1,000 acres in crops. In the Census of Agriculture, there are only 230 farms that would meet that criteria, just 1.4% of the total….
12 questions about modern money
Richard Murphy, December 07, 2025 [Funding the Future]
Where does the money lost in a crash go?
Richard Murphy, December 10, 2025 [Funding the Future]
Steve Keen, Dec 07, 2025 [Building a New Economics]
This is another of the reaction videos to my interview by Novara Media some weeks ago, which explains how credit—the annual change in private debt—is an integral and volatile component of aggregate demand and income. Since Neoclassicals ignore credit because of their belief in the “Loanable Funds” model of banking, they ignore credit, which is why they didn’t see the Global Financial Crisis coming.
Information age dystopia / surveillance state
Google Bankrolled Secret Summit For Key State Lawmakers
Luke Goldstein, December 11, 2025 [The Lever]
Google Starts Sharing All Your Text Messages With Your Employer
[Forbes, via Naked Capitalism 12-09-2025]
Rhoda Feng, December 10, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Chatbot in the Kill Chain: The AI Bubble Driving Trump’s Kleptocracy
Jim Stewartson, Dec 12, 2025
The multi-trillion-dollar boondoggle threatening the economy, the military, and our collective sanity.
Run me my money, Jeff.
Amazon consumers who signed up for a U.S. Prime subscription in the last six years, or tried and failed to cancel a membership during that time, are eligible for a refund. Amazon has agreed to pay out more than $1.5 billion in consumer refunds after a federal lawsuit found the company used “dark patterns” to trap users in Prime memberships. Here’s how to see if you qualify.
Collapse of independent news media
Mainstream news coverage almost totally ignored Bannon’s extensive ties to Epstein
John Knefel & Sophie Lawton, Dec 11, 2025 [mediamatters.org]
Dennis Broe, Dec 9, 2025 [LA Progressive]
Censorship by Stealth: The West’s Algorithmic Gatekeepers
[Near Eastern Outlook, via Naked Capitalism 12-09-2025]
Climate and environmental crises
Comparing climate models with observations
[The Climate Brink, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
How Democrats Lost the White House
Christopher D. Cook [Roots Action, via Naked Capitalism 12-12-2025]
Our report identifies five main reasons for Harris’s failure:
- Voter Disenchantment: Losing a whopping 6.8 million voters who supported Biden in 2020 proved pivotal in this extremely close election. Harris’s inability to mobilize these pro-Biden voters may have been the campaign’s biggest failure.
- Biden’s Betrayal: Former President Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to run for reelection, and his stubborn refusal to step aside until very late in the process, robbed voters of a Democratic primary process, created confusion and chaos, and severely hindered Democrats’ chances.
- Abandoning the Working-Class Base: With millions of Americans already disenchanted and desperate due to inflation, the Harris campaign lost this essential Democratic base by focusing on courting Republicans, kowtowing to corporate donors’ interests, and failing to confront the role of corporate greed in escalating inflation.
- The Gaza Effect: There is ample evidence that Harris lost many voters, especially young voters, Arab-Americans, and critical support in Michigan and elsewhere, due to the campaign’s failure to shift or even signal a potential shift in policy on Israel and Palestine.
- Losing Young Voters: Extensive evidence shows a huge drop-off in both turnout and Democratic support among young voters aged 18-29.
This report examines the voluminous evidence bolstering these conclusions. We document the many ways in which the Harris campaign and Democratic Party leadership failed to meet the moment and gravely miscalculated both what and who the election hinged on.
We don’t just tally losses and failures—we also document a promising alternative that frequently outperformed Harris in 2024. Progressive and economic populist campaigns often “beat the spread,” winning where Harris lost. As we report, vast polling shows strong majority support for bold candidates and measures that address the needs of working-class Americans.
A New Report Reveals the Real Reason Democrats Lost in 2024
Monica Potts, December 11, 2025 [The New Republic]
It wasn’t because Biden voters shifted to Trump—but because so many of them stayed home. Here’s how Democrats can motivate them once more.
Democrats need to move right to win back voters in 2026 and 2028—that’s the conventional wisdom from a slew of Democratic think tanks and Beltway strategists. To make their case, they’ve released reports and polling trying to prove that voters are more moderate on many social and cultural issues—like trans athletes in school sports and immigration—than the party’s far-left activists. But an exhaustive new report, made available exclusively to The New Republic, makes a convincing counterargument. More importantly, it provides a road map for Democratic candidates that doesn’t require throwing vulnerable members of their coalition under the bus….
The report comes from Way to Win, a left-leaning “strategic donor collaborative and strategy hub” founded after the 2016 election. The report, a compilation and analysis of the surveys and focus groups they’ve done since the 2024 election, looks not just at swing voters but the entire coalition, including those who voted for President Biden in 2020 and then sat out the 2024 election. This presents a fuller picture than analyses that simply conclude the electorate swung right last November. While some Biden 2020 voters did vote for Trump last year, a substantial number stayed home. This changed the composition of the electorate, and made it look more Republican than it really was. Those who sat it out in November are much more politically aligned with Democrats but weren’t motivated to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and downballot Democrats. Determining what they want from future candidates tells a different story than centrists might hope….
Even In a Populist Moment, Democrats Are Split on the Problem of Corporate Power
Matt Stoller, Dec 11, 2025 [BIG]
Polling shows that views about big business are at a 15-year low, and overall perceptions of capitalism are dire. Videos on TikTok about weird corporate scams, dynamic pricing games, and junk fees are pervasive. Law firms that specialize in jury selection are warning big companies that people have a “deep skepticism of corporate America. People increasingly feel that too many aspects of their lives are out of their control and that they are helpless to address the issues confronting them.” 94% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans think the rich have too much influence over politics….
Within the elite of the Democratic Party, among the tens of thousands of elected officials and staffers and operatives and lawyers who comprise the bureaucratic machinery of the party, there’s a deep division about whether corporate power has any relationship to what voters care about. For instance, not a single California politician outside of Steyer and Khanna has opposed the Netflix-Warner merger, which will devastate the entertainment industry in the state. But this dynamic goes far beyond this one particular deal….
Until relatively recently, such an anti-populist approach made sense. Most Democrats thought a billionaire was someone who made a lot of money by doing something smart, often bringing us cool technology. Bill Gates might be aggressive, but he helped develop the personal computer. And this frame wasn’t some centrist thing, it was consensus. In 2011, for instance, when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died, the protesters at Occupy Wall Street set up a shrine to the billionaire.
This dynamic has changed. Over the last 15 years, Americans have started to believe that most great fortunes are extractive by nature. Tech titans used to make cool stuff, but you can only replace the iPhone with something virtually identical so many times before you lose your innovation brand. And with the rise of surveillance pricing and junk fees, people have come to believe that oligarchs don’t work for their money, they simply extract.
I’ve only seen this kind of jarring distance between elected political leaders and voters one other time, during the war in Iraq….
Democratic Voters Are Clamoring for AI Regulation. Their Leaders Aren’t Interested.
Henry Burke, December 12, 2025 [The American Prospect]
A new AI commission established by House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries includes several corporate-friendly legislators.
Daily Dirt: Real Estate Funds Mamdani’s Transition
[RealEstate.news, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2025]
Real‑estate firms poured millions into a campaign to block Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid, but the effort collapsed. After the election, industry donors—though modest in the campaign—contributed $40,900 to Mamdani’s transition between Nov. 5 and Nov. 30, a fraction of the $2.6 million he raised in that window. By Dec. 5, contributions from the sector exceeded $3 million, earmarked for staff and operational costs as he prepares to assume office. The donors span development, construction, architecture, property management, and brokerage.
Key contributors include Beachwold Residential CEO Gideon Friedman ($3,700), Washington‑area developer Joseph Kaempfer ($3,700), Craig Harwood ($2,000), LCOR’s David Sigman ($250), Albany developer Faraz Khan ($3,700), New Jersey investor Mustafa Ladha ($3,700), and JRT Realty’s Jodi Pulice ($2,000)….
Resistance
Inside Chicago’s Neighborhood ICE Resistance
Melissa Gira Grant, December 14, 2025 [The New Republic]
Residents have organized a formidable network to protect immigrant communities from Trump’s brutal deportation program. Their efforts are making a genuine difference.
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, December 8, 2025 [The New Yorker]
...This ever-proliferating content often glosses over bureaucracy, crime, and the fact that Westerners tend to sequester themselves in spaces that locals can’t afford. Anywhere must be cheaper—and less stressful—than America is today. A recent survey by the Harris Poll, a research firm, found that nearly half of its respondents had considered leaving the U.S., citing politics and the cost of living as their main factors. There’s a historical irony to these responses. Americans are looking to emigrate for the same reasons that immigrants once came to America—for safety, economic security, better opportunities, and an over-all sense that their families would have a better future.
Americans are also afraid. Between January and November, sixty-seven U.S. citizens (many of them transgender) have requested asylum in the Netherlands; last year, there were nine. No applications have been approved this year. In October, a Rutgers professor named Mark Bray moved to Spain after receiving death threats at his home prompted by a petition, from the school’s chapter of the conservative group Turning Point USA, to have him fired. Bray is a scholar of antifascism, “so the dynamics of this aren’t alien to me per se,” he told me. “But you know the Nietzsche quote ‘If you stare long enough into the void, the void stares back’? Everything I’d been writing about was suddenly looking at me through the void.”
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Peter Rothpletz, Dec 10, 2025 [Zeteo]
A 2025 Court Accountability report on rulings from different levels of the US judiciary indicates Donald Trump has enjoyed far, far more favorable results out of the Supreme Court than from both district and circuit courts, which suggests that while most judges around the country tend to blindly weigh the scales of justice, John Roberts and his conservative compatriots appear to be playing an “ideologically driven” game.
The report found that by late October, individuals or groups who challenged the Trump administration secured legal victories in approximately 60% of the 240 rulings judges had handed down. Notably, that total included winning 55% of cases before Trump-appointed judges. Not too shabby, Lady Justice!
The win-rate for folks who challenged the administration at the circuit court level was similar, with them coming out on top 59% of the time in the 90 cases analyzed by Court Accountability.
Our ol’ alphabet soup friend, known as SCOTUS, was a far different story, however. Of the 23 temporary orders and rulings passed down by the body that in some way related to direct actions by the Trump administration, Cheeto Benito luxuriated in a whopping 90% win rate. (During his first term, Trump appointed three justices to the Supreme Court, cementing its 6-3 ultra-conservative supermajority.)
Amy Coney Barrett: Laughing at the Law
Tom Hall, Dec 11, 2025 [L A Progressive]
Barrett’s new book makes clear that she knows what the Constitution says and that she heartily joins the other corporate extremists on the Roberts Court in working to shred that document….
In sum, Amy Coney Barrett’s new book makes clear that she knows what the Constitution says and that she heartily joins the other corporate extremists on the Roberts Court in working to shred that document. The book reads like a guide to ReTrumplican plans for formalizing Donald Trump’s role as a king, exempt from the terms of the Constitution and answerable only to the billionaires and multinational corporations which fund him.
She is clear about how sophistry is and will be used to get around what the Constitution actually says, and around what historians, and the Founders’ actual writings, tell us the Founding Fathers meant. It is an appallingly flagrant and open discussion of anti-democratic governance and a well thought out plan to achieve that goal….
David Daley, December 10, 2025 [The Atlantic]
Civic republicanism
A New Governing Ecosystem Is Evolving
[Noema, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2025]
Book Notes: The Technological Republic (2025)
[The Scholar’s Stage, via Naked Capitalism 12-11-2025]
Book co-authored by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his legal counsel Nicholas Zamiska.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's Blunt Call for Government By "Independent" Experts
Matt Taibbi, Dec 12, 2025 [Racket News]
Donald Trump is losing. Seven conclusions as 2025 winds down.
Garrett Graff, December 12, 2025 [Doomsday Scenario]
4) Individuals have been strong, where institutions have been weak…. Never have we seen so many of them fail the most basic of tests. Law firms, universities, and media companies have kow-towed to Trump one after another — often inexplicably, at great reputational cost, while getting almost nothing meaningful in return….
5) Even if Trumpism fails, America is fundamentally changed. We have always told ourselves “it can’t happen here.” But it now has — and we can never look at our country the same again. Trump has made American daily life coarser, more rude, and less welcoming to others. We have seen fundamental tears this year in the civic fabric of our country and communities. We now recognize and confront strains of our neighbors — especially racism and misogyny — in a way more naked and violent than most of us had believed possible in the 21st century. Decades of progress in welcoming trans people and people with disabilities and different learning styles into American life have been unwound; decades of hard-fought progress by Blacks and women in the military and government have been undone….
No foreign entrepreneur or high-skilled immigrant student will look at the US with the sense of safety, security, and opportunity that they did before January 20th. Once-secure research positions at labs, universities, and medical centers will never feel as sure-a-thing as they did.
We still haven’t recognized how much of the basic fabric of the US Trump has altered — from the sense that media organizations need to bend toward Trump to avoid business problems to the idea that immigrants don’t have a fundamental right to free speech here. A nakedly partisan and extremist Supreme Court continues to enable and supercharge a presidency that doesn’t need any more power, and we’re likely to see bedrocks like civil rights legislation unwound in the months ahead. Which leads me to:
6) The world will never look at the United States the same again. We have shattered the halo that has existed around the United States for much of the world across the eight decades since World War II — and, in many cases, even longer. By closing our doors to the world’s brightest and most ambitious immigrants, by becoming the most unreliable of world partner, by embracing corruption in government like a second-tier banana republic, and by committing literal war crimes and murder on the high seas, the US is showing a different side of itself to the world. The disappearance of USAID will mean millions of deaths in years to come; the “values gulf” between us and adversaries like Russia and China has shrunk dramatically on the world stage. Many countries are weighing their alliances not between “authoritarianism” vs. “democracy” anymore….
The legacy of “America First” long-term is going to be a country that will never be able to reintegrate itself in the world community in the same way again.
We don’t talk enough about moments like this: When Danish intelligence — traditionally the closest of US allies, and one with immense and important capabilities — says it can’t trust the US anymore as an ally. The latest Danish intelligence threat assessment actually listed the US as a threat: “The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.”
7) Accountability must come. As Brian Beutler wrote last month, “The attempt to speed-run authoritarianism has failed. The new acute danger is greater political violence (Trump calling for hangings, etc). But the concerted danger is down the line, when MAGA realizes the bill for all this corruption will come due.” ... America got to this point because we have systematically failed to hold elites to account, from systemic under-prosecution of white-collar crimes to the 2008 financial crisis to Jeffrey Epstein to Trump after January 6th.
There can be no “let’s just turn the page” kumbaya after Trump; as I said in a speech last week, the Biden administration’s original sin was believing that January 6th was the end of something, rather than the beginning. We must ensure that once it falls, Trumpism and authoritarianism cannot rise again in America.
Whatever reform agenda someday grows out of this, we must not rely on “norms” and “tradition” as we have before; too many institutions, like the Justice Department, have turned out to be eminently corruptible if you just ignore the process. (As I wrote this fall: The only check-and-balance that matters turns out to be good character.) There must be laws and enforcement mechanisms going forward. And we must strive, most of all, to return and empower people of good character in public office….
