Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 18, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution
Trump in TROUBLE as Amy Coney Barrett SNAPS at Supreme Court (YouTube video)
[Legal AF, May 16, 2025]
[TW: Leah Litman, Michael Popok and Alex Aronson discuss the Supreme Court hearings on Friday 5-16-2025. This is ostensibly about birthright citizenship, but perhaps the more important issue is whether US District courts can impose injunctions nationwide. I do not recall ever before having linked to a discussion of Supreme Court hearings, but these were extraordinary in showing how (anti)Republicans and conservative are attempting to obliterate two and a half centuries of legal development and reasoning in the USA republic’s experiment in self government. Recall that the (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians repeatedly sought and obtained injunctions to stop implementation of Biden policies they disliked. But now that Democrats and liberals are stopping Trump policies with court injunctions, (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians are arguing that only the Supreme Court can impose nationwide injunctions.
[But it’s even worse: Trump’s former personal attorney, now serving as U.S. Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, actually argued that a court injunction can apply only to the particular case and the particular litigant. (This was the point in the hearings that Justice Amy Coney Barrett sputtered “Really?” with some incredulity.) In other words, according to Sauer, if you want to prevent Trump / Musk / DOGE from disposing of 12,351 workers from an agency, you would need 12,351 injunctions for each of the 12,351 agency workers to protect all of them. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor, pointedly asked Sauer, “You’re talking about the hundreds and thousands of people who weren’t part of the judgment of the court. They would all have to file individual actions?”
Litman, Popok and Aronson also discuss how (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians are pushing for laws and legal decisions that would almost totally restrict the path for class action lawsuits, the only alternative to using court injunctions to legally protect large groups of people. With this, you see the outlines of the legal assault on American law and jurisprudence that has been developed during the past half century in the seminars and conferences by the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, Mercatus Center, and the rest of the apparatus of plutocrat-funded conservatives and libertarian entities.
[As I have argued before, the “left’s” response to this assault on American law and jurisprudence has been crippled by the “left” rejecting the legitimacy of American history and institutions for being based on racism and misogyny. I firmly believe this is the primary reason the doctrines and ideas being developed by conservatives and libertarians were largely ignored for the past half century. The “left” has yet to deal with the question of why the plutocrats are expending so much to reinterpret and change American law and jurisprudence. What was there in place before the plutocratic assault that plutocrats want to obliterate, and the “left” has been ignoring?
[Especially frightening is that “Justices” Thomas and Alito appear to have accepted Sauer’s arguments.]
In Birthright Citizenship Case, Trump DOJ Asks Supreme Court Justices to Make Themselves Irrelevant
Garrett Epps, May 16, 2025 [Washington Monthly]
… Thursday’s argument had two aspects, which appeared and disappeared like the Katzenjammer Kids playing peekaboo throughout the nearly three hours of oral argument. The Court had formally assembled to hear the first: When is it okay for one federal district judge to block a government policy nationwide?
The second was: Has every Congress, every Court, and every administration for the past century and a half read the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause wrong, leaving Donald Trump, on his sole authority, to upend the rule that all babies born in the U.S., except the children of diplomatic families, are citizens at birth?
Though Sauer began his argument by boldly proclaiming the administration’s novel interpretation of the Amendment (it applied, he said, only to the children of free slaves in 1868 and has no effect on the children of immigrants today), he quickly moved to the administration’s real aim in bringing this “emergency docket” application before the Court.
In Sauer’s view, the case was about a broader issue than the permissibility of “universal injunctions” (federal district court orders that block new executive policies nationwide). Article III of the Constitution, which created the federal judiciary and gives it its powers, he argued, does not permit any federal court, at any level, to issue such injunctions.
This raises the question: What if the government loses in the district court—and then loses again in the Court of Appeals? What if it loses in the Supreme Court? What court can order it to stop engaging in behavior that Article III courts have found to violate the Constitution?
Without quite saying so, Sauer let it be known that the answer is: None.
If plaintiffs won in the Supreme Court, he graciously conceded, they could take the judgment to the bank—for themselves, that is. But Sotomayor asked him, once the Court decided the constitutional issue, would its order bind the government to stop the unconstitutional action against anyone?
Well . . . said Sauer . . . Not so much.
The result of such a case, Sauer said, would not be a Supreme Court order binding everyone else, but instead a Supreme Court precedent. And of course, plaintiffs still being injured by a government policy (for example, by being rendered stateless by an executive order) could cite that precedent in their cases. “If there was a decision that violated the precedent of the Court, then the affected plaintiffs could get a separate judgment,” he said.
Responded Sotomayor, “You’re talking about the hundreds and thousands of people who weren’t part of the judgment of the court. They would all have to file individual actions?”
Maybe not, said Sauer—if the case could satisfy “the rigorous criteria of Rule 23,” to be certified as a class action.
But if not, said Sotomayor, “you are claiming that not just the Supreme Court—that both the Supreme Court—and no lower court can stop an executive from universally, from violating those holdings by this Court.”….
If a president can simply wave away that much adverse authority—and then only grudgingly apply his losses in court—then the role of the federal courts will be, from now on, quite different from the one they have played for the past 100 years. American-style judicial review would become something like the Mexican writ of amparo, by which parties can get a judgment blocking an unconstitutional law only as to their individual cases; others in the same situation must go to court to get their own amparo. In the atomized world envisioned by the administration, judicial review might be called the Writ of Sisyphus. No matter how often a court pushes the rock up the hill, it will face the same task over and over if the government so chooses.
McKay Coppins, May 16, 2025 [The Atlantic, via ownwithtyranny.com]
...Vought’s critics have warned that elements of his agenda— for example, unilaterally cutting off funding for congressionally established agencies such as USAID— are eroding checks and balances and pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis. But in interviews over the past several weeks, some of his allies told me that’s the whole point. The kind of revolutionary upending of the constitutional order that Vought envisions won’t happen without deliberate fights with Congress and the judiciary, they told me. If a crisis is coming, it’s because Vought is courting one.Bannon told me that mainstream Republicans have long complained about runaway federal bureaucracy but have never had the stomach to take on the problem directly. Vought, by contrast, is strategically forcing confrontations with the other branches of government. “What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over,” he said. “There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”… Vought himself has written that we are living in a “post-Constitutional time.” Progressives, he argues, have so thoroughly “perverted” the Founders’ vision by filling the ranks of government with unaccountable technocrats that undoing the damage will require a “radical” plan of attack. “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years,” he wrote in an essay for The American Mind, a journal published by the Claremont Institute.What exactly would such an approach look like in practice? Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and a friend of Vought’s who helped steer judicial nominations in Trump’s first term, told me that he expects an escalating series of standoffs between the Trump administration and the judicial branch. He went so far as to say that if the Supreme Court issues a decision that constrains Trump’s executive power in a way the administration sees as unconstitutional, the president will have to defy it. “The reptiles will never drain the swamp,” Davis told me. “It’s going to take bold actions.”
J. Michael Luttig, May 14, 2025 [The Atlantic]
When Trump again assumed the presidency in January, he— like every American president before him— swore an oath to faithfully execute the laws of this nation, as commanded by the Constitution. In the short time since, Trump hasn’t just refused to faithfully execute the laws; he has angrily defied the Constitution and laws of the United States. In America, where no man is above the law, Trump has shown the nation that he believes he is the law, even proclaiming on social media soon after assuming office that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
From the moment he entered the White House on January 20, 2025, Trump has waged war against the rule of law. He not only instigated a worldwide economic crisis with his hotheaded, unlawful tariffs leveled against our global trading partners and our enemies alike; he deliberately provoked a constitutional crisis with his frontal assault on the federal judiciary, the third and co-equal branch of government and guardian of the rule of law— grabbing more and more power for nothing but power’s sake.
On his first day back, foreshadowing his all-out assault on the rule of law, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,200 January 6 rioters. Soon, he began to persecute his political enemies— of whom there are now countless numbers— and to fire the prosecutors for the United States who attempted to hold him accountable for the grave crimes against the Constitution that he committed after losing the 2020 election.
Also within those first 100 days, the FBI arrested the Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan in her Milwaukee courthouse on federal criminal charges that she was “obstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the United States” and “concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest,” because she invited an undocumented immigrant appearing before her on misdemeanor charges to exit her courtroom by way of the jury door rather than the front door of the courtroom. The evidence, at least as revealed so far, does not come close to supporting these charges.
The arrest and prosecution of judges on such specious charges is where rule by law ends and tyranny begins. The independent judiciary is the only constraint of law on a president. It is the last obstacle to a president with designs on tyrannical rule.
Appearing on Fox News, the attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, defended the evidently unlawful arrest: “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” she said. The judges “are deranged, is all I can think of. I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today if you are harboring a fugitive … we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”No, Ms. Bondi, our judges do not think they are above the law, and no, judges are not deranged. They are simply upholding their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States— the same oath you took.
It is now entirely foreseeable that arrests of judges will occur in the federal courts across the country as well. To read the criminal complaint and related FBI affidavit that led to Judge Dugan’s arrest is to understand at once that neither the state courts nor the federal courts could ever hope to administer justice if the spectacle that took place in Judge Dugan’s courthouse on April 18 was to occur in state and federal courthouses across the country.
It’s impossible to imagine that the federal government could ever prove the charges against Judge Dugan. But that was not the point of the FBI’s arrest.
…The rule-of-law casualties of these presidentially provoked national crises are mounting by the day. America cannot withstand three-and-a-half more years of this president if his first few months are a harbinger of what lies ahead.
Trump has spoiled for this war against the federal judiciary, the Constitution, and the rule of law since January 6, 2021. He has repeatedly vowed to exact retribution against America’s justice system for what he falsely maintains was the partisan “weaponization” of the federal government against him.No one other than Trump and his most sycophantic supporters believes that the government’s attempts to hold him and others accountable for their actions that day amount to “weaponization.” With the world as witness, Trump attempted to thwart the peaceful transfer of power— committing perhaps the gravest constitutional crime that a president could ever commit. The United States had no choice but to prosecute him for those crimes, lest he be allowed to make a mockery of the Constitution of the United States.
It is Trump who is actually weaponizing the federal government against both his political enemies and countless other American citizens today.
Judge Michael Luttig on Trump's 100 Days of Lawlessness (YouTube Video)
[Telos News from Ryan Lizza, May 8, 2025]
[TW: while I appreciate that Luttig is not only opposing Trump, but doing so with monumental erudition and powerful articulation, I still cannot help thinking that the crucial point has yet to be reached: when conservatives such as Luttig realize — and admit — that the conservative project was inevitably going to result in Trump or some other authoritarian, and they begin the autopsy of their ideology to discover why.]
Trump’s clash with the courts raises prospect of showdown over separation of powers
NICHOLAS RICCARDI, May 18, 2025 [Associated Press, via politico.com/playbook]
Tucked deep in the thousand-plus pages of the multitrillion-dollar budget bill making its way through the Republican-controlled U.S. House is a paragraph curtailing a court’s greatest tool for forcing the government to obey its rulings: the power to enforce contempt findings….
Is Rule Of Law Still All That Important To Americans... In the 21st Century?
Howie Klein, May 15, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
...Rule of law isn't some abstract ideal— it's the firewall between freedom and fascism.
And it wasn’t some afterthought or accidental feature of the American experiment— it was baked into the foundation from the start, because the founders knew exactly what it meant to live under arbitrary power. Many of them had watched, in real time, as the British monarchy wielded authority without accountability: imposing taxes without representation, quartering soldiers in private homes, arresting dissidents without fair trial. That experience of imperial overreach wasn’t just a political grievance— it was a lesson in what happens when law serves rulers instead of the people….
What we’re seeing now is how the entire American project, flawed as it has always been, was built on the idea that law should restrain power— not serve it….
SCOTUS to Trump: Due Process! Alito and Thomas dissent
Joyce Vance, May 17, 2025
Friday afternoon, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 In one of the many immigration cases currently in the courts as a result of Trump’s deportation of alleged Tren de Aragua gang members without any due process. In A.A.R.P. v. Trump, the Court enjoined the government from summarily deporting alleged gang members under the Alien Enemies Act while litigation over the constitutionality of those deportations works its way through the courts.
The decision is a per curiam opinion, which means no single justice signed it, but it represents the view of seven of them. You can read the full decision here. It runs to 24 pages, and is worth spending some time with, if only to get the Court’s tone. Suffice it to say, the majority is displeased with the government….
Federal grand jury indicts Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan in ICE case
[Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via Naked Capitalism 05-14-2025]
Joyce Vance, May 15, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
While this case is largely viewed as a politically motivated prosecution, it is worth noting that the acting U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Richard Frohling, has been in the office since 2000. He has served as the First Assistant, the number two person in the office, since 2015. That means he was in that position for part of the Obama administration and through both the Trump and Biden administrations. He served as the acting U.S. Attorney during the Biden administration. He also served as the Criminal Chief during the Obama administration. In other words, he doesn’t look like a political hack.
Trump not violating any law
'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law'
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Hasan Piker detained at the border and questioned for hours over politics
[User Mag, via Naked Capitalism 05-14-2025]
Past presidents couldn’t keep gifts of lions or horses. How could Trump accept a jet from Qatar?
[CNN, via Naked Capitalism 05-13-2025]
‘Gestapo Nation’ – Inside the ICE Arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka
[Work-Bites, via Naked Capitalism 05-13-2025]
Trump administration welcomes 59 white South Africans as refugees to the US
[Aljazeera, via Naked Capitalism 05-13-2025]
Feds Begin Political Vetting for American Citizens
Ken Klippenstein, May 14, 202 [via Naked Capitalism 05-15-2025]
Men DOGEbags at Work
Blitzscaling for tyrants: The lightning-fast path to tearing down due process
Henry Farrell, May 12, 2025
Here are some features of DOGE’s approach to changing government:
DOGE is all about scaling. Its fundamental ambition is to get big things done very quickly, and on the cheap.
DOGE looks to scale through data. Humans don’t scale well - hiring and firing take time and come with a lot of politics. Data and algorithms can be scaled up much more easily.
DOGE is highly tolerant of mistakes. You can’t build big and build quickly without making messes along the way.
DOGE looks to overwhelm the opposition before the opposition can even figure out what is happening. Scale up fast enough, and you will be able to set the rules of the game before the other players even realize that there is a game to win.
DOGE relies on a small elite team to completely reshape a much larger organization.
DOGE is hostile to regulation. Rules are made to be broken.
DOGE went looking for phone fraud at SSA — and found almost none
Natalie Alms, May 15, 2025 [GovernmentExecutive]
Since SSA installed new anti-fraud checks on claims made over the phone, only two claims out of over 110,000 were found to likely be fraudulent, according to internal documents obtained by Nextgov/FCW….
“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said.
The attention to fraud, however, did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend.
The lags stem from the three-day hold placed on telephone claims in order to run the antifraud claims, a move that “delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,” as the document noted….
The additional slowdown to retirement processing comes as the agency deals with an influx of retirement claims this year that surpasses previous numbers, according to an internal SSA email announcing a sprint to bring that number down. SSA has over 140,000 unprocessed retirement claims that are over 60 days old.
They Looted Companies — Now They're Looting the Government
Lynn Parramore, May 12, 2025 [Institute for New Economic Thinking]
...Economist William Lazonick has spent decades analyzing that transformation. He argues that corporate America has abandoned its commitment to innovation and productive investment, replacing it with a laser focus on cost-cutting, price gouging, and tax dodging to boost profits so they can do more stock buybacks—all in the name of maximizing shareholder value. Most executives are no longer rewarded for building durable businesses or contributing to the real economy—they’re rewarded for how efficiently they extract value from the companies that they control.
Lazonick calls this model a “scourge,” blaming it for weakening U.S. technological leadership, driving massive inequality, and destabilizing the broader economy. Now, he warns, this same extractive logic is infiltrating the federal government.
The ongoing 2025 budget debates are a case in point. Under the guise of “efficiency” and “fiscal responsibility,” the Trump administration has proposed slashing $163 billion from federal spending — cuts that would gut education, housing, and medical research—all of which are essential for value creation. The language mirrors what executives have long used to justify layoffs, offshoring, and disinvestment. But in this case, it’s not a corporation being hollowed out. It’s the state itself….
'A Huge Scandal': Internal Doc Exposes Trump-Musk Hunt for Social Security Fraud as a Sham
Jake Johnson, May 16, 2025 [CommonDreams]
An internal Trump administration document reportedly shows that anti-fraud checks recently installed at the Social Security agency have found just two cases of potentially improper benefit claims out of more than 110,000—a rate of 0.0018%.
The documents, first reported Thursday by Nextgov/FCW, further undercut President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk's narrative that Social Security is brimming with fraud. Musk falsely claimed in March that "40% of the calls into Social Security were fraudulent."
The anti-fraud checks for Social Security have been applied only to benefit claims made over the phone. According to the internal document, "No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases." Earlier this year, amid widespread outrage, the Social Security Administration (SSA) walked back a proposal to scrap many of its phone-based benefit claim services….
Heather Cox Richardson, May 13, 2025
...Musk’s turn from DOGE back to AI is revealing not just in providing evidence that his primary interest all along was not in “waste, fraud, and abuse” but in collecting government data about the American people. It is not likely a coincidence that the administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last Thursday and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter on Saturday. Both Hayden and Perlmutter have questioned the unauthorized use of copyrighted material to train AI…..
USDA, DOGE demand states hand over personal data about food stamp recipients
[NPR, via Naked Capitalism 05-11-2025]
LEAKED: Acting FEMA Director’s Plan for “FEMA 2.0”
Ka (Jessica) Burbank, May 16, 2025 [Drop Site]
Thursday, May 15, 2025, at 2:00pm EST, the new acting director of FEMA, David Richardson, held a “town hall” with staff. Drop Site obtained 30 minutes of leaked audio from today’s meeting, as well as 10 minutes of leaked audio from Richardson’s introductory meeting on Friday, May 9, 2025. Both are transcribed in full below.,
The former acting director, Cameron Hamilton, was fired just one day after giving Congressional testimony, where he stated: “I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” Many have credited this statement for his ouster, including one FEMA employee who told Drop Site, “since Cam said he didn’t think getting rid of FEMA was good for the country, Trump fired him.”
During today’s town hall, when Richardson was asked “which is more important, the President's will or the interests of the American people?” Richardson told staff “to me, they're the same thing.” Rambling at times, Richardson spoke about putting “a large part of response and recovery down to the states,” and conducting “mission analysis,” which involves identifying “all of the laws that govern FEMA,” and limiting operations only to what is required by law. Richardson calls the new mission and direction for the federal agency “FEMA 2.” When asked about DOGE’s involvement in FEMA, Richardson told staff that he wrote a memo to DOGE today, saying, “you don't make any decisions” for FEMA.
Shadow SEC: The PCAOB Should Be Carefully Reviewed, Not Hastily Abolished
[The CLS Blue Sky Blog, via Naked Capitalism 05-17-2025]
Strategic Political Economy
Historian DESTROYS Big Myth Of Trump And New Far Right - w/. Quinn Slobodian (YouTubeVideo)
Quinn Slobodian discusses his new book Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right.
...like it or not these people — the Trumps, the Brexiters — were now the tribunes of the working class you know whether we liked it or not on the left, and that didn't sit right with me... as a critic of neoliberalism. Asking myself does that mean I now have to side with the people who seem like the consequent opponents
3:14
of the status quo system? ...It only took a second glance at the actual people who were involved with leading this supposed backlash against capitalism to see that they were actually in many cases much more hardcore capitalist radicals than even the neoliberals that preceded them…....these are hardcore Thatcherites who felt like the EU was now this smothering socialist behemoth….
10:17
then there's also a willingness as I describe in the book for example Murray Rothbard, the famous anarcho capitalist in the 1990s, he saw Pat Buchanan this like firebreathing critic of globalism as a potentially useful ally as a Republican presidential candidate. Even on paper like this guy was the farthest thing from a libertarian you could find: he wanted to do protectionism He wanted to close the borders He wanted to reinforce traditional morality. And Rothbart was like, we can maybe ride this tiger through to some better outcome… let's see how far we can get against the broader left which is the shared enemy of both the ethno-nationalists and the economic neoliberals
14:25And even in the heartland of industrial capitalism the United States and Great Britain the New Deal is on the rise The Keynesian model is on the rise So we need to you know be the keepers of the book so to speak But we add the NEO It's not just old school liberalism because we realize that in an era of mass democracy you can't just like force the working class into things that you could have to get back to the gold standard just liquidate half the workforce you know liquidate factories...
19:01….That was the shocker to me was that in the 90s they were prematurely or away precociously freaking out about all the things that would be described 25 years later as like wokeism and progressive ideology. So they were worried about feminism They were worried about gay rights movement. They were worried about anti-racism and all that stuff already...
If China can rise, why can’t India?
[Asia Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-17-2025]
Under What Circumstances Might the US Dollar and the Yuan Both Crash?
Michael Shedlock [via Naked Capitalism 05-13-2025]
[Yves Smith: “A must read.”]
Global power shift
MAGA and the American Pope: Seven things to know about Pope Leo XIV (The Bulwark)
[The Bulwark, via The Big Picture May 12, 2025]
… MAGA
Those monomaniacal narcissists are losing their damn minds over the guy….
To the extent that [the new Pope’s] retweets are a window into his values, he believes in traditional Catholic social justice teachings—which are in direct conflict with large swaths of the current Republican political project.
No matter how apolitical Leo XIV tries to be, MAGA will polarize around him and turn him into a fetish object in its culture war. (See above.)….
But I’d put even money that Trump picks a fight with him, because he can’t help himself. To Trump, an American pope who is not openly on the side of MAGA is a provocation….
the Vatican is dominated by Europeans and they are deeply suspicious of America and American Catholics. To them, we are toddlers with shotguns.
Earlier this week, Bishop Robert Barron explained to a reporter from CBS why the next pope wouldn’t be American:
“Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: ‘Look, until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.’ And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don’t want America running the world religiously. So, I think there’s some truth to that, that we’re such a superpower and so dominant, they don’t wanna give us, also, control over the church.”
Barron is one of America’s MAGA priests, so naturally he could not imagine that anyone else in the world might view America as being in decline.
But we are and it’s obvious.
It’s obvious to the people of Canada, who just elected a prime minister exclusively on the grounds that the American century was over.
It’s obvious to the Chinese, who are planning to step into the vacuum and establish their own world order.
It’s obvious to our European allies, who are now making plans for a future in which America is toothless, lazy, and impotent.
And maybe—just maybe—this reality was obvious the College of Cardinals, too.
Maybe they looked at America and realized that it was no longer a colossus bestriding the globe. No longer exceptional. Not just in decline, but deluded about its reality.
Bombshell NYT Report Reveals 'Invisible' F-35 Nearly Shot Down by Houthis
Simplicius, May 14, 2025
A truly ‘bombshell’ New York Times article revealed the jaw-dropping truth a few days ago about the real reasons Trump pulled out of Yemen.
First a summary for those who don’t want to read the article:
“According to a New York Times article, U.S. President Donald J. Trump grew frustrated after the lack of immediate results and numerous mishaps and setbacks during Operation Rough Rider (ORR), the operation to degrade and destroy Houthi military capabilities and hamper their ability to strike commercial and naval shipping in the Red Sea.
“New details were also revealed in the article, including those on the nature of strike operations themselves. Already known to many, the Houthis downed a staggering 7 MQ-9 "Predator" drones in just the first 30 days of ORR, which started back in March 2025.
“Additionally, citing unnamed U.S. officials, an unspecified amount of F-35 and F-16 fighter jets were nearly downed by Houthi air defenses in the same time period. While U.S. pilots are well trained enough to be able to evade, counter, and/or defeat incoming surface-to-air missiles, the article detailed the looming possibility that a U.S. pilot could be shot down, killed, or captured….”
As we know, the Houthis then caused the USS Truman to lose two F/A-18 Super Hornets, valued at ~$70M each. NYT writes that by then, Trump had had enough.
“But the cost of the operation was staggering. The Pentagon had deployed two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 bombers and fighter jets, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses, to the Middle East, officials acknowledged privately. By the end of the first 30 days of the campaign, the cost had exceeded $1 billion, the officials said.”
...It now makes all the more sense as to why Israel dared not go anywhere near Iran’s border with its own F-35Is: the West knows their planes are in fact detectable by the radars of the resistance, and the latest episode merely proves this fact. The only reason the Houthis didn’t get the shoot down likely comes down to the fact that it’s easier to manufacture a radar—a much older technology—than it is to make a missile with the kinematic properties that allow it to chase down a maneuverable fighter jet; the radar likely did its job but the missile couldn’t quite finish it.
The fact is, the West has spent decades building up an entire doctrine of warfare that is slowly becoming obsolete—one that relies on high-tech, high-cost weapons which cannot be reproduced at scale. Part of this is due to the fact that with the increasing complexity of modern ‘high-tech’ weapons, supply chains become problematic, particularly when China controls most of the world’s rare earths.
.
Notes on the Crises, via Naked Capitalism 05-14-2025]
Gaza / Palestine / Israel
Medhurst Case: Test of a Turning Tide on Gaza
[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 05-14-2025]
The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics
Most Americans don’t earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds
[CBS News, via Naked Capitalism 05-16-2025]
A credit crunch is coming soon
[Seeking Alpha, via moonofalabama.org 05-13-2025]
US Spring Homebuying Season Has Its Weakest Start in Five Years
[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 05-17-2025]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 05-17-2025]
The housing market has never been this unaffordable in U.S. history.With inflation-adjusted home prices setting a record over the last three years.We're now in the biggest housing bubble of all-time, and the only period that came close was 2006, before the big crash.
Trumpillnomics
With Moody’s downgrade, US loses treasured Aaa credit rating
[Reuters, via Naked Capitalism 05-17-2025]
[Yves Smith: “As is usual, the downgrade happened only after Mr. Market made the downgrade via the sustained increase in 10 and 30 year yields.”]
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 05-12-2025]
Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack says she’s hearing from firms that aren’t sure how much tariffs will go up, so they are beginning to implement a sequence of rolling price hikes to avoid a larger, one time increase in prices. Some firms that haven’t faced tariffs are also raising prices because their competitors, who do face tariffs, have raised prices.“That certainly would be the type of environment where the tariffs could be more inflationary rather than just a one-time increase of the price level.”Hammack said it could be a while before the Fed has visibility on whether and how to change rates.
Republicans Aim To Enshrine Rental Price-Fixing
[The Lever, May 13, 2025]
Accused of price gouging renters, RealPage could now get a legal shield from GOP lawmakers — after a lobbying surge and a flood of campaign cash.
Trump’s White House has let scammers fleece regular people
[The Verge, via Naked Capitalism 05-13-2025]
Trump Appointees Are Hijacking the Patent System:Cronyism is threatening American innovation.
Alex Moss, Timi Iwayemi, May 15, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Predatory finance
An Evening with Michael Lewis, from “Liar’s...
Barry Ritholtz, May 14, 2025 [The Big Picture]
Health care crisis
They Cut Medicaid, Not the Waste: Congress Protects Big Insurance While Slashing Care
[HEALTH CARE un-covered, via Naked Capitalism 05-15-2025]
Collapse of independent news media
The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence On Press Freedom And The Media
[Religion Unplugged, via Naked Capitalism 05-11-2025]
Trump’s Plan to Give Right-Wing Propagandists a Global Megaphone
[Free Press, via Naked Capitalism 05-11-2025]
Creating new economic potential - science and technology
Scientists Crack 70-Year Fusion Puzzle, Paving Way for Clean Energy
[SciTechDaily, via Naked Capitalism 05-11-2025]
Democrats' political malpractice
House Democrat starts ‘abundance movement’-inspired caucus
[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 05-13-2025]
Why the “Abundance Agenda” Could Sink the Democratic Party
[The Nation, via Naked Capitalism 05-11-2025]
[TW: The fundamental problem with Ezra Klein’s “Abundance Agenda” is that it carefully avoids taking aim at the usury, speculation and economic rent extraction of Wall Street and the corporatists. Only by eliminating the usury, speculation and economic rent extraction that has come to dominate the economy over the past half century can you possibly hope to build an economics of wide-spread, equitably shared prosperity. ]
The missing tech case for how we create an era of abundance
[Freethink, via The Big Picture May 12, 2025]
A new political movement and government reform won’t be enough to bring abundance.
Howie Klein, May 15, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
Is politics just a team sport? You put on a different uniform and you’re part of the other team? The way Charlie Crist did— utterly destroying the Democratic Party brand in Florida. In recent years, conservative Republicans, uncomfortable with the GOP’s turn towards fascism, have decided to bring their conservative values over to the Democratic Party….
And now we have David Trott, Michigan's former eviction king and ex-Republican congressman from the Detroit suburbs who didn’t run for reelection because of Trump. He switched to independent, which he still is but now wants to run for his old seat— which is being abandoned by conservative Democrat Haley Stevens who is running for the open Michigan Senate seat.... [Trott is a] former foreclosure attorney splits his time between Florida and Michigan, where he still owns with a partner 16 legal newspapers in Michigan, commercial real estate properties and is chairman of ATA National, a national title insurance company. Before his time in elected office, Trott was a major Republican donor….
So what even is a political party anymore? A brand? A flag of convenience? A shell you inhabit until you’ve wrung every ounce of personal gain out of it, then toss aside like a campaign yard sign the morning after Election Day? When conservatives cycle through the Democratic Party not to evolve, not to build, but to water it down— to defang it, derail it and reshape it in the image of the party they claim to have fled— what’s actually being preserved? What’s being fought for? If someone doesn't stand behind the New Deal, why should they be allowed to even call themselves a Democrat?
It’s not just a matter of jerseys and team colors. It’s a matter of survival. Because when the opposition is marching toward fascism, and the supposed resistance is too busy recruiting former enablers of that very project, the whole game becomes theater. Worse— it's complicity….
Trump’s losses aren’t necessarily Democratic gains…....while talking to these voters, we heard a parallel emotion to their frustration with Trump. They’re second-guessing their 2024 vote choices, but they don’t necessarily say they would have swapped their vote for Kamala Harris. And they don’t say they plan to vote Democratic in the future — or declare that Republicans have completely lost them either.Some Philly residents told us they’re still trusting the process. Nikita, and other college students we talked to, said they’re willing to give Trump more time before turning on him completely. They like some of what he’s doing, and think he can still get back on track.Other first-time Trump voters said they wished they’d sat out the election entirely and plan to do so again. White, for example, said the last few cycles have made her lose faith in politics completely. “I’m going to be honest. I’m tired. I feel like at this point, my vote don’t matter,” she said. “It’s like, I can’t do nothing to change anything. There was a time that Black people couldn’t vote. There was the time women couldn’t vote…but I feel like my vote don’t matter.”
Retirement Is the New Resistance: The Democrats waging war on their gerontocracy
Russell Berman [May 12, 2025, The Atlantic]
Trump’s transactional regime
Pam Bondi's Qatar Links Under Scrutiny Over Trump's Luxury Plane Gift
[Newsweek, May 12, 2025]
Bondi worked as a foreign lobbyist for the nation of Qatar, earning $115,000 a month in the role which she held in 2020 and in the run up to the World Cup in 2022.
[TW: This Newsweek report is incorrect: it was the lobbying firm which Bondi worked for, Ballard Partners, which received $115,000 a month from Qatar.]
Resistance
Righting Wrongs (w/ Kenneth Roth) | The Chris Hedges Report
Chris Hedges, May 14, 2025
27:45
...[Vaclav] Havel's great essay The Power of the Powerless….
28:47
as as you correct point out these solitary figures often because very few people it's almost suicidal to do what they do standing up to this regime but the their own moral authority and their own courage gives them a kind of power in the face of that regime yeah no I mean Chris you're correct in this and I think the reason is that you know we tend to look at dictatorships as omnipotent you know that they they've got all the arms they can do whatever they want but in fact um dictatorships require to a large degree the acquiescence of people if you're hanging on to power you know simply by shooting people everybody's going to be constantly plotting to get rid of you and you could face the the fate of Assad for example who everybody hated and nobody stood up for him in the end and he was quickly toppled and so that's you know every dictator's nightmare and this is the power of the dissident because the dissident you know speaks to the choice the freedom that each individual has um the ability to say no to the dictator we want something better and what dictators always worry about is that that that individual dissident or that small group of dissident is going to spark a broad movement...
‘We Are in a Moment of Unparalleled Peril’: An Interview With Naomi Klein
Cerise Castle, May 13, 2025 [The American Prospect]
Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War
America’s Long Coup: How the GOP Rigged, Lied, Stole Its Way Into the White House for Over 50 Yrs
thomhartmann, May 13, 2025 [Daily Kos]
Greg Palast recently did the math, and it’s now irrefutable: the only reason Trump is in the White House is because over 4 million Americans were either denied their right to vote or their votes were discarded.
The US Elections Assistance Commission data tells the damning story: a staggering 4.7 million voters were wrongfully purged from voter rolls before the election….
Over 2.1 million mail-in ballots disqualified for minor clerical errors
585,000 in-person ballots thrown out
1.2 million “provisional” (what I call “placebo”) ballots rejected without being counted
3.2 million new voter registrations rejected or not processed in time….
We Need Calls Now!' Republicans Slip Nonprofit Killer Bill Into Tax Package
Jake Johnson, May 13, 2025 [CommonDreams]
Doug Bock Clark, May 16, 2025 [propublica.org]
Republican Jefferson Griffin conceded after a monthslong legal battle. But Democrats suffered a defeat that may be more consequential: losing control of the state board that sets voting rules and adjudicates election disputes.
Heather Cox Richardson, May 16, 2025
In his newsletter today, retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump’s posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election swept like a brushfire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream. In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the U.S. Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing “anti-white genocide.”
Southworth calls this “narrative warfare,” and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now, this technique is also known as “political technology” or “virtual politics.” This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian president Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool: flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out.
The administration has clearly adopted this plan. As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order “to sell the country on [Trump’s] expansionist approach to presidential power.”
The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines.
“We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” The White House brought right-wing influencers into the press pool, including at least one who before the election was exposed as being on the Russian payroll. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, who before he began to work for Trump was a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”….
Civic republicanism
9 Federally Funded Scientific Breakthroughs That Changed Everything
[New York Times, via The Big Picture May 17, 2025]
The U.S. is slashing funding for scientific research, after decades of deep investment. Here’s some of what those taxpayer dollars created.
GPS…. That idea, in 1958, became Transit, a navigational system for tracking nuclear subs, developed by Johns Hopkins and the Defense Department. Then came the Navstar Global Positioning System, starting in 1978, for wider military use; in 1983, commercial airlines were authorized to use it, too. All of this required newer satellites; atomic clocks for better accuracy; rockets to launch everything into orbit; research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Naval Research Laboratory; and government contracts to companies like Rockwell International, General Dynamics and Boeing. Now it’s just called GPS.
Diabetes and Obesity Drugs…. In 1980, Dr. Jean-Pierre Raufman, a researcher studying insect and reptile venoms at the National Institutes of Health, discovered that venom from the Gila monster had a pronounced effect on the pancreas, prompting it to release a digestive enzyme. This piqued the interest of Dr. John Eng, an endocrinologist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx, who worked with Dr. Raufman to isolate and identify a novel compound, exendin-4, in the lizard’s venom.
Quantum Dots… Quantum dots are tiny crystals of semiconductor stuff, 10 nanometers (billionths of a meter) or smaller in size, and they have become a mainstay of consumer electronics…. First baked in 1980, quantum dots have been refined and made mass-producible with funding from NIST, the U.S. Army Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies and other agencies.
Sign Language Dictionary
CAPTCHA
Life Without Screwworm…. In 1950, scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture realized that if they could create, breed and release sterile males, they could fool the females into mating the population out of existence. Two decades and $750 million later, Sterile Insect Technique worked. The technique has since been adapted and used abroad against other agricultural and disease-carrying insects.
Bladeless LASIK Surgery…. In the years that followed, Dr. Kurtz collaborated with Gérard Mourou and his colleagues at the optical science center, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, to turn the laser into an ophthalmological tool. Their work led to bladeless LASIK surgery, which uses a femtosecond laser, instead of a blade, to carve into a patient’s eye.
Infant Massage…. Dr. Schanberg began collaborating with Tiffany Field, a psychologist at the University of Miami who had been studying tactile stimulation and infant development. Together, and with additional N.I.H. funding, they demonstrated that premature infants who received regular stroking and massage gained weight faster and were released from the hospital sooner than those who did not.
The Dustbuster…. To collect soil samples from underneath the Moon’s surface, NASA needed to arm its astronauts with a compact, lightweight, cordless drill. So the agency enlisted Black & Decker to help develop the Apollo Lunar Surface Drill. “In the course of the development, Black & Decker used a specially developed computer program to optimize the design of the drill’s motor and insure minimal power consumption,” the space agency wrote in its 1981 issue of Spinoff, a publication devoted to products and innovations that benefited from NASA research and funding. The company’s work on the moon drill paved the way for the development of a suite of cordless consumer products, including the Dustbuster, a hand-held vacuum cleaner that came to define a whole new category of cleaning products….
[TW: Two points. First, government supported research and development is a form of government intervention in the economy that is ideologically opposed by conservatives and libertarians. The entire (anti)Republican Party, top to bottom, should be condemned for its embrace of this ideology. Science in the Federal Government. A history of policies and activities to 1940 (an online copy is available here). A. Hunter Dupree. Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 1957. Second, the effects of Trump’s and Musk’s destruction of government supported research and development is incalculable, because it involves the technologies and abilities that will not be developed and will not become available in the future. ]
Rev. William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove reminded their readers on May 16, 2025
"Critical access" hospitals in America’s rural communities were established by the Hill-Burton Act of 1946, during the Truman administration, to provide life-saving healthcare to America's heartland, where people often find themselves too far removed from a regional hospital to receive timely treatment in an emergency. Because they do not see the volume of patients that have become the norm at major regional hospitals, these critical access hospitals often require federal subsidies to keep the doors open. This is nothing new; their existence has been a justified expense for millions of Americans since the mid-twentieth century.
[National Institutes of Health, via Naked Capitalism 05-16-2025]
Lysenkoism 2.0 and the dismantling of the NIH
[Science-Based Medicine, via Naked Capitalism 05-14-2025] Well worth a read.
[Johns Hopkins, via Naked Capitalism 05-11-2025]
Elite impunity
Many Americans Are Thinking— Or Should Be— About What Happens When The System Fails
Howie Klein, May 13, 2025 [downwithtyranny.com]
