Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 06, 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]
Welcome to the Age of Disappearance: America’s new era of secret police
Hamilton Nolan, July 02, 2025 [How Things Work]
…an avalanche of new funding for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and anti-immigration measures is, in fact, coming. This is going to spill well past the bounds of what any sane person would consider to be “immigration enforcement.” It is going to create a lavishly funded, unaccountable, quasi-secret police force that will transform our nation for the worse. Very soon.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the terrifying scale of this new funding. This bill contains enough money to build a new system of immigration detention centers far bigger than the entire federal prison system. The American Immigration Council says that it will be enough to facilitate the “daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.” It will let ICE hire more field agents than the FBI. Its $170 billion in funding for Stephen Miller’s rabid campaign to purge America of brown people is comparable to the total annual funding for the United States Army.
Donald Trump envisions himself as an all-powerful leader whose will is equal to law. He is bent on revenge against his political enemies. He has installed extreme loyalists in the Justice Department, the FBI, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and all other security departments. The courts have declined to meaningfully restrain his abuses of these departments. This budget will give him the final piece of the puzzle that he needs to achieve his fever dream: a nationwide army of masked, unaccountable armed agents empowered to snatch anyone they like off the streets, and the physical infrastructure to imprison or deport those people at will. Thousands of men with guns, unrestrained by judges or local police, who do not answer to Congress, who point guns at the press, who arrest whoever they want, for reasons they do not share, and do whatever they wish with those people. The implications of this are going to make America a much darker place….
…ICE has already arrested a number of Democratic elected officials, including mayors and members of Congress and a judge. In this environment, it is a trivial matter for Trump and his loyalists to concoct reasons to arrest almost anyone. People can be arrested if they are immigrants, if they look like they might be immigrants, if they illegally harbored or assisted immigrants, or if they somehow impeded ICE’s quest to arrest immigrants. The mission can and will be scaled up from “deport immigrants” to “punish those who want to stand in the way of our mission.”….
16 Thoughts On The Republican Budget Atrocity
Brian Beutler, July 03, 2025 [Off Message]
- Quite apart from the economics, this secret police force and the prison network that will be built for it, is the most repugnant and frightening aspect of the bill; Medicaid can be funded again, food stamps can be funded again, clean energy can be funded, taxes can be increased progressively. But an immigrant prison network, overseen by Trump-loyal paramilitaries, with no resources for due process, will be very hard to dislodge, and could easily be turned against the citizenry. This is Stephen Miller’s wet dream and it will stain the whole country….
Trump falsely questions Zohran Mamdani’s citizenship, threatens to arrest him over ICE operations
[ABC, via Naked Capitalism 07-02-2025]
Trump’s Threat to Deport Mamdani Isn’t a Joke
Ken Klippensteinm, July 3, 2025
Last month, according to an internal memo, the Justice Department ordered its attorneys to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings” — the process by which naturalized Americans can be stripped of their citizenship — not for fraud or criminality, but “against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security.”
Strategic Political Economy
There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away
[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 07-02-2025]
Beijing is selling clean energy to the world, Washington is pushing oil and gas. Both are driven by national security….
While China still burns more coal than the rest of the world and emits more climate pollution than the United States and Europe combined, its pivot to cleaner alternatives is happening at breakneck speed. Not only does China already dominate global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, E.V.s and many other clean energy industries, but with each passing month it is widening its technological lead….
China has also begun to dominate nuclear power, a highly technical field once indisputably led by the United States. China not only has 31 reactors under construction, nearly as many as the rest of the world combined, but has announced advances in next-generation nuclear technologies and also in fusion, the long-promised source of all-but-limitless clean energy that has bedeviled science for years.
Global power shift
BRICS Without China? Xi’s No-Show at Summit in Brazil Is No Coincidence
[YouTube, via Naked Capitalism 07-05-2025]
[Yves Smith: “This video does not consider the thesis that another well-substantia...