Category: Books

Posted on

Making Capitalism Work for the Common Good

The Common Good Economy; How to Make Capitalism Work for Us All, Mariana Mazzucato, 2026

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. – John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936-1973) Also quoted by Susan Neiman in Call It Evil; Understanding the Trump Era 2026.

The book gives a brief summary of key enlightenment figures Thomas Hobbs, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, David Hume, and Adam Smith, Hegel, Marx, Engels, and John Stewart Mill:

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the emphasis on individual freedoms had consolidated into a dominant liberal framework, placing individual autonomy and self-interest at the center of political thought… Mill (1859) championed individual autonomy, resisting the authority of moral or religious communities that sought to impose goals on others. Similarly, (John) Rawls (1971-1993) maintained that the state should remain neutral among competing conceptions of the good life, focusing instead on securing the freedoms and opportunities necessary for individuals to pursue their own well being without coercion…Rawls derived two principles of justice. The first guarantees equal basic liberties for all citizens including freedom of speech, conscience, and the rule of law. The second, known as the difference principle, permits social and economic inequalities only if they benefit the least advantaged and arise within a context of equality and opportunity.

In a section entitled Lessons on collective intelligence from biology Mazzucato highlights:

Parasitic ecosystems benefit one organism at the expense of others, whereas symbiotic or mutualistic ecosystems allow all organisms to benefit while keeping each other in check. When balance in the ecosystem is disrupted by one organism becoming disproportionately powerful, the ecosystem is threatened with collapse.

Similarly forest ecologist Suzanne Simard (2022) has studied how trees communicate via underground mycorrhizal fungal networks, which she has called the ‘woods wide web’. She challenged previous work on trees that view forests as competitive environments and argues instead that trees often collaborate to support each other’s health and growth.

Scholars of the ‘collaborative economy’ study the conditions that allow communities to flourish, emphasizing community building, inclusivity, and sustainability…Relatedly, work on ‘collective intelligence’ emerging from fields such as sociology and psychology , captures the idea that people working together can solve problems better than they can individually, resulting in continuous experimentation and innovation…Moreover, this intelligence is even greater when there is social diversity, as a growing body of research has shown that diverse groups make better decisions.

In philosophy, this narrow (Eurocentric) view obscures the fact that profound philosophical traditions around the common good have long existed outside the West, including Confucianism in East Asia, Islamic philosophy across the Middle East, Ubuntu in sub-Saharan Africa, Buddhist and Hindu thought in South Asia, and the diverse worldviews of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, Oceania and beyond.

Linux was created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds while he was a computer science student at the University of Helsinki in Finland because Bell Lab’s originated Unix based computers were too expensive. Linux is open source and became the default operating system chosen as Internet servers were globally deployed. Today’s Linux’s descendant is Ubuntu, also open source and attracting large numbers of open source applications. This blog was written on an Ubuntu laptop.

Many Indigenous worldviews understand the self as emerging from relationships with community, the land and the spiritual world, rather than as something defined in isolation…By rejecting this separation, Indigenous communities view the individual and the collective as mutually sustaining, reflecting a more holistic understanding of the interdependence of the social, ecological, and spiritual dimensions that sustain life.

For example, in Ecuador, the Quechua concept of sumak kawsay – translated into Spanish as buen vivir ‘good living’ – reflects a worldview (cosmovision) in which the good life is not achieved through individual accumulation or consumption, but through harmony with nature and collective coexistence. Ecuador formally updated its Constitution in 2008 to incorporate buen vivir as a foundational principle of national development and governance.

A major advance in social economics came with Amartya Sen’s capability approach (1979). This framework shifts the focus from utility-based welfare to what individuals are actually able to do and be — what Sen calls ‘functionings’. Functionings encompass basic conditions such as nutrition and health as well as more complex aspects like self-respect and meaningful participation in community life. An individual’s ‘capability set’ — the range of functionings they can achieve — reflects their freedom to pursue a life they value, shaped by both personal characteristics and broader social, economic and institutional conditions.

Communitarian, biological and Indigenous perspectives reveal that individuals do not exist in isolation, but within interdependent social and ecological networks. Identity, wellbeing, and even generation of value in the economy are inseparable from these relationships. This challenged the idea of value as something produced only be individuals and instead points to collective value creation, in which markets are shaped by shared institutions and common objectives.

The distinction biologists draw between symbiotic and parasitic ecosystems provides a useful analogy for rethinking economics. A symbiotic economy requires attention to the quality of relationships which are shaped and governed through a wide range of mechanisms such as property rights, water rights, intellectual property, and data flows. These underlying arrangements determine whether economic systems foster cooperation or enable exploitation.

Much of mainstream economic thought has ignored such interdependence, treating humans as isolated agents and markets as neutral mechanisms. This perspective leaves little room for the social and ecological dimensions of value creation and confines collective action to addressing failures after they happen. By focusing on the way relationships are structured from the start, both within communities and with nature, we open the possibility of shaping our economy to actively advance the common good.

By contrast, former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (2018) in his book The Common Good, explores the idea of the common good in relation to what he believes to be the erosion of shared values and mutual obligations in American society. He argues that the historic US commitment to the common good — stemming from the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, and expressed through ideals such as the rule of law, democratic institutions and a commitment to truth — began to erode in the late 1970s. He perceives three major structural breakdowns have driven this shift; the degradation of political into partisan competition, the retreat of corporate responsibility in favor of shareholder primacy, and distortions within the market that encourage exploitation over fairness. Together, these dynamics have weakened public trust, accelerated economic inequality and shifted attention away from collective wellbeing towards private gain.

To restore the common good, Reich calls for a renewal of civic life grounded in trusteeship, where leaders see themselves as stewards of the common good. He emphasizes reclaiming the social use of honour and shame to condemn corruption and celebrate virtue, rebuilding a culture of truth telling in public life, and reviving civic education to instill responsibility and democratic values in future generations. In doing so, he envisions a society in which the common good once again guides the collective. Yet, like the communitarians, Reich does not provide a framework for ensuring that the common good actively shapes how the economy operates at its very core: the role of business, the role of government policy beyond fixing markets, and how the two interrelate.

A common good economy requires embedding economic objectives with the fabric of social relationships and rethinking how all actors — individuals, public institutions and private firms — relate to one another. This demands removing it from a notion of market failures; it must instead be about how to shape markets and the economy, putting the common good at the centre of all economic relationships. And it also cannot be about non-market activities. It must go to the centre of economics and markets work. A common good framework for the economy is about aligning goals, incentivizing collaboration, fostering collective intelligence, and ensuring that all participants share knowledge, risks and rewards. It moves beyond treating markets as neutral arenas for individual maximization, aiming instead to design systems that actively cultivate cooperation and shared wellbeing to make the common good possible.

To create a new economics of the common good, we must thus shift away from a focus on maximization exercises towards collective value creation, where interactions between business, governments and other organizations are viewed not as mere transactions but as relationships to be guided through principle of reciprocity.

By understanding the role the state played in forcing markets into existence, we understand that there are no deterministic market laws, but rather markets are outcomes of governance decisions. Similarly, Evans (1995) concepts of ’embedded autonomy’ show how states actively organize and stabilize markets through structured engagement with firms while retaining independence.

Market shaping can lead to more inequality, if the state is working for the interests of capital, as Marx argued. Or it can lead to more pollution, depending on the governance of companies, as well as the tax system. The question then becomes how to have the kind of government policy and governance structure that shape markets to create a more inclusive and sustainable capitalism. Outcomes orientation in this view means that instead of just viewing the bad things that arise in the economy as ‘externalities’ we can better understand how those bads are produced by the way markets work even in ‘perfect’ form, indeed through the very logic of the market.

In her book The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor (2019) talks about how inequality is coded in the law. Without un-coding, inequality remains. Marx insisted that capital was a social relationship, based on capital exploiting labour. Pistor argues that capital isn’t a natural or physical thing, but a legal construct crafted through what she calls ‘legal coding’; the selective deployment of legal tools (property rights, contracts, trusts, and bankruptcy law) that give an asset priority, durability, universality and convertibility, enabling it to generate wealth and be enforced globally. Private lawyers act as the architects of this code, deliberately shaping financial instruments, corporate structures and even intangible assets to concentrate wealth among the legally sophisticate, perpetuating inequality across countries and generations.

Unless these legal frameworks are unraveled, it is nearly impossible to change the rules of the game that produce inequality and disempowerment. Attention to legal relationships must be matched by attention to all relationships at the interface between public and private sectors, from property rights to procurement contracts to bailout schemes. Only be redesigning these structures can we begin to foster the mutualistic ecosystems necessary for an economics of the common good.

If businesses are wed solely to maximizing shareholder value, then we get specific market outcomes: a fictionalized economy where what matters most are quarterly returns and stock prices…But if we build corporate models that genuinely align long term success and value creation with social and environmental value, businesses can become powerful engines for good growth.

“Global economy watchers have inundated the internet with historical parallels for the triple financial bubble at hand, inflated by hopes and dreams for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, and previously unimaginable levels of borrowing.” World Economic Forum Nov 2025

Over the past forty years or so the stock market has become increasingly decoupled from the real economy. The growing size of the financial sector and that financialization of our economics point to the need to reduce finance’s share of the economy, while making sure that the finance that exists truly serves it.

Furthermore, finance is often very short term, making trillions from millisecond trades that are just about buying and selling existing assets instead of creating new ones.

Of all the vaccines produced during the (Covid 19) pandemic, only one embodied an outcomes-oriented approach in the design of the public-private partnership; the collaboration between Oxford University and AstraZeneca (sometimes referred to as ‘Vaxzevria’). In this model, early stage developments by Oxford were transferred to AstraZeneca for final development, manufacturing and distribution. Within this arrangement, the UK government embedded conditionalities in the Vaxzevria Supply agreement, requiring vaccines to be delivered at cost. As stated in the Agreement: ‘AstraZeneca shall use Best Reasonable Efforts to mitigate and reduce the Cost of Goods during the Term of this Supply Agreement. These terms significantly enhanced the UK government’s ability to guarantee vaccine access for all UK citizens.

After the pandemic, different attempts were made to learn the lessons on how make sure Global South countries are able to produce their own vaccines: for example, the creation of the mRNA Vaccine Technology Transfer Program. Its main purpose is knowledge sharing to increase the capacity of the Global South countries to produce their own vaccines. By distributing technology across multiple production sits in the Global South, the programme seeks to decentralize and diversify mRNA vaccine manufacturing, counter extractive intellectual property practices, and ensure that early-stage, high-risk public funding is conditional on knowledge sharing and equitable access.

Another example of knowledge sharing is the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture often referred to as the Seed Treaty. Established by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and adopted in 2001, this global agreement created a multilateral system for the sharing of plant genetic materials crucial to food security and sustainable agriculture. The Seed Treaty enables countries to freely access a pool of over sixty important food crops and forage plants, including staples like rice, wheat and maize, which have been cultivated, bred and improved upon over centuries by farmers across the globe.

From a common good perspective, the Treaty represents a shift in governance from a system based on ownership and enclosure to one based on stewardship and reciprocity. It reflects the co-creation and participation we discussed in the previous chapter, ensuring that smallholder farmers and Indigenous communities – who are often the original custodians of these genetic resources – are included in decision-making and benefit-sharing processes. Moreover, it promotes transparency and accountability, the final element of the common good compass, in how plant knowledge-sharing agreements, when designed around public purpose, can reshape economic incentives and legal norms toward more inclusive, sustainable outcomes. It also reinforces the point that innovation ecosystems should not only produce technological progress but must also institutionalize fairness in access and distribution – something that the Seed Treaty operationalizes through international law.

Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) – a layer of infrastructure that sits above hardware and internet protocols and underpins the functioning of modern markets and societies – is emerging as the defining features of this century, like roads, electricity and water systems. DPI forms the backbone of our collective life. For much of the past two decades, the digital agenda had focused narrowly on service delivery, administrative efficiency and enabling private sector innovation. But today, DPI is increasingly recognized as the ‘railways of a digital economy’ – a shared infrastructure that connects people, supports the delivery of essential services and rights – and promoted inclusion.

What is needed is a clearer understanding of what constitutes public value in the context of DPI and how that value is intentionally created and sustained. Without this framing, it is impossible to ensure the transparency and accountability of the most important technological changes of the twenty-first century.

Two lenses are commonly used to assess DPI’s public value creation: attributes and functions. Attributes refer to the technical features that make infrastructure scalable, flexible and open – such as interoperability, modular design and open source code. These features support dynamic efficiency and reduce fragmentation across digital ecosystems. Functions, on the other hand, refer to the roles DPI plays in society; fostering community and social relationships, enabling economic activity, guaranteeing essential capabilities and enhancing overall quality of life.

While both are important, they are not sufficient. A system can be technically open and functionally useful yet still fall short of advancing public goals or being governed in ways that promote the common good. Instead, a third lens is needed: the common good elements discussed in this book, which focus not only on outcomes but also on the processes and institutional arrangements through which value is shaped, distributed, and sustained.

Collective learning and knowledge sharing imply that DPI should be conceived of as a site of continual experimentation and feedback. Open source platforms such as the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) enable global collaboration and localize adaptation. By supporting shared infrastructure that evolves through distributed contributions, such models institutionalize collective intelligence and align innovation with long-term public value.

 

For Instance, the Bezos Earth Fund, established by Jeff Bezos has made important investments in climate adaptation. Yet the fund is funded by wealth generated through deeply problematic business practices. Amazon, the company Bezos owns, has relied on tax avoidance and labour exploitation to accumulate massive profits, while also producing 68.25 million metric tonnes of CO2 in 2024 – comparable to a mid-sized European country – and its carbon footprint is expected to grow further due to its AI data centres. While philanthropic initiatives like the Bezos Earth Fund provide some support for addressing climate change, they cannot offset the harm caused by the company’s core business practices.

The World Bank’s Mission 300, which aims to provide electricity to 300 million people in Africa by 2030, combines public and private investment to expand power generation and transmission, scale up decentralized renewable solutions such as mini grids, and improve affordability and regional integration. It also emphasizes community empowerment, particularly for women, by enable access to clean energy and productive uses that foster local enterprise.

In many ways, Mission 300 aligns with several principles of the common good compass. It promotes co-creation through collaboration with governments and local partners, supports collective learning via open data and shared platforms, and seeks fairer reward sharing by linking investment to social outcomes rather than short-term returns. It also emphasized accountability and transparency through public reporting and feedback mechanisms, indicating a move towards more participatory governance.

These considerations are important for thinking about how to govern artificial intelligence (AI) around common good principles. A technological breakthrough of epochal proportions, AI could and should be used for the common good. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that it is quickly going in the wrong direction. It depends on access to the gatekeeper’s cloud computing platforms. Three companies – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – control around 70 per cent of the cloud’s market share. This oligopolistic ownership structure has turned AI into a venous engine of rent extraction and a drain on knowledge from the public sector, as the private companies use their grossly excessive trillionairs incomes to lure top talent away from public labs, universities and the public service with very high salaries. Meanwhile, data privacy is being breached, misinformation is rampant, and the divide between unskilled and skilled labour is widening. AI platforms also consume enormous amounts of energy, water and minerals, exacerbating climate change, the water crisis and other environmental challenges.

Yet, like previous technological revolutions, today’s AI breakthroughs, from voice recognition to large language models were built on the shoulders of public investments. AI models are largely trained on the creative work of writers, singers, artists, journalists, illustrations and more whose creations are used without permission, and who almost always receive no compensation. Simply tightening copyright protections, as many critics have proposed, will in and of itself be insufficient to correct this dynamic. We should instead treat collective knowledge in the age of generative AI as a common good and collectively fund (and benefit from) its production. Like clean water or vaccines, the creative commons should be accessible to everyone, with risks and rewards equitably distributed among all actors.

AI is still in its infancy, though developing fast. Nobody can truthfully say what direction it will take or what its impact on society will be. We can say, however, that the best approach to AI governance would be to design a public-oriented structure that embodies the five elements of the common good compass to steer AI innovation towards public value creation..

First, AI development should be guided by a clear public mission to advance collective wellbeing, social justice and environmental sustainability, rather than serving the short-term profit motives of a few dominant corporations. This mission must be pursued through co-creation and participation involving public institutions, universities, civil society, citizens and workers across sectors. Such collaboration would ensure that the design deployment and regulation of AI reflect diverse perspectives, public needs and democratic accountability, rather than being shaped exclusively by private commercial interests.

Knowledge sharing and open access to data, models and research should replace the current reliance on secrecy and excessive patenting. AI advances funded by public resources should remain open and interoperable, allowing for collective learning and the diffusion of innovation across the public and private sectors. Moreover, risk and reward sharing must be embedded into the AI ecosystem to ensure that value generated from collective inputs benefits society as a whole. AI should be publicly supported with clear conditionalities so that outputs remain in the public domain and serve public purposes.

Finally, transparency and accountability must underpin all aspects of AI governance. Independent oversight bodies, open metrics and publicly accessible evaluation frameworks would make it possible to track AI’s social, environmental and ethical impacts, challenge failures, and hold both public and private actors to account.

Posted on

Consulting eviscerates governments and corporations

The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments, and Warps Our Economies; Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, 2023

This book exposes the Big Three consultancies; McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain and Company; together with the Big Four accountancys PwC, Deloite, KPMC and EY together with others as  “confidence” or con operations who endanger our governments and businesses and threaten the entire economies of the world.

And the big consultancies that are intimately involved in important political and corporate decision-making often have egregious conflicts of interest themselves. Clients rarely have access to information about a consultancy’s other clients, even when they are serving “both sides of the street.” In climate consulting, for example, big consulting firms work simultaneously for governments populations would like to see lower emissions and for the fossil fuel companies that contribute most to the climate crisis.

The scale of contracts with the consulting industry–via roles as advisers, legitimaters of controversial decisions and outsourcers–weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economics. The cumulative use of big consultancies that operate with extractive business models stunts innovation and capacity development and learning, and undermines democratic accountability and obviscates the consequences of political and corporate actions…The Big Con imperils us all…Battling any addiction begins with admitting the gravity of the problem.

The launch of its (French January 2021) vaccine program had been a disaster; just 5,000 people had been vaccinated by the beginning of January, compared to 316,000 in Germany and 139,000 in Spain…It didn’t take long for media outlets to uncover that McKinsey had been at the helm of the vaccine rollout.

Obamacare was a bold mission to bring healthcare to more people who needed it in the United States…Dozens of contractors were brought in to manage the delivery of core parts of Obamacare. This included HealthCare.gov, the website through which individuals could purchase subsidized private health insurance via an exchange market platform and sign up for Medicaid. By 7 a.m. (launch date Oct 1, 2013), millions of people had tried and failed to access HealthCare.gov. The website had crashed…Two and a half weeks later, the White House even considered shutting the website down indefinitely.

Technology contractors and vendors were brought in to do almost everything related to the development of the website, software and integration systems. These included the military technology giant Lockheed Martin, as well as companies that specialized in providing digital technology for the federal government such Aquilent–which has since been acquired by Lockheed Martin–and a host other smaller IT and software engineering firms. In total, over fifty-five companies were hired to work directly on the project.

A government review in 2014 revealed that the costs for delivering HealthCare.gov had soared to $1.7 billion–multiples of the original budget…On the day that HealthCare.gov was supposed to launch, CGI Group (Canada) had a market capitalization of $8.9 billion, with annual revenues of around $4.8 billion…In total over $200 million was set aside for the Canadian firm. In the end, the cost overrun for its five HealthCare.gov contracts reached $28 million…An independent review determined in February 2013 that there were “a high number of coding defects” in CGI Group’s work. Internal staff in CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) discovered that the company’s developers “did not follow some best practices for making last-stage coding changes, resulting in code conflicts between some systems. In the end, these all proved critical to HealthCare.gov’s botched launch.

To assume that HealthCare.gov would have been successful if only CMS senior managers had “declared a clear business owner” or improved communication among its own staff ignores the systemic problems with an approach to government that relies on outsourcing core functions and parts of their management to consultants. Even with the best public managers in the world, and with an organization culture that “promoted acceptance of bad news” and “continuous learning”–as also recommended,,,the size and complexity of the contracts exacerbated the risk to the whole healthcare initiative–and to the government. To believe that these organizational tweaks would even be possible after decades of outsourcing across government departments was wishful thinking.

“Often, c-suiters–the people making the decisions at the top of organizations–have already made up their mind, but they really need an external independent arbiter to validate their position or make the case on their behalf. They can then go to the board and say, “Oh, Deloitte or McKinsey or EY said we should do this.” It’s the consultancy credibility stamp of approval. And for me, I saw that on so many of my projects.”

A loss of knowledge can also undermine the state’s capacity to govern relationships with the private sector, whether through regulation, procurement or other forms of partnership. Throughout the history of capitalism, governments have needed to maintain a deep knowledge about developments in markers and specific companies. A skilled government workforce needs to be able to analyze changes both to ensure corporate laws are abided by to amend or improve those laws where necessary. Engaging with markets has always been important in their regulation for the simple reason that businesses are a key source of information about sector and economy wide trends. But with the growth of consulting since the 1980s, many critical areas of regulation have become characterized not as a learning relationship–in which public sector analysts turn to markets for insights that will help them to make appropriate regulatory decisions–but instead by the outsourcing of the development of those rules to the market actors who will be affected by them.

That incremental loss of up-to-date knowledge also affects public bodies’ ability to negotiate suitable terms for new contracts with the consultancies and other providers. Again, this is particularly the case in highly technical areas of public services, such as environmental monitoring, finance and digital technologies.

This was illustrated when Denmark contracted with IBM to integrate “Watson” into the Copenhagen region’s hospital system. After 18 months in 2018 the relationship collapsed when it became clear the technology would never work. A former Danish official describing how “it was very oversold what Watson could do. There was something of the ’emperors new clothes’ about it.” Millions of kroner were pocketed by IBM and wasted.

  • Low Agreement: During a 2017 pilot project at Rigshospitalet (Denmark’s leading hospital), oncologists found that local tumor board decisions agreed with Watson’s recommended treatments in only about one-third of the cases.

  • Guideline Mismatches: The low concordance rate highlighted fundamental problems with adapting a single global AI tool (Watson) —trained heavily on protocols from New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center—to regional European healthcare guidelines, localized drug availability, and distinct clinical practices.

  • Abandonment: Due to these misalignments and low utility in actual clinical workflows, Danish clinicians ultimately dropped implementation of the platform.

The coup of “cronyism” during the (Covid 19) pandemic in the U.K. could not have happened without the hollowing out of internal contracting capacity. In better days, a minister who sought to provide favors for an old business partner or close friend would be met by administrators whose job it was to ensure procurement was a transparent and fair process…The scale of “corrupt” contracts in the UK and elsewhere during the pandemic suggests this is not the case today.

In business organizations–as in the public sector–the collective and cumulative development of knowledge and resources are at the heart of a firm’s capacity to innovate products and respond to new customer and social demands…The cycle of adopting and then abandoning the consulting industry’s various solutions “may reinforce a persistent lack of knowledge accumulation within the system of knowledge supply.” Some researchers even view “forgetfulness” as being at the heart of management consulting, whereby “the persistent introduction ideas…permits the repeating of previous mistakes and inhibits organizations from learning.”

In few areas have the consequences of MSV (maximize shareholder value)–and the influence of the consulting industry in its entrenchment–been more apparent than in the pharmaceutical industry. The development of new drugs is a highly complex and highly uncertain process, which requires strategic investment in a skilled workforce and technical equipment. Studies have demonstrated that in recent decades, many pharmaceutical companies have reduced investments in R&D as they increase distributions to shareholders, securing greater profits not through creating value from drug innovation, but through cutting operational spending and inflating the prices of existing drugs, often acquired through mergers.

The primary resolution came through a historic $650 million deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), making McKinsey the first management consulting firm to be held criminally responsible for advice that led to a client’s criminal conduct. Most recently, McKinsey added $125 million to Purdue Pharma’s (manufacturer of OxyConti) broader $7.4 billion bankruptcy restructuring plan to entirely resolve remaining civil liabilities.

A clear example was the collapse of Valeant Pharmaceuticals in 2016  for which the Financial Times ran the headline “McKinsey’s fingerprints are all over Valeant.”

McKinsey and other consultancies involved in the Valeant case were not solely responsible for the direction the company took. Valeant and its business model existed within g political and legal infrastructure and facilitated egregious value extraction, part of what the law professor Katharina Pistor calls the “code of capital”. The company’s strategy of maximizing shareholder value by price gouging was only possible because the United States does not regulate drug prices. KcKinsey’s calls to slash R&D spending did not fall on deaf ears and were embraced wholeheartedly by its client-because shareholders are allowed to have short-term interests and suck companies dry without ever creating value through new treatments. But KcKinsey nonetheless profited from the extractive direction the company took, and it did not face sanctions or repercussions beyond unfavorable headlines that ultimately have not affected the company’s overall growth.

In 2008, Sweden’s Stockholm County Assembly (chose) to completely reimagine the region’s largest hospital, setting the mission of creating a hospital explicitly “to meet future challenges for health delivery.” politicians across the party spectrum agreed to rebuild most of the Karolinska University Hospital, which had been established at the dawn of the country’s modern welfare state in 1940. The new hospital, Nya Karolinska Solna (NKS), would develop and implement ground breaking medical technologies, all in a building designed to minimize the risks of infection, harness the benefits of natural light and materials, and foster interdisciplinary research across departments. Public art, understood as key to patients’ holistic well-being and recovery, would adorn the hospital’s walls. Acutely aware of the environmental costs of hospital care, Stockholm Country Assembly also aimed for NKS to become one of the most sustainable hospitals in the world, with most of its energy coming from renewable sources…They commissioned reports from Ohrlings Pricewaterhouse Coopers (the Swedish branch of PwC) and Ernst & Young to explore the potential challenges of such an approach (public-private partnership). Unsurprisingly, both consultancies concluded that private firms would not only offers the “highest possibility of value creation since it gives incentives to innovation and optimized investments and operating costs over the life cycle.” but also “decreased risk for running costs, since the risk mainly is transferred to the private partner.”..Before long NKS had earned a reputation as the “most expensive hospital in the world.”..In 2019, the BMJ reported that around 250 doctors and 350 nurses at the hospital had been warned they could lose their jobs because of an unanticipated deficit.

The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was an international treaty that sought to extend UNFCCC. In the negotiations, the Clinton administration successfully argued for the inclusion of “market based flexibility mechanisms, namely international emissions trading.” In this system, industrialized countries could emit beyond internationally agreed limits by buying “credits” from other countries that emitted less than their targeted amounts of carbon.  The resulting birth of global carbon trading created a booming market in carbon credits and related financial instruments across primary and secondary markets that in 2021 were estimated to be worth $277 billion globally, and ensured industrial interests could continue to emit to their shareholders content. In 2001, the United States ultimately withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol under George W Bush…

However, governments and businesses may also hire consultancies not to reduce their climate footprint, but to convince others of the commitment to mitigating the climate crisis, even if this is not matched with action.

In response to this (deforestation), during the 2000s the UNFCCC developed the “Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD) mechanism, which aimed to create a means of offering financial incentives to developing countries to maintain, conserve, and manage forests that might otherwise be cut down for profit…In 2007, the UNFCCC contracted McKinsey to develop a metric for estimating the financial value of maintaining, conserving, and managing forests as a source of carbon capture, vis-a-vis other uses of the land, through an extension REDD known as REDD+.

The tool that McKinsey created was based on a Marginal Abatement Curve (MAC), a technique that has long been used by governments to evaluate the cost effectiveness of different climate strategies…Using its MAC tool, McKinsey advocated the reduction of deforestation to be achieved through stopping what is known as “slash and burn” agriculture by indigenous communities, because this tradition was deemed to create low financial value, and so the communities would require less compensation for the loss of habitats and ways of life. Large timber companies, in contrast, would require higher compensation because the costs of not cutting down forests for them were deemed high. The latter was, of course a far greater contributor to deforestation…McKinsey’s clients included logging companies that operated in the forests of countries involved in REDD+…The indigenous communities affected most by the mechanism…were not clients of McKinsey.

Environmental, social and governance criteria (ESG) are standards that companies can use to demonstrate that their operations do not harm the environment, that they support positive relationships with employees and other communities; and that they have effective governance structures. Advocates of ESG claim that by encouraging companies to disclose this information, good corporate behavior is incentivized because it is rewarded with higher value: The pitch that companies should focus on ‘doing good’ is sweetened with the promise that it be also be good for their bottom line and for shareholders.

Demand for corporate ESG Frameworks and financial ESG investing metrics has exploded in the past few years…The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group made up of large companies in the United States, “supercharged the ESG movement following its 2019 meetings, when it endorsed the view that businesses exist to serve stakeholders, and not just shareholders. Bloomberg reported that ESG designated assets are “on track to exceed $53 trillion by 2025,” representing more than a third of projected total assets under management. Investors with $100 trillion of assets under management have signed on to the United Nations Principle for Responsible Investment, which were “developed by investors, for investors,” and advocate greater use of ESG frameworks for investing.

 

Posted on

Becoming a Distinguished Black Female Law Professor; a Memoir

Backtalker; An American Memoir; Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, 2026

Overall, I’d say that in the 1960s most folks shared the belief that prejudice did play a significant role in racist conditions, and that there was hope that well intentioned people could actively diminish prejudice…Folks debated whether it was more important to just cut to the chase by creating the world that would have existed if anti-Blackness had not been a core set of ideas for so long in American History.

In fact, I was the one who was surprised when, on one occasion, the school (Heritage Christian, Canton Ohio) had the bright idea to reverse the bus route so that everyone could see where everyone lived. When we approached the homes of our rural neighbors, I was shocked to see ramshackle houses with abandoned vehicles strewn about, windows covered with plastic, and a tarp thrown over a partially covered roof. But this was nothing compared to what shocked my (white) fellow bus mates. They seemed far more curious about how my family had come to live in our home… (Her brother Mantel); “Oh, right–they think Mom is a live-in maid. So like, we couldn’t actually live here because Black people don’t live in anything white people would want! (A number of white families had moved out of the neighborhood when Kim’s family moved in.)

The Cherry-Market corridor was the center of Black Canton, the setting for virtually every event or story about us that was told by us–in living rooms, beauty parlors, barbershops, church pews, bars, social clubs–you name it.

Yet despite its centrality for us, despite the hopes and hard work and pride of ownership that so many had poured into their little piece of the American dream, nothing that flowed through the arteries of Black Canton prevented it from being slated for physical and psychological destruction. It was a destruction that began years before the bulldozers reduced it all to rubble. The process of draining this community of its blood before taking its life was done under a truly Orwellian misnomer: “urban renewal”…In the end, this long-term decapitalization-“misappropriation” would be more accurate–took such a toll on my mother’s real estate holdings that they were worth less in the 1970s than they had been when my grandfather purchased them in the 1930s.

It’s been estimated that between 1949 and 1973, 2,500 neighborhoods in 993 American cities were destroyed, dispossessing nearly one million people.

Two events, the Clarence Thomas Anita Hill hearings in 1991, and the O.J Simpson murder trial in 1994 where Simpson was acquitted led to Kim’s pioneering work on intersectionality.

Democratic Senators Who Voted “Yes” for Thomas who was confirmed 52-48: David Boren (Oklahoma) John Breaux (Louisiana) Dennis DeConcini (Arizona) Alan Dixon (Illinois) J. James Exon (Nebraska) Wyche Fowler (Georgia) Ernest Hollings (South Carolina) J. Bennett Johnston (Louisiana) Sam Nunn (Georgia) Charles Robb (Virginia)

I sought to articulate a both/and position; it was about race and it was about gender. Especially after the 1991 Thomas-Hill debacle; this was not  an unfamiliar position for me. But something new was emerging that hadn’t fully taken shape in that earlier spectacle. Colorblindness was becoming a shared point of departure among mainstream pundits, reporters, feminists, and others who collectively repudiated any concerns about racism as a potential factor in the investigation and at Simpson’s trial…In a sense, colorblindness itself was on trial…Put together, these two moments further convinced me that racial justice could not be sustained without a thorough rethinking of patriarchy…In absolute numbers, there were more white men who supported O.J. than there were African Americans in the entire country.

The freedom to think, to learn, to agitate, and to talk back are essential to a free society. Yet these freedoms have always been contested, especially when exercised by those at the margins. That our government can appropriate law to banish critiques of the status quo, changing the rules about which racial histories can be taught and which experiences can be acknowledged, is not a healthy feature of a robust democracy. It is a sign of a dying one.

In the same way that we must bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice, legal education must grapple with the law’s role in creating the conditions that still hobble our efforts to stand together as a nation. It must equip future generations with the critical tools necessary to move us farther away from our troubled past, not doom us to repeat it.

But tension and contradiction abound throughout my life, reflecting a complex dance with the notion of “we”-of race, of gender, of nation, of humanity–that can never be complete, not ever fully abandoned.

 

Posted on

July 4 – 250 Years of White Celebration

America, U.S.A.; How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries: Eddie S. Glaude Jr. 2026

The Nation (March 21, 1872 and July 6, 1871) celebrated the death of Reconstruction and declared  that “the ‘negro’ will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him”. Black people would be banished, made invisible. They would not be imagined as Americans but, rather as problems that America had to address: either wards, victims, or mindless creatures destined to toil.

To be seen as a problem, to be approached as an object of charity, and to be managed by the state — this made of Black people empty vessels to be filled with the musings and terrors of those who lived among them but who did not really see or know them. And when the actual lives of Black people intruded upon the fantasies of white America — when the demands to be treated as human beings exposed the lies at the heart of the nation — the response, again, shifted from sentimentality to rage, one easily becoming the other. The whip of the whirlwind.

As those who had rebelled and lost used violence to regain control of the South, many of (Frederick) Douglass’s so-called white liberal friends now sought some kind of conciliation. Disremembering justified their capitulation to the violence. The purposeful forgetting of the reasons for the war and need for Reconstruction allowed them to blot out what the past revealed. Douglass understood that this disremembering made space for reunion Between Americans from the North and South struggling with a sense of national identity in the aftermath of a war that baptized the country in blood. But in the dismembering, Black people were cast aside and made the repositories of our national fears of the dark. Such a partition allowed for white Americans a retreat into the comfort of illusions — the storybook that affirmed the goodness of the country despite the evils right under our noses.

Douglass was speaking some eighty years later. Slavery was no more. The Civil War amendments had been ratified. That much was true. But the fever dream had spiked again, and Black people were subject to unimaginable violence as the nation turned its back and prepared to celebrate its freedom. Douglass had to refute and refuse the illusion.

He reached for words to encourage a different kind of refusal than the one Moses Gordon chose. We could not abdicate our responsibility to one another, no matter how much white Americans in the South raged or how passively others stood by and let them do it. He reached for the Revolution of 1776, not to celebrate or glorify its heroes, but to call out an analog to what Black people now faced as the country prepared a centennial celebration that would cast aside any pretense to racial justice.

“The fathers of this Republic, as I have said, had their trial ninety-nine years ago. The colored citizens of this Republic, are about about have their trial now. How we shall stand that trial, how we shall pass through it, how we shall come out of it, is to me a matter of great solemnity. The men of the Revolution went through the furnace, and came out pure gold. Shall we, the colored people, present a similar example?” …”We are the creatures of a conflict of social elements which we did but little to create. The white people of this county quarreled and came to blows, and it was our lot to be on the side of the victorious party…Men cannot, ought not and will not quarrel and fight forever.”

He understood what was happening: the (1876) centennial celebrations would tell a story of the nation that rejoiced in reunion, and that reunion required the erasure of Black people. The event would be a national affair in which the “silvery notes of peace and unity” from sacred places in our national history would render the true cause of the Civil War invisible in a national ritual of disremembering. The country would revel in its technological advancements, as capitalists celebrated America’s economic resolve despite the Panic of 1873, and as white people reasserted superiority of white Anglo-Saxon blood. An idea of America, alabaster white, would arise from the ashes of war and Reconstruction.

Douglass was clear: “Peace among the whites” means horrors for us. Politically, culturally, and existentially. This was not an abstract conclusion. The violence in the South, the active indifference to that violence in the North, and the dead bodies left in the wake made it real.

Philadelphia journalist J.W. Forney; “that the great show of the American peoples industry and independence will close with one link in the chain of its complete history left out. Although the chains of slavery have been broken…,the prejudice against him…have prevented him from taking any part or having a prominent part of this marvelous undertaking in celebration of one hundred years of American independence.”

Historian Eric Foner: “What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure…If racism contributed to the undoing of Reconstruction, by the same token Reconstruction’s demise and the emergence of blacks as a disenfranchised class of dependent laborers greatly facilitated racism’s further spread, until by the early twentieth century it had become more deeply embedded in the nation’s culture and politics than at an time since the beginning of the antislavery crusade and perhaps in our entire history.”

In 1975, white America was in full retreat from the gains and promises of the civil rights movement. Proponents of Black Power and activist groups had concluded that the country refused to change–that it could not change without revolution.

Bicentennial Blues by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson;

  • America has got the blues and it’s a bicentennial edition
  • America has got the blues
  • It’s got the blues because of partial deification
  • Of Partial accomplishments
  • Over partial periods of time
  • Halfway justice
  • Halfway liberty
  • Halfway equality
  • It’s a half-ass year

Your country? Your history? No. It is ours. Our sweat and tears have shaped this land. You feel us in the music; our sound rolls off your tongue. Our presence fills your classic literature. Our wails and moans, our joys and laughter, make this place swing. Your country? No. The bars of music that begin each chapter of this book suggest otherwise. And no matter your efforts to make us invisible or to deny the history of the country that unravels your myths and legends, we know America would not be America without us.

Posted on

Investment Bubbles always Burst (Life after AI)

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI; How to Think About Artificial Intelligence — Before it’s Too Late, Cory Doctorow, 2026

A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human conscripted to serve as a biological appendage for a machine working at an inhuman pace.

The fact that there’s a low probability that an AI will be able to do your job doesn’t change the fact that there’s a high probability that an AI salesman will convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job.

Never forget that you aren’t the target for AI hype — investors are…If you drive 101 of 280 past (SFO) or San Jose (Airport) , you’ll pass gigantic electronic billboards, pumping out ten of thousands of ANSI lumens that glow even at high noon, seen by thousands of commuters but there to pitch only a couple dozen VCs and executives at major firms.

If you want to puncture the AI bubble, you should train your fire on the applications that are used to justify the massive investment in data centers and training.

The workers who are dead center in the crosshairs of AI bosses are programmers. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple — over and over,  we hear announcements from tech bosses about how many of their coders they plan to fire once the AI works, or (even more ominously) how many coders they’ve already fired because AI works so well.

The reason tech workers are able to command all these on-the-job goodies is down to an accident of history: when computers were absorbed into every kind of industrial and personal activity, the supply of trained coders was nowhere near high enough to meet the demand for their obscure, hard-to-master skills.

This meant that coders could demand all kinds of concessions from their bosses because there were always high-paying jobs with gobs of perks going for anyone who knows how to turn out reliable code on deadline, and bosses could afford to meet those demands and still turn gigantic profits.

In 2018, Google workers by the tens of thousands, walked off the job, kicking off a series of confrontations that forced the company to abandon a censored search engine for the Chinese market, a $10 Billion  military project…The exec in charge of the military contract resigned…In the space of just a few months Google declared its first dividend, fired twelve thousand workers (including many of its most senior–and thus most mouthy–technical staff), and declared a $70 billion stock buyback, which would have paid those workers wages for the next twenty-seven years.

One Google engineer relates his experience with AI in the workplace: “I have been a software engineer at Google for several years. With the introduction of generative AI-based coding assistance tools, we are already seeing a decline in open-source  code quality (defined as ‘code churn’ how often a piece of code is written only to be deleted or fixed within a short time). I am also starting to see a downward trend of (a) new engineer’s readiness in doing this work, (b) engineers willingness to learn new things, and (c) engineers effort to put in serious thoughts in the work.”

For AI companies to make back the hundreds of billions, their investors have entrusted them with, they will have to displace a hell of a lot of high-waged labor. That’s displace, not augment. AI companies are selling the replacement of workers with chatbots, but chatbots just can’t do workers’ jobs. To sell hundreds of billions of dollars worth of AI, you need a killer demo.

During the drafting of this book (2026), an MIT study found that 95 percent of commercial AI deployments fail, with “no measurable impact on profit.” The news sparked a panicked sell-off of AI related stocks, though whether this is the pin that pricks the bubble remains to be seen.

Its essential that we never stop reminding people that the current, actually existing lucrative uses for AI are terrible and should be banned.

In 2025 builder.ai (once valued at more than $1 billion) collapsed…In reality, builder.ai was a secret employment agency, farming out the work of building its customer apps to eight hundred to one thousand low waged Indian programmers. Wags said the “GPT” in ChatGPT stands for “Gujarati People Typing”.

Tech bubbles are surprisingly easy to generate, thanks to something economists call “the Byzantine premium.” That’s the extra value that investors place on an asset that they don’t understand.

Every bubble is a transfer of wealth from savers to crooks. Every bubble is bad. We shouldn’t have bubbles…Regulators should intervene to prevent bubbles in the first place. ..Some bubbles pop and leave nothing behind. These are the pure fraud bubbles.

The crypto bubble keeps getting reinflated, not least because the literal president of the United States issued his own shitcoin…But eventually the crypto bubble will burst (again) (and permanently) and when it does what will be left?

The environmental costs of the “compute” is off the charts. Even if you stipulate that the world will benefit from having some giant “advanced” AI tools, there’s no rational case for endangering the planet and the lives of millions of people to make several redundant AI tools that are functionally indistinguishable, with each consuming so much energy that they wipe a substantial share of the gains made from solarization and the broader switch to renewables.

Remember: seven giant AI companies account for 35% of the U.S. stock market. Amputating 35% of the market is going to destroy a ton of innocent bystanders, including people whose retirement savings are invested in index funds, considered the safest of all safe bets. We’re talking about a crash that will put 2008 in the shade and meet or exceed the pandemic selloff.

What’s more, that AI center is literally incinerating million dollar GPUs all the time and these have be be constantly replaced.

You can’t give a third of the S&P 500’s value over to seven money losing AI companies that energetically pass the same $100 Billion IOU around and around without creating the conditions for a prolonged, brutal global crash.

Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd., doing business as DeepSeek, is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that develops large language models. Based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, DeepSeek is owned and funded by High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund.

The release of Deepseek in 2025 sent shock waves through AI investors. Deepseek laid bare the incredible laziness of the giant U.S. AI companies, who solved all their scaling issues by throwing money at their problems rather than by applying their ingenuity to them. Deepseek’s debut sent a cold chill up the spine of every investor in a big U.S. AI company. If their $100 billion models can be bested by a model that cost a reported $6 million to create and can run on commodity hardware, what future do these top-heavy AIs have?

But they (AI companies) haven’t invented an intelligent being. They haven’t set in motion the tools to conjure up a new god or demon. They haven’t even invented a tool that can do your job for you.

 

Posted on

Trump Administration’s Cruelty and Indifference is Forecast to Result in 14 Million Deaths by 2030

Into The Wood Chipper; A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID, Nicholas Enrich, 2026

Atul Gawande, Biden’s Assistant administrator for global health, USAID:

“Established in 1961, and championed by President John F. Kennedy, USAID has been created by Congress to provide sustained, expert support for the advancement of human survival, economies, and democracy in order to foster peace and stability and to counter the adversaries of freedom. There is no such thing as a temporary pause in such work. It soon became clear that hundreds of thousands would die.”

“But the new administration only doubled  down, turning the pause into a wholesale dismantling of USAID. The toll since has been staggering. Boston University researchers have conservatively estimated that, one year later, the shutdown has already killed at least three-quarters of a million people, most of them children.”

“Into the Wood Chipper is a remarkable, devastating insider account of exactly how this was able to occur. The agency was brought to its knees in a matter of a few weeks, despite being established in law. Nick Enrich was a civil servant at USAID during four  administrations, two Democratic and two Republican, and as USAID’s last acting head of global health, he was a witness to the pivotal events. He makes painfully clear that, in order to destroy the agency, people at the highest levels made choices to ignore the law, the procedures, and the harm to people’s lives. Others — in Congress, the courts and in the agency itself, including Nick — were confronted with what they would do in the face of these choices. And what you encounter in this account of this tragedy is a Shakespearean range of human behavior and emotion: deceit, indifference to harm, bloodlust, thirst for power, incompetence, fear, accommodation, self-delusion, and at all too few moments, courage.”

New York Times

A Timeline of Cuts, Legal Orders and Chaos at U.S.A.I.D.

By Amy Schoenfeld Walker and K.K. Rebecca Lai

“For more than five weeks, the Trump administration has been working to take apart the United States Agency for International Development, through layoffs and contract terminations. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court weighed in on a piece of those efforts, rejecting President Trump’s emergency request to freeze nearly $2 billion in already completed foreign aid work.”

“Here are the major actions by the administration and the courts, as well as their effects on the agency’s work force, since Mr. Trump took office.”

“For now, the case over frozen aid payments will proceed in the lower court, which the Supreme Court said should clarify what the government must do while taking into account what is feasible. Those instructions suggest the case could return to the Supreme Court.”

“But much of what undergirds the practical future for the agency remains in limbo: Most of the agency’s workers are on leave or fired, as are staff workers at many of its partner organizations. And a majority of its contracts and awards have been terminated, leaving only about one-tenth of its former total number intact.”

Nick Enrich:

“However, some researchers began to get a sense of the scale of the devastation, confirming the impacts that I had forecasted in my memo. In a study published in June 2025 in The Lancet, a comprehensive forecasting analysis estimated the impacts of the cuts to USAID on mortality in low and middle-income countries by 2030. The findings were staggering. If not reversed, the study concluded, the dismantling of USAID will in five years result in 14 million  unnecessary deaths, including 4.5 million children under the age of five.”

Trump Political Appointees

Joel Borkert: Acting chief of staff, USAID

Meghan Hanson: Director of Policy, USAID

Ken Jackson: Acting deputy administrator Jan 23 to Feb 3, then acting deputy administrator for management and resources and “senior bureau official” USAID

Adam Korzeniewski: USAID White House Liason

Mark Lloyd: Assistant to the administrator for conflict prevention and stabilization USAID

Timothy Meisburger: Assistant to the administration for humanitarian assistance USAID

Laken Rapier: Senior advisor for communications USAID

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and acting administrator of USAID starting Feb 3

Russel Vought: Director White House Office of Management and Budget

Cartwright Weiland USAID transition landing team lead

Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Edward Coristine, Clayton Cromer, Luke Farritor, Gavin Kliger, Jeremy Lewin

Elon Musk Head of DOGE

No DOGE member had security clearance to access USAID computer systems

Posted on

Saving American Democracy Will Require Major Structural Reforms

The Blind Spot; How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy, Jeffrey Winters, 2026

For oligarchs, voting is meaningless compared to how their wealth influences politics and society literally all the time…They fund candidates that protect the rich, fund think tanks to produce ideas justifying oligarchic agendas, and buy up the media that pump those ideas into society…And, as we will see, there is no area where this power is more impactful than in the epic fight over progressive taxation–the primary tool that democracies around the world use as they try to stem rising inequality. Heavy taxes on the ultra-rich, both individually and on the corporations they own, are the last chance we get to keep extreme inequality in check…Forbes reports that the US was home to about 900 billionaires in 2025, with $6.8 trillion in combined net worth. Most of that had never been taxed.

A small cushion of wealth provides an elevating safety net to fall back on; it allows for choices, buys precious time in difficult moments, and is fortifying psychologically. It must be viewed as absolutely necessary for all human beings. The problem is that most people in the world have no access to this most basic form of security; while a few are mindlessly hoarding everything they can and gearing up for an oligarchic transfer of tens of trillions of dollars tax-free to their immediate heirs.

The Gini index is reported on a scale between 0 and 100, where 0 means prefect economic equality across the population and 100 means perfect inequality — that is, everything has somehow been grabbed by a single person. (The wealth Gini for the world is 88; Sweden is 87, the USA is 83, Europe is 81.)

For the years 2014 to 2018, the 25 wealthiest American families paid a mere 3.4 percent. Warren Buffet paid 0.1 percent, Jeff Bezos paid 0.98, and Michael Bloomberg paid 1.3. Across half a century, these relentless oligarchic victories over taxation have fueled an epidemic of inequality in America and the related descent into open political warfare.

Alexander Hamilton James Madison

The converging crisis of the mid 1870s taught the (Constitutional) convention (1787) delegates two kinds of lessons reflecting two kinds of fear. One was that too much democracy and empowerment of the people could produce policies unacceptable to oligarchs. The other was that too little democracy could result in mass protests that could become volatile. What was especially worrying about all the debt relief and paper money legislation was that so many state senates had failed the test of protecting the rich…Randolph argued that, at the state level, senates were too close to the masses and too easily intimidated by unrest. Control had to shifted upward within a steep pyramid of power.

The result of 1787 was the Constitution (less all the amendments) we have today with a national senate, a president with veto power, and a high court that can override federal laws.

In 2006 Congress passed a whistleblower law for revealing tax fraud that offered a reward of up to 30 percent of the funds the IRS collects. In 2007, Bradley Birkenfeld, a UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) employee, came forward with incrimination information. “Without Mr. Birkenfeld walking in the door of the Department of Justice in the summer of 2007,  I (Kevin Downing) doubt as of today this massive fraud scheme would have been discovered by the US government.”

Birkenfeld received $104 million but spent thirty months in prison for his efforts.

Charles P. Rettig, who was the IRS commissioner in 2023, said that the actual number was “about $1 trillion in unpaid taxes every year.”..For perspective, the tax gap in 1974 was only $40 billion…With Rettig’s estimated $1 trillion in taxes going unpaid every year, it means the very rich are constantly adding hundreds of billions to their wealth through non-compliance and defeating the tax system.

We’ve arrived at a paradox where oligarchs are more visible than they’ve been in 150 years while their wealth is more invisible than ever…As we’ve seen, three of the most important weapons in the oligarchic arsenal are complexity, secrecy, and infiltration. Complexity, created deliberately be the Wealth Defense Industry, is deployed as a squid deploys ink. The secrecy that hides wealth and financial dealing is a core concession to oligarchs by governments–most evident in their reluctance to demand an answer to the most basic political-economic question: who owns an asset? And infiltration is the placement of oligarchic foot soldiers in strategic government offices to ensure key regulations tilt strongly in favor of the rich.

With multi tiered (20 or more) partnerships with half a million partners or more and pass throughs replacing corporations, driven entirely by tax advantages for oligarchs, tax collection is virtually impossible. Two Congressional efforts to reign in this chaos The Enablers Act and the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) both failed. 

The ENABLERS Act (Establishing New Authorities for Businesses Laundering and Enabling Risks to Security Act) is proposed, bipartisan U.S. legislation designed to close major loopholes in the country’s anti-money laundering (AML) framework. While U.S. banks are required to investigate their clients’ wealth and block illicit funds, the ENABLERS Act aims to extend these same “know-your-customer” (KYC) rules to a broader group of professional “gatekeepers”. The Enablers Act was never enacted.

The CTA had a very simple goal — to document “beneficial ownership.” By now, it is apparent that, in the hall of mirrors that is the world of assets, income, and ownership, there are scores of entities that range from actual people to creations on paper that can, at least financially, do everything an actual person can do except have a heartbeat. All of these constructed substitutes for persons–companies, shell corporations, shelf corporations, trusts, foundations, and so on — ultimately represent, somewhere, buried under multiple layers and tiers of concealment, real breathing persons who are the owners, the beneficiaries, the controllers and deciders, beyond whom there is nothing else. Sometimes there are so many hidden intermediaries that there is a need to refer to the “true” beneficial owners.

The CTA was the US government’s attempt to find out who owned what, their names, and where they were. Having that information makes it far easier to confront threatening groups or actors, discover how trillions of dollars in illicit funds are hidden, moved, and laundered, and sometimes intercept dangerous peoples before they can do great harm. On this occasion (the 2021 Defense Authorization Act), oligarchs were late to the game, in part because wealth defense specialist hadn’t been paying attention…It was a costly oversight… The CTA became law on 1 Jan 2021 with strong bipartisan support.

It was in March 2025 that the bombshell hit…the executive branch was now under the control of a new administration with no interest in corporate transparency…”All entities created in the United States — including those previously known as ‘domestic reporting companies’–and their beneficial owners are now exempt from the requirement to report beneficial ownership information.“..By executive fiat, over 99 percent of all companies that had been required to register no longer had to do so….The law was still there, but it had been completely gutted.

The politics of preparation

The second level of our challenge to oligarchy (after progressive taxation) is deeper, focusing on changes that become possible only during the politics of crisis, when oligarchs are at their weakest. During ruptures, the decision-makers oligarchs rely on face pressure to focus their priorities on stabilizing the society. That certainly can included default responses that shore up oligarchy itself, but that is not necessarily the case. It is in the nature of crises that those in charge become far more willing to consider policies and solutions that would be unthinkable during the politics of the ordinary. They can do this because emergencies often require extreme actions and because they are less afraid of the ways oligarchs can punish. After all, oligarchs themselves are in disarray during these ruptures and also want restabilization, even if that means significant concessions they would ordinarily oppose bitterly…When a rupture happens. two things matter most; how well organized citizens are to pursue their interests, and what major changes are prepared to be implemented. A high state of readiness in such moments enables change that is transformative and lasting.

Wealth inequality arises at two sites. The first is the labor market, where inequality unfolds at our places of employment. Many impactful things can be done there to constrain oligarchs–enacting laws that facilitate rather than block unionization, raising minimum wages, having employees own significant shares of their workplaces, and indexing compensation of employees to compensation for the highest levels of management and ownership, just to start.

The other site is after the dust has settled on these income, compensation, and wealth gains. This is where we address inequality through redistribution. Confronting political structures that uphold oligarchy– like unrepresentative lower houses, senates, supreme courts, and presidential vetoes–is unusually hard. Enacting policies for the redistribution via the tax system has not only been a realm of great success but one where the victories has been so substantial that oligarchs were forced to retreat into tax evasion as they fought to reduce the tax rates. There are two large lessons to draw from this; the progressive tax victories of the past must be won again and stronger, and the maneuvers of the Wealth Defense Industry has devised to subvert redistribution must be answered. That means dismantling the mazes of complexity the industry has built, forcing an end to ownership secrecy, and closing the industry’s revolving door with government.

There is no greater threat to oligarchy than transparency…This extreme secrecy can be defeated. In the US, enacting policies like the Enablers Act and Corporate Transparency Act will deal a major blow. We must also turn the Wealth Defense Industry against its creators by forcing its many branches to monitor and report suspicious financial activity–with stiff penalties including imprisonment for failing to do so.

Although it’s a tough sell, democratic populations around the world must support dramatically stronger tax agencies. Larger budgets, more auditors, and more technology will only hurt oligarchs.

In 1922, American oligarchs faced fifty-six brackets. After the Second World War, the highest bracket was over 90 percent. By 2026, there were just seven brackets with the highest rate being 37 percent. Having two or three dozen tax brackets, with the highest being over 80 percent is an important goal.

The immediate goal must be to impose two kinds of taxes on oligarchs–a true income tax on annual gains in the value of oligarchic fortunes, and wealth tax on the total current value of those riches.

Oligarchs enjoy substantial annual increases on their assets, but this income is rarely taxed unless it is “realized” by selling the assets. This is a pure concession to the rich that fuels inequality and serves no positive social purpose.

As I’ve mentioned, this agenda is only a start–there are many more reforms that could be attempted. Still, while achieving them would be great progress, they are not enough to end participatory inequality. That requires deeper and harder changes of a constitutional or semi-structural kind. This moves us into the realm of the politics of preparation. These proposals are grand in scale and significantly more impactful in making political power more equally shared. They are conceivable only under conditions of severe crisis.

Three of these ideas are a direct reversal of oligarchic safeguards created by the Philadelphia (1787) delegates. Such antidemocratic features have been replicated in many countries since, especially in presidential systems. The first one requires little elaboration. The veto powers of the executive branch should not exist. A single person should not be able to cancel the will of the people expressed through the legislature’s deliberations and votes. The purpose of an executive branch is the execution of laws and policies from the legislature not the making or blocking of policies from that powerful office. If there is a need to check or slow certain sensitive decisions, it would be fine to grant limited powers to the executive branch to delay implementation to allow for further national debate or to send a law back to the legislature for a confirming simple majority vote.

The second proposal concerns constitutional courts, which are everywhere made up of just a few judges whose primary function is to constrain democracies composed of millions of voting citizens, represented by many hundreds of legislators (or thousands if state or provincial legislatures are included). In the US, it takes just five judges to block the will of the people, even a super majority. Supreme courts and the constitutions they interpret have served to sustain oligarchy in the face of democracy. The only compelling justification for concentrating so much power in so few hands is to protect the the weak from the powerful. It certainly is good to prevent a “tyranny of the majority” when this means mostly actions taken democratically against the vulnerable, especially when those actions trample important principles of fairness and justice.

The problem is that in democracies dominated by oligarchs high courts have spent most of their time doing the opposite–defending the powerful few against the vulnerable many. The justification for constitutional courts collapses once it is recognized that their main obsession has been to support oligarchy against democracy.

One solution is to have our constitutional courts be much larger and more representative of average citizens.

Beyond the size of the court, it is important to change how justices are chosen. The current American system of presidential nomination and Senate confirmation was created in Philadelphia (1787) to preserve oligarchy. We can democratize that process using sortition. Half of the justices on the enlarged bench should be appointed by lottery from a pool of citizens who have a law degree, having served as a judge for at least three years at any level, and have a clean criminal record. Congress should vote on the remaining judges, but neither the legislature nor the executive  should be involved in those appointed through random selection. Sortition will ensure that the overall panel of judges on the Supreme Court has a broader diversity of views and is more representative of the wider public. If this remedy fails, ending judicial review completely remains an option.

The third structural proposal to roll back oligarchic protections is the elimination of all upper legislative chambers. The primary purpose of senates and houses of lords is to dampen the power of more democratic bodies below them. Several countries have transitioned from a bicameral to unicameral system by elimination their upper chambers. New Zealand erased the Legislative Council in 1950. Denmark removed the Landsting in 1953. Several provinces in Canada abolished their upper houses. As senates are removed, societies should design alternative checks that ensure fairness, defend freedom, and protect truly vulnerable minorities.

Additional steps along these lines would include dramatically increasing the number of seats in the people’s legislature so that districts are smaller…Smaller districts bring representatives closer to their constituents, complicate legislative lobbying by special interests, and make it harder for oligarchs to dominate campaign financing across so many races.

sortition replaces voting

None of these major reforms goes far enough in addressing the ability of oligarchs to dominate electoral democracy with money.  A bold proposal to neutralize the power of oligarchs in elections is to choose representative by lottery rather than voting.

In the US, over 150 million voters get to choose, but they do not get to choose their choices. The slate of candidates, and the narrow agenda they pursue, is overwhelmingly influenced by oligarchs. Camila Vergara calls this distortion of democracy “systemic corruption”, and she joins a growing chorus of others — most notably (John) McCormick himself, Helene Landemore, Gordon Alrlen — who argue this will never be fixed by tinkering at the margins.

Their startling conclusion is that in the face of centuries of resilient oligarchy, the only way to strengthen democracy so that it functions horizontally and vertically is by ending voting for representatives. In its place they propose sortition — selection of leaders by random lottery…We are represented not because we voted but because those making decisions are like us.

The closest example today is how juries are selected for trials from a random group of fellow citizens.

Amy Kapczynski’s Proposed Constitutional Amendment

Congress shall have the plenary power and duty to legislate a democratic political economy, in order to provide genuine political equality for all natural persons. This shall include the power and duty to remedy structural discrimination, to empower workers, to provide for the care and health of the people, and to ensure a sustainable environment. The judiciary shall defer to Congress with respect to legislation that pursues these ends, notwithstanding any other provision in the Constitution.

These words display a subtle appreciation of the problems at the heart of participatory inequality. Unlike the vague expressions in constitutions around the globe of popular values and goals societies should strive for, this proposal requires that they be pursued. A democratic political economy leaves no room for oligarchy. “Genuine political equality” refers to power shared equally in all its forms and only by natural persons, not corporations. And the courts are explicitly stripped of their power to impede this progressive agenda.

Posted on

A History of the Jewish Bund from 1772 to 1948

Here Where We Live Is Our Country; The Story of the Jewish Bund, Molly Crabapple, 2026

The Jewish Labor Bund was a secular, socialist, and anti-Zionist movement founded in 1897 in the Tsarist Empire. Dedicated to doikayt (hereness), Bundists fought for multi-racial democratic socialism and cultural autonomy where they lived, rather than emigrating to establish an ethnostate in Palestine.

Large numbers of Jews migrated from Spain and other western European areas to escape the pogroms around the time of The First Crusade (1096–1099). Most settled in an area around present day Poland. There, they developed their own language, Yiddish, an amalgam of medieval high German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic written in the Hebrew alphabet.

In 1791, Empress Catherine the Great formalized the Pale (of Settlement) after Russia acquired vast territories with large Jewish populations during the partitions of Poland. Jews were only allowed to settle in this Pale. At its peak, the territory spanned about 500,000 square miles (1.2 million square km), covering parts of modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Moldova. It comprised roughly 20% of European Russia. The Pale was officially abolished following the February and October Revolutions (1917), which dismantled the Russian Empire and eliminated state-sanctioned restrictions on Jewish residency.

Now free of the Russian Empire, Poland immediately embarked on its own imperial wars of conquest, starting with the exquisite, formerly Hapsburg city of Lviv…The Lviv massacre was among the first of over a thousand pogroms that took place between November 1918 and March 1923, within the former Pale of Settlement. They were of a ferocity and sadism never before experience in eastern Europe. Almost everyone took part, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Russians, Poles, Cossacks, criminals, warlords, aristocrats, soldiers, deserters, Whites, Greens, monarchists, reactionaries, nationalists, people with no ideology whatsoever, and even units that were ostensibly communist…Everyone agreed they had it coming.

Over the next two decades, the Bund would show Jewish workers that they were a people as worthy as any other. Their methods remind me of those of the America’s Black Panther Party, another group of young radicals who carried guns and started free breakfast programs and asserted their people’s beauty in a country that wanted them dead. Like the Panthers, the Bund was a Marxist party built by and for oppressed and racialized others, who created a network of communal care and cultural uplift, of schools, clinics, mutual aid centers, and youth groups, backed with weapons and branded with militant chic…The Bund created a youth movement. Tsukunft (the Future), for teenagers who worked ten hours a day and lived five to a tenement room but still dreamed of a better and more beautiful world. Bundist teachers dominated the new, secular Yiddish school system, TSYSHO (Central Yiddish School System). These schools directly challenged the traditional cheders that my great-grandfather endured — that Bundists described as filthy holes where subliterate old men “filled [a child’s] small brain with nonsense,” using  a cat-o’-nine-tails to reinforce their points.

The Bund helped transform Yiddish, the language of the Jewish street, into a vehicle for transnational literary culture. When they fled disaster, Yiddish became a portable homeland that Bundists carried on their tongues. Secular Yiddish literature and the Bund grew together until Bundists became the literature’s greatest champions. Bundists devoted themselves to the perpetuation of Yiddish long after they had been forced to abandon everything else.

In April 1920, at the Bund’s Krakow convention, a majority of delegates voted to join the Comintern (Communist International).

From a 1928 Bund Warsaw resolution:

  • The most important condition for a peaceful life together for the population of Palestine, is a renunciation of the Zionist plan to rule the land against the will of the majority.
  • Zionists have built all their hopes on stripping away the political rights of Palestine’s existing Arab population, who constitute the oppressed majority…and on forcing them from all positions of power…[Zionists] have stood with every occupying power in Palestine–first Turkey, now England–and have used every means to make sure that Arabs are not granted their most minimal demands for political freedom and self-government.
  • The Arab hatred of the Jewish population is a direct result of Zionist politics. Zionism has poisoned the atmosphere and put the Jewish population of Palestine in danger.
  • The nationalist demonstrations that Zionists have organized exploit the victims of these tragic events and the understandable upset of the Jewish community…This meeting call on Jewish workers to fight the storm of nationalism and chauvinism that Zionists are unleashing on the Jewish Street. The answer to tragically, but pointlessly spilled blood cannot lie in more national hatred, which will inevitably lead to more communal clash, but in international solidarity and the growth of the socialist movement.

(Henryk) Erlich (Bundist leader) spelled out the fatal conflict at the heart of Zionism. The establishment of Israel would lead to perpetual war with its neighbors and the people it had dispossessed. “If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be; eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine…Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?” Erlich asked. “Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?”

Bundists described how the Nazi Slaughter was an extrapolation of what Europe had inflicted on the world. “It is the Hitlerites’ attempt to invoke the colonial methods of extermination that the European imperialists adopted in the previous centuries…and apply them to weak and small peoples of Europe.”

By the end of WWII in 1945, “The Nazis  murdered 90 percent of Polish Jews — and one-third of the  Jews on earth.”

When, in 1948 Congress tried to pass a bill to accept 200,000 survivors, the bill passed banning 90% of Jewish survivors because they had taken wartime refuge in the Soviet Union.

In social justice circles, it’s said that an oppressed group can’t be racist because racism requires power. If a group is powerless, they can be as bigoted as they like. Jews have been powerless for most of our history. The rituals of our religion are those of a powerless people, and we have hated with a powerless hate. On Purim, we make noise to celebrate not just Haman’s death but the murder of our enemies, the people of Amelek, down to the last man, woman, and child. For a long time, this was just an expression of impotent emotion. Theater, in the Aristotelian sense. Catharsis. We weren’t going to do anything about it. It’s not like we had an army.

This is fine when a group is powerless, but power is a fluid thing. Jews now have an army, and those once-impotent fantasies about destroying Amalek have transformed into white phosphorus bombs dropped on Gaza, into torture camps and mass graves full of cancer patients, shot with their catheters still in.

In 1942, young Zionists in the Warsaw ghetto founded the Jewish Combat Organization. Exactly five years after the ghetto revolt, on the eve of Passover 1948, Zionist paramilitaries ethnically cleansed fifteen thousand Palestinians from Haifa.

Bundists (Bulletin June 1949) saw the Nakba for what is was, the foundational crime of the Zionist  endeavor. Born of another people’s violent dispossession, Israel had yoked itself into an ever worsening cycle of repression and resistance. Its own violence would poison it, and the cancer would metastasize, until there was nothing else left.

Sophia (Dubnova, widow of Henryk Erlich) died in 1986, at age 101, engaged and lucid to the last. Shortly before her death, she told her grandson Henry she had a confession to make. She was no longer a socialist, but an anarchist.

Today, a new generation of activists and scholars view the Bund as a historic model for global solidarity, democratic socialism, and the fight for human rights. To explore their extraordinary history in depth, you can read Molly Crabapple’s book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country.

Posted on

Is Big Tech a Bubble?

Muskism; A Guide for the Perplexed, Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff, 2026

His (Musk’s) communication style had always been proleptic (refers to something that is anticipatory, happens before its expected time, or treats a future event as if it has already occurred. ) The logic of financial fabulism (a contemporary literary genre that weaves fantastical, mythic, or surreal elements into otherwise realistic everyday settings. It blurs the line between reality and the impossible, treating magical occurrences as mundane to explore profound human themes) treated imagined futures as already underway, allowing speculative claims to generate market effects before the underlying technology had matured. “Musk’s success is sustained by predictions of a technological sublime that’s only ever another decade away.”

On twitter, however, such predictions could produce financial effects instantaneously. In 2018, Must tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” The number was a weed joke, but investors took him seriously: Tesla stock jumped 11 percent…In 2020, he posted “stock price too high imo” and Tesla dropped as much as 12 percent. In January 2021, he added “#bitcoin” to his Twitter bio and the cryptocurrency jumped 20 percent within an hour. This was attention alchemy at work. As journalist Marco D’Eramo observed, Musk’s followers were his “real capital”.

The most important site of cyborg symbiosis (concept heralds a future where biological intelligence and artificial intelligence converge, potentially mirroring the cooperative success stories found in nature.)  was social media. “Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all these social networks — they’re giant cybernetic collectives,” Musk told the podcaster Joe Rogan ins 2018. They didn’t just let people collectivize their thoughts but, more importantly, their feelings. The “success of these online systems,” Musk argued, is a function of how much limbic resonance (a neurobiological concept describing the capacity for deep emotional and physiological attunement between two or more people) they’re able to achieve with people.” Virality was driven by emotion. “The more limbic resonance, the more engagement.”

What made these collectives cybernetic was the fact they included computers as well as humans. And these computers were, in fact, learning from the humans. AI systems based on neural networks are trained to perform a particular task by finding patterns in large quantities of data. On the platforms, users supplied this data through their activity. “We’re all collectively programming the AI,” Musk explained.

Gradually, this process would result in smarter and smarter AI. “The percentage of intelligence that is not human is increasing, and eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence,” said Musk. The ultimate legacy of the cybernetic collectives of social media would be humanity training its replacement. In a computer, a bootloader is a special program that helps initialize the system. Humanity, Musk told Rogan, was becoming “the biological bootloader of AI.”

But there was an interesting wrinkle to this theory. If our online interactions were fueled more by emotion than reason, then the AI systems that we were collectively programming would reflect that. The AI that learned from observing our behavior in the cybernetic collective would become “our id writ large,” Musk said. This was a view of advanced AI not merely as “superintelligence” but as an algorithmic embodiment of combined impulses and instincts.

One implication was that social media had immense importance for the future of the human race. If social media were the primary site of cyborg symbiosis, then a platform like Twitter was more than a place to crack jokes, troll rivals, or pump crypto and stocks. It was a place where the perils of superintelligence could be neutralized by dissolving ourselves into data. If we didn’t become AI, AI would eliminate us.

SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are all expected to make their stock market debut with hefty valuations, as investors are eager to get in on the companies at the heart of the AI boom that have previously been locked up in private markets
.
Wired; Public backlash against AI is escalating rapidly, driven by widespread anxiety over job displacement, surging utility costs from massive data centers, and ethical concerns regarding copyright and disinformation. This growing distrust has sparked grassroots protests, lawsuits, and an alarming spike in targeted, anti-tech extremism across the United States.

Is Big Tech a Bubble? Goldman Sachs;

  • The AI Capex Loophole: Critics argue that Big Tech is funding their own “circular revenue”. Giant tech firms invest billions into AI startups, which then use that exact funding to rent cloud infrastructure from those same tech giants.
  • Unsustainable Spending: Companies are heavily sacrificing cash flows and taking on massive debt to fund data centers and AI hardware. Some analysts from major banks warn that this mirrors the telecom overspending of the dot-com era.
  • Historical Concentration: A handful of mega-cap tech stocks now make up an unprecedented share of indices like the S&P 500, leaving the broader market vulnerable to any industry pullback.
Posted on

Leonard Leo, Opus Dei, John Roberts, and the Most Dangerous Supreme Court

Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and his Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, Lisa Graves 2025

SUPREME COURT CORRUPTION AND PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY

Through action and inaction, Roberts has also allowed a culture of corruption to run rampant. For more than a decade, he has worked to stall congressional efforts to require an enforceable code of conduct for the Supreme Court, even though every other judge in the nation is subject to such rules…Roberts stood silent as Thomas sat on the case involving Donald Trump’s immunity claims in a criminal case about Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, even though Thomas’s wife, Ginni Thomas, actively sought to stop the count and even to secure fake electors. Roberts adopted the same do-nothing approach toward Samuel Alito, despite evidence that flags tied to the Jan 6 insurrection were flown over his homes. Why? Roberts needed their votes in order to accomplish his most reactionary agenda to date and to cement the most unprecedented edict of all: to effectively pardon Trump and pave the way for his return to power, emboldened by kinglike immunity from prosecution for any of his “official acts” as president…John Roberts unprecedented decree was that Trump had committed no crimes, and could have committed no crimes , as long as he was acting in his official capacity as president. The chief justice’s declaration that Trump’s speech and actions in connection to his so-called official acts could not be used as evidence also interfered with other indictments and potentially his conviction in one of the other cases… This was, essentially, a judicial coup.

This situation–where ethically compromised justices were making critical decisions about the election of the president–harkens back to Bush v. Gore. In 2000, Clarence Thomas refused to recuse himself from the Bush v. Gore case despite a very serious conflict of interest involving, once again, his spouse. Rather than recusing himself, Thomas proceeded to cast the decisive vote in the Court’s 5-4 decision to stop the recount in Florida, thereby making George W. Bush president. As part of her job at the Heritage Foundation, Ginni Thomas helped lead the screening and recruiting of appointees for a future Bush administration…After Clarence Thomas failed to recuse himself, the Heritage Foundation promoted Ginni to director of executive branch relations, working directly with the Bush administration..She received nearly $1 in compensation over the next seven years.

John Roberts is presiding over the most corrupt Supreme Court in American history, and he is doing it in order to use the judiciary to entrench Republican power and roll back legal precedents that secured rights that he dislikes. Despite his superficial geniality, Roberts may go down as the worst chief justice in US history, presiding over the destruction of the law and the decimation of the Constitution.

Citizens United v. FEC 

Devastatingly, Roberts has systematically altered the very structure of our democracy by sabotaging voting rights and permitting illegitimate and undemocratic electoral maps that all but eliminated incentives to seek compromise, fueling extremism and division. But Roberts masterstroke was alchemy: turning gold into speech by judicially rewriting the First Amendment to allow mountains of gold in the form of dark money to distort our elections. The result in that case, called Citizens United v. FEC (2010), was orchestrated by the Roberts Court, which ordered an out-of-season oral argument on new questions to clear the decks for a surge in secret cash for the 2010 midterms–just in time to try to rein in America’s first Black president, Barack Obama. That tsunami of cash has been deployed to distort the ensuing elections, epitomized by the actions of the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who spent $288 million to procure the presidency for Donald Trump (and an unelected copresidency for a while) in 2024.

OPUS DEI AND LEONARD LEO

A lot of the money used to rewrite the Constitution through the capture of the Court came from a small number of people–mostly white men–wielding their wealth to limit other people’s rights, especially women’s rights and voting rights, but not just those. To be clear, the Roberts Court does not stand alone in the endeavor to limit these rights: Its sits at the apex of a complex infrastructure of nonprofit groups and for-profit firms seeking to use the Court and protect it from critics. Leonard Leo’s role in building this infrastructure cannot be overestimated. It would not be unreasonable to assert that he is the individual most singularly responsible for reversing American’s reproductive freedoms and other rights through the Roberts Court. Of course, none of this would be possible without generous funding from billionaire zealots.

By 2001, Newsweek was reporting that Justices Scalia and Thomas were reputed to be part of Opus Dei, a secretive ultraconservative Catholic sect, although they could also have been  unofficial collaborators. That article also reported that Scalia’s wife, Maureen, had attended multiple Opus Dei “spiritual functions”…Opus Dei was created as a special prelature of the Catholic Church by Joes-maria Escriva, a priest with close ties to Spain’s Fascist dictator, Francisco Franco. Journalist Gareth Gore recently noted that most Opus Dei members in the United States live in or near Washington D.C., and no government since Franco’s has included as many Opus Dei members or collaborators as the first Trump administration. Two of Leo’s closest allies in the dark-money financial engine that has captured the court, Neil and Ann Corkery, have been part of Opus Dei. Leo also funds the Opus Dei headquarters in DC, the Catholic Information Center, and has received its highest award…by 2006, the Court had its first Catholic majority in US history: Alito plus Roberts, Thomas, Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy.

Attack Philanthropy: Right-Wing Billionaire Fueled Climate Denial & Conservative Judges, Schools

ProPublica reported that in September 2020 (Barre) Seid sold one of his companies and created a massive trust with Leo as Trustee. When the transaction details were settled, Leo stood at the helm of a $1.6 billion trust, one of the biggest gifts of its kind in US history.

No Supreme Court majority in American history has ever been constructed the way the Roberts Court has–with the help of big, dark secret money.

In 2024, Leo made public a letter he had sent to numerous right-wing groups explaining that his focus is on “funding to operationalize or weaponize the conservative vision,” to “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society.” Leo wasn’t writing just as a person who controls a billion-dollar trust fund, which he has used to help orchestrate the reversal of Roe and more. This is the man who helped handpick the majority of justices on the US Supreme Court.

OVERTURNING 1973 ROE V. WADE

Since John Roberts became the chief justice of the US Supreme Court, American women have been losing their liberty. Starting with the Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) decision through the Dobbs v. Jackson (2021) ruling and its aftermath, the Roberts court has made it increasingly difficult for American women to get the medical care they need, to follow their doctor’s advice to protect their health when they are pregnant and confronted with a heart-wrenching diagnosis like cancer that needs treatment or where a severe fetal abnormality is detected. Women are literally dying because John Roberts agreed that states can restrict access to abortion well before a fetus is viable.

MARRIAGE EQUALITY

…when the question of marriage equality was taken up by his court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, Roberts cited as authority sources built on biblical claims…For example, Roberts cites a book published by an Opus Dei-tied publisher and edited by Robbie George, which asserts that the movement for same-sex marriage has created a “crisis,” for marriage. It also treats Christianity as authority on the relationship between “husbands and wives” and “man and woman” where “the family (headed by the husband) ruled itself.” That essay, by law professor David Forte, which Roberts cites in his opinion, also  asserts that the Founding Fathers relied on marriage as the foundation of a “free republic,” “national morality,”, and “public virtue,” based on one letter by John Adams asserting that marriage was necessary to rein in “private passions,” whatever that means. This is one of the flimsiest readings to hang a ruling on that I have ever encountered in more than thirty-five years of reading Supreme Court opinions.

Rich and powerful people have always tried to rig the rules in their favor. Now they are trying to take America backward and control who we can be, who we can love, and how we can care for our bodies, our families, and our world. They are putting the weight of their wealth on the scales of justice to diminish other people’s freedoms. The billionaires who helped capture the Supreme court have a guaranteed freedom to exercise their religion in America, just as all Americans have the freedom to worship or not, as they choose. But the billionaire-backed effort to use the US Supreme Court to impose those views as law on abortion and other social issues is profoundly at odds with our nation’s founding as a place of refuge from state-imposed religion.

VOTING RIGHTS

Roberts waited until three days after Obama was reelected in 2012 to accept another case on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights  Act, a case out of the Deep South known as Shelby County v. Holder. It was brought by Shelby County in Alabama, a state with a legacy of racial terror lynchings and a history of vote dilution efforts…That was the vehicle Roberts handpicked to destroy the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights act…Roberts reprised his theme that “things have changed in the South” in his judicial decree in Shelby County. Then he went about arrogantly disregarding congressional expertise and rejecting a mountain of factual findings in contradiction of this political agenda.

Supreme Court Justices, like all appellate judges, are expected to follow precedent and defer to the factual findings of the courts below them and to Congress. But in Shelby County Chief Justice Roberts did not behave like an appellate judge. Instead, he gave scant consideration to the detailed findings of Congress and to the arguments of the groups submitting amicus briefs in defense of the Voting Rights Act, including those that provided detailed evidence to support the extension of the law…Roberts produced the antidemocratic outcome he desired but that the majority of the people’s representatives overwhelmingly rejected. Roberts declared, despite congressional findings to the contrary, “The conditions that originally justified these measures…no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.”

Voting restrictions started going into effect immediately, within minutes of John Roberts announcing his decimation of the preclearance protections under the Voting Rights Act.

Attacking The SEC administrative agency and administrative law Judges

In Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy (2025), Roberts chose to pen that decision, striking down decades of administrative law practice to declare suddenly that Congress cannot assign the administration of civil penalties for securities fraud to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and that instead such cases must be tried in federal court. This dramatic change in the law will make it far more difficult and expensive for the SEC to enforce the rules on trading securities, rules that protect American investors.

Charles Koch and the Supreme Court attack on Unions and Environmental Protections

The Kochs appear throughout this book, particularly Charles Koch. (See Kochland) Charles is not religious but worked closely with Leonard Leo.

In the 2018 Janus v. AFSCME John Roberts assigned the opinion to Sam Alito, who asserted that the fair-share rule created a “windfall” for unions.  Alito’s opinion, which Roberts joined, allows workers like Janus to be free riders who get the benefits and wages negotiated by unions without paying any fees–that’s the real windfall…the Roberts Court’s majority were weaponizing the First Amendment to undo precedents that the new majority disliked; they were reversing the law in Abood (1977) based not on any material change in the law or circumstances but just because John Roberts had the majority to do it. The decision also gave Charles Koch and his family a major victory in their multigenerational attack on unions.
In Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, (2021) John Roberts delivered another blow to union organizing with his own words. Writing for the 6-3 Republican majority in that case, Roberts struck down a forty-six year old law that allowed union organizers a “right of access” to an agricultural employer’s property to protect agricultural workers’ right  to freedom of association in order to organize. Roberts asserted that the right  to organize in the farm fields constituted a “taking” under the Fifth Amendment.

In West Virginia v. EPA (2022), Roberts dealt a devastating blow to the power of the EPA. Roberts articulated the totally invented so-called major questions doctrine, which appears nowhere in the Constitution and had never appeared in any prior cases. The judicial invention asserts that federal agencies cannot use existing statutes to regulate on an issue the the Court deems to be a “major question” that Congress should first pass specific legislation to address. Under that “doctrine”, Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees declared that the EPA did not have the authority to regulate carbon by setting targets for utility companies to expand reliance on renewables, even though the EPA has authority under to statute to regulate carbon and other pollutants.

On its face Loper Bright (2024) is about sea captains opposing a regulation designed to protect wild fish in marine habitats from overfishing, but the  case was about much more than marine life. It was about advancing the destructive legal agenda of one of the the richest men in the world, whose enormous wealth comes from extractive industries. The case transcended Koch’s individual pecuniary interests, however, and was designed to make it easier for other billionaires and corporations to assail an array of federal regulations across countless industries. A close examination of the Loper Bright litigation reveals how it was orchestrated to secure a pro-Koch ruling by a Supreme Court with a newly constituted majority with judges Koch helped get confirmed. (Koch got) the reversal of the legal precedent set in Chevron v. NRDC (1984) …that required federal courts to defer to interpretations by federal agencies of statutory language when Congress did not specify the meaning of a particular word or term and the agency’s interpretation was a reasonable policy choice…Over the course of forty years the Chevron case was cited more than 15,000 times by the courts and provided some stability to the setting of federal rules…By 2024 federal judges no longer needed to defer to reasonable policy choices by experts at federal agencies in cases of broad statutory authorization. Now federal judges–which include more than 200 Trump appointees–can substitute their beliefs and slants for those of government scientists and other substantive experts employed by  the public. The Roberts Court has opened up a free-for-all for hostile federal judges to assert that they know more about air pollution than the experts at the EPA… or that they know better than the FDA about approving drugs like abortion medicine…This is a signature outcome long sought by Koch, Leo, and their comrades…It was about power.

For a look at how the Justice Department and FBI failed to bring Donald Trump to trial and justice for his many crimes and the role of the Federal courts in preventing these trials see Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department, by Carol Leonnig , Aaron C. Davis 2025