Liberal Elites Kicked the Door Wide Open for Trump’s Flagrant Corruption

From Tony Wikrent's Week in review:

Liberal Elites Kicked the Door Wide Open for Trump’s Flagrant Corruption

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis, November 9 2025 [The Intercept]


…While Trumpian corruption is striking in frequency, scale, and just how routine it is starting to feel, this administration was the logical endpoint of the long-standing tradition of elite impunity. The second Trump administration is a striking monument to governmental misconduct, but the ground was broken long ago, with both parties laying the foundation. For the past half century, corporate and white-collar crime have gone largely unenforced. This was the result of both a widespread shift in views of governance (à la the Reagan Revolution) and a coordinated plan orchestrated to enable private wealth to hijack our democracy, as David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher documented in their new book “Master Plan,” building on a podcast of the same name.

Trump himself is a byproduct of the wealthy being empowered to violate the law. Seemingly his entire pre-government career was predicated on getting away with gaming bankruptcy law, committing widespread financial fraud, and racial discrimination. Now, in government, he is employing the “blitzscaling” model pioneered by firms like Uber to break the law faster than anyone can keep up with….

The Great Recession was a turning point; the extent of corporate lawbreaking in the financial sector was laid bare. And, famously, hardly anyone ever went to jail. Obama-era regulators, in many ways the acme of our last half-century of the hands-off approach to ruling-class misconduct, earned rebuke and scorn as “the chickenshit club,” afraid to square up against the powerful, if not overtly committed to serve elite interests. Since 2008, it has only become more apparent that the wealthy play by an entirely different set of rules.

Trump’s first election was, in part, built on the argument that he knew “how to play the game.” In this telling, his ability to break the rules was actually an asset because he would break them for you rather than just for the powerful. It was always a dubious pitch, but it’s understandable why — faced with the choice between someone trying to convince you the game that’s obviously been fixed is actually not rigged, and someone who tells you how they cheat and promise to help you get ahead a little bit — people would gravitate toward the latter. Part of the early MAGA mythos was built on resignation to the fact that our rule of law is fundamentally perverted to create two parallel tracks of justice: an unforgiving, punitive, carceral system for most people, and a cushy, consequence-free dinner party circuit for the ruling class.

Dethroning Trump will not be enough to restore real rule of law; the Biden administration is proof enough of that. Donald Trump was excised from the White House with historically bad public sentiment in the immediate aftermath of a failed coup. Under Biden, the Garland Justice Department tried to wind the clock back to 2016 and resume operating the way establishment politicians did in the 1990s and 2000s. It failed spectacularly, allowing bad actors like Elon Musk to grow ever more powerful while continuing to flout the law with impunity. The result was an embittered Trump who faced no real repercussions for his corruption — the worst-case scenario….

To dislodge the hold that corruption has on our government and restore the rule of law, Democrats will need to decide who they really are — and who they’ll fight for.

[TW: More accurately, Democrats will need to decide who they’ll fight against.]

The importance of (public) banking

 Public bank maven Ellen Brown has a new post describing how Zohran Mamdani is going to manage to get the money needed for his programs. Hint: It's a public bank. You might also refer to this previous post for context. It explains why this isn't optional, it's required.

Excerpt:

Banks, Not the Government, Create the Money Supply

How can a public bank lend billions more than the capital it actually has? The answer is in a little-known secret of banking: banks don’t lend existing money. They create it. When a bank issues a loan, it doesn’t hand out cash from a vault. It creates a deposit in the account of the borrower, backed by the borrower’s promise to repay the loan with interest; and these deposits are counted in the money supply. Roughly 95% of the U.S. money supply is created in this way — by private banks, for private profit.

A public bank does the same thing, but in the public interest. It monetizes future productivity — housing that will generate rent, roads and rail that will transport workers, solar panels that will lower energy costs. To “monetize” means to turn future productivity into something that can be spent now — e.g. spent on the labor and materials necessary to create the products that will repay the loan. The money is created into existence, circulates through the economy and is extinguished upon repayment.

Isn’t That the Sort of “Money Printing” That Drives Up Prices?

No. Price inflation is a function of supply and demand: prices go up when too much money is chasing too few goods. Injecting new money (demand) does not drive up prices as long as the money creates new supply to absorb it, keeping prices stable.

China’s development model illustrates this principle. Over the past 29 years, its money supply has increased by a whopping 5,500%. Yet price inflation has remained modest, because the increase in money was matched by an increase in goods and services. The China Development Bank — one of the largest banks in the world — along with other Chinese public banks fund infrastructure, housing and manufacturing, creating real assets that absorb the new currency in the marketplace. 

....

The New York Public Banking Act (S1754/A3352), which Mamdani co-sponsored in the NY Assembly in 2023, would allow cities in the state to obtain charters for their own public banks. Modeled on California’s AB857, it has broad legislative support. However, it remains stalled in the legislature — likely due to pressure from entrenched financial interests. New York State is home to some of the largest and most powerful banks in the world, and they are in the heart of New York City.

New York City is also the home of the most powerful branch of the Federal Reserve, the New York Fed, and like all Fed branches, it is 100% owned by the banks in its district. Because of its proximity to Wall Street and its operational responsibilities, the New York Fed is often considered the heart of the Federal Reserve System. Its Wall Street owners are not likely to relinquish control of that megacity’s finances without a fight.

 

 

 

Ever wonder about the quality of economic advice our leaders receive?

 

Saikat Chakrabarti Runs for Pelosi's Congressional Seat + Thomas Ferguson evaluates Democratic failure

You'll read all about conventional Democrat Weiner running for Pelosi's congressional seat in the "lame-stream" news, but the absolute minimum about the progressive challenger, Saikat Chakrabarti. He's come from AOC's staff, and is very clear about the progressive goals he embraces. For the full story, read or listen to his interview with The Intercept.

One excerpt:"So the thing I’ve been working on at my think tank New Consensus, we’re calling it the “Mission for America.” And it really harkens back to basically what FDR did during the New Deal, but also during the mobilization for World War II to build a whole new economy because I think that’s ultimately the way we defeat authoritarianism. Because back in the 1930s, we had a really powerful, far right in this country. We were actually seeing Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden, it was filling the stadium.

"And the way we defeated that was FDR came in with the New Deal movement. He built this whole new economy and a whole new society that improved people’s lives so dramatically, it just killed this idea that you need an authoritarian to do it for you.

"He proved democracy can work. And he did that through the social safety net. But he also did that by building an industrial base that created the modern-day middle class. So that’s really what the “Mission for America” is. It’s basically taking a lot of the institutions and the lessons from that era and saying, how do we do that today? Because I argue that it’s not just about some policies; it’s actually this whole other kind of governing that we had back then." 

Meanwhile, Thomas Ferguson evaluates Democratic chances here Hint: follow the money.  

Excerpt:

"The old line continues in a new way as people try to understand the Trump economy. Paul Krugman and many others continue to maintain that Biden left a good economy that Trump is ruining. The very last months of Biden’s term were somewhat better, but the dominant tendency is a deepening of the dual economy Storm and I spotlighted with the continuing stock market boom. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston just put out a study of wealth, income, and consumption spending. It concludes that it’s the rich who are benefiting hugely in both wage growth and spending, not the lower-income groups. Other studies confirm this. 

"Indeed, segments of the business press now routinely refer to the “K-shaped economy,” alluding to the divergence between top and bottom in income and wealth. Most stories manage not to mention quantitative easing and the Fed’s role, but they document very clearly the way retail sales and other spending divide in our dual economy. That tendency became stronger during Biden’s term, especially once the relief programs were withdrawn and access to health insurance fell. Even the Wall Street Journal has come around on this point.

"The process has been going on for quite a long time, yet Democratic Party elites mostly felt comfortable discussing it in terms of second-order effects suffused in references to racism and gender. You could see that very clearly in 2016, where virtually everybody’s election analysis focused on race and gender. By contrast, in the analysis that Ben Page and my colleagues and I did, we were very clear that Trump’s ascent was first of all an economic story. You only had to listen to him talk to realize that race and gender were also playing big roles in his electoral appeals. But the importance of the economic squeeze on many Americans was clear from day one, as was the disenchantment of many Democratic voters with the party.

"It’s not getting better. Little in the “abundance agenda” now touted by many Democrats addresses the real problems. The recent paper from economists at the San Francisco Fed showing that supply constraints don’t explain housing construction and prices in US cities is devastating, for example. So is the evidence Storm and I presented about electricity rates; you don’t explain those by NIMBYism. Electricity prices are classic cases of money in politics distorting regulation."

Nick French

"To summarize where that leaves the Democrats right now: They still push this narrative that Biden had a great economy, that he delivered for workers. He only lost because the workers are confused by social media or because they don’t care about economic issues…

Thomas Ferguson

"Or the party has somehow not found a message. That’s another nonsense bromide. The Democrats failed to deliver for most Americans who were not rich, full stop."

 

Advantage: China

 

I finally got a chance to read this fascinating paper on productivity in China by Weijian Shan, a man who's had an incredible life, starting as a Cultural Revolution worker in the Gobi desert to today one of the world's most respected investors.

One statistic blew my mind. In… https://t.co/5H5tHY4SY1

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) November 12, 2025

 

...worth expanding. The text describes how Chinese workers produce 14 times more than American workers. This is odd because the Chinese work for lower pay than the Americans. But China's commitment to infrastructure, particularly transit and green energy, makes this possible. The US has set up its economy as a series of toll booths, so worker need higher pay just to live their lives. The privatization of everything essential to survival from food, to housing, to healthcare, to education, etc. -- all of that makes just day-to-day living more expensive, and not incidentally, the US less competitive internationally.

Material Conditions Matter: Slavery, the Fall of Rome, and the American Civil War

(c) by Mark Dempsey

A recent article about the fall of Rome cites the corruption and lack of civic consciousness of the elites as some of the causes of (Western) Rome's fall in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. However, it overlooks one important material cause of Rome's decline: food shortages. Material conditions matter.

Early Roman farmers practiced sustainable agriculture, maintaining soil fertility as they grew their crops. As more conquests produced more slaves, however, they abandoned those techniques to farm with slaves. Slaves don't care if they deplete the soil.

The depleted soil meant declining food production for Rome, which became more dependent on imported food, particularly from its North African colonies. The Vandals battled their way down the Iberian Peninsula to North Africa and shut off that food source. When the barbarians came to Rome, the hungry population opened the gates for them.*

One reason farming with slaves came to the New World in the American South was because Old World diseases like malaria and yellow fever decimated populations that might have otherwise supplied workers.** Africans had resistance to these diseases, so slavery made economic sense in a New World short of human labor, and was particularly necessary in the areas where the yellow fever and malaria vectors (mosquitoes) existed--roughly from the Mason-Dixon line to the northern border of Argentina.

Those diseases may also be the reason Napoleon's soldiers couldn't defeat a 1791–1804 slave revolt in Haiti. An army with too many deaths from illness is much easier to defeat.

Plantation operators solved the depleted soil problem in the New World not by planting soil-restoring crops like peanuts, but by moving to new territory and "mining" that soil. As the US expanded westward, the debate about whether the new territories would allow slavery was one of existential importance, at least to the South, where soils were degrading thanks to slave-based farming. The South's economic dependence on soil fertility trumped all the moralizing from abolitionists.

Farming cotton with slaves is perilous for other reasons too. Andrew Jackson's administration stole much of the Southeastern US from its native inhabitants despite Supreme Courts in Georgia and Washington D.C. confirming that the natives owned the land. Jackson dared the Supreme Court to enforce its order, and evicted the tribes from their land with a march called the "Trail of Tears." Note: Trump is not the first president to defy the courts.

This defiance made lots of new territory available for cotton farmers who occupied the land and borrowed to buy new slaves. But the income with which they expected to pay those loans did not materialize because they produced so much cotton that the price descended to new lows, even though they warehoused 60% of the crop.

Their difficulties were further compounded because, in 1835, Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt entirely and revoked the charter for the National Bank. That meant there was no public currency. People did their business with specie (monetized gold) and over 7,000 varieties of private bank notes of varying reliability. 

It was a business nightmare, and many planters lost everything because they lost their dollar savings and couldn't pay slave loans with either their cotton income or those savings. A wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures – the "Panic of 1837"– ensued.

These events set the stage for the American Civil War. That war impoverished the South even more since, after the South lost, all its banks failed, and its Confederate currency was worthless. 

The postwar period was full of predatory lending from suppliers – the "furnishing man" later shortened to "The Man" – and the Gilded Age of predatory capitalism met with populist resistance from the only partly successful Farmers’ Alliance and the People's Party.

Both Rome and the American South illustrate how social inequality leads to a deterioration of civic life and the danger of social collapse. Currently, the US is experiencing massive social inequality, and even echoes Rome's dependence on imported food.

"Sustainability" is a watchword for some public policy candidates, but there's seldom any interest in a comprehensive pursuit of that goal. Even the way the US builds its cities--"suburban sprawl" – means maintenance expenses grow faster than the tax base, so our particular Ponzi scheme is literally cast in concrete. 

The rhyme of history may not be the one we want to hear.

*This simplifies some complex history, but if you're interested in the details, read Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians.

**See Charles Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Deaths of Despair