Source: Washington Monthly
by Jonathan Alter

“o one can predict how the murder of Renee Good will change this country. But there’s an encouraging history of change the aftermath of certain violent and tragic events, and a poor track record for governments that shoot their own people in the streets. Even when this story is pushed out of the headlines by some new outrage, we may look back on it as the moment when Donald Trump lost his grip. Of course, the ICE story will likely get worse before it gets better. … why am I hopeful that after tensions escalate for a time, we’ll get some accountability—if not for Good’s murder, then for Trump’s efforts to establish an American police state?” (01/12/26)

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/01/12/how-the-murder-of-good-changes-the-stakes-for-good/

Source: Common Dreams
by Klaus Moegling

“The beginning of 2026 falls into a period of increasing global social destruction. Multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe OSCE are being systematically destroyed. Countries such as the US and Russia are withdrawing from these institutions or attempting to obstruct them through blocking behavior. US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are political leaders who are dismantling or destroying the remnants of democracy in their countries, increasing repressive pressure on their populations, and acting aggressively toward the outside world. They find international law rather annoying, ignore it, and develop a right-wing and authoritarian nationalism, within the framework of which the ruling circles in the US and Russia enrich themselves excessively and disregard everything that previous values in terms of decency and justice demand.” (01/12/25)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/2026-war-authoritarianism

Source: Bitcoin.com
by Sergio Goschenko

“The issue of bitcoin’s lack of privacy has been raised as a key concern that may affect its adoption as a central bank digital currency by state nations. In the latest episode of the ‘All-In Podcast,’ venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya presented his contrarian take for 2026, stating that central banks will realize both gold and bitcoin have limitations, and will seek out a ‘completely new cryptographic paradigm.’ This new paradigm will be controlled by the central bank’s balance sheet and will be ‘fungible, tradable, and completely secure and private.'” [editor’s note: The LAST thing central banks want is secure/private currency. That would limit the ability of the regimes linked to the central banks to steal it from us and monitor our use of it – TLK] (01/12/26)

https://news.bitcoin.com/is-bitcoin-too-public-to-become-central%E2%80%91bank-money/

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Michael Dioguardi

“In modern political debate, rising costs of living are usually blamed on markets. Housing is ‘unaffordable.’ Healthcare is ‘broken.’ Education is ‘too expensive.’ The proposed remedy is almost always the same: more public spending, more intervention, more emergency programs funded by government credit. But what if the affordability crisis is not a failure of markets at all? What if it is the predictable outcome of how modern governments finance themselves? From an Austrian perspective, the affordability crisis is best understood as a monetary and institutional phenomenon. Since the early 1970s, governments like the United States have operated under a system of discretionary sovereign credit, where spending is no longer meaningfully constrained by taxation or savings.” (01/12/26)

https://mises.org/power-market/sovereign-credit-affordability-and-crisis-ratchet

Source: The Atlantic
by Jonathan Chait

“Trump is alienating anti-system voters because he now controls the system. His appeal lay in his opposition to established power, but now that he has it, he is flexing it gleefully. He is the warmonger, the censor, the face of the Epstein cover-up. It is hard to remain an outsider while holding the world’s most powerful job. But Trump seems not to have anticipated this, in part because he had far less trouble maintaining his anti-establishment identity in his first term. He managed this because that term consisted mainly of failures. … Trump is no longer making this complaint about the established forces working against him, because he has solved this problem. His presidency is filled with loyalists. He has largely overcome any reluctance that officials might have had in carrying out his most unethical or illegal demands. He can’t present himself as anti-system, because he has become the system.” (01/12/26)

https://archive.is/J8CDj