Naked Capitalism Fundraiser 2025: Finding High Ground as the Tsunami Rolls In

Our 2025 fundraiser starts today. If you appreciate all of the in-depth and ever more wide-ranging reporting and analysis, extensive daily links, highly informative and often witty comments, and cute creature pix, please go straight to the Tip Jar, to find out how to support us via check, debit or credit card. Get the fundraiser off to a fast start! Every contribution helps us be fitter and more ferocious in 2026!

We really do depend on reader support. We’ve gotten even more reader huzzahs over the course of this past year than before, confirming you value trenchant takes, sharp eyed community members, and cat video mental health breaks. If fortune is smiling on you, please give generously to help make up for those with tight budgets. And you can contribute in other ways, by circulating posts to friends and colleagues, by participating in comments, and by sending us link candidates.

As is customary, we use this kickoff post to look back and ahead. But by accident and design, making sense of where we are collectively and where we are going gets harder and harder. Even before the Trump chaos and the merry system-breaking of accelerationists, short-sighted oligarchs, and Dunning-Kruger-effect dominated elites, once-adequately-functioning systems were starting to crack under the weight of their own contractions. And that’s before considering the one crisis that rules them all, climate change and resource scarcity.

Merely from an economic perspective, the wheels have been coming off since the global financial crisis. We pointed out in ECONNED that its upheaval showed that neoliberalism had hit its end game. We said then the most likely result was paradigm breakdown. Incumbents would keep trying to patch up the old order. So conditions would deteriorate as officials and elites pulled on levers that simply don’t function any more.

In 2021, we depicted the state of play as early stage collapse. In 2024, we highlighted the tendency to look at problems in silos, like domestic versus foreign policy, or military versus economic strategy, as breaking down. More and more energy is being pumped into already stressed systems, pushing them towards a state change, as in more disorder. For instance, the Western refusal to find a way to declare peace with honor in Ukraine is pushing France and the UK into budget/financial crises, as well as political turmoil, as many citizens reject the premise that they should give up social safety nets because Putin. And how many in the UK and EU recognize how much they’ve been made to put on the Ukraine altar in the form of Russia-sanctions-induced high energy costs and job losses?

Even with that trajectory, more wheels came off in the past year. Trump the chaos generator is a big reason. Even so, many of his actions, from tax cuts and social safety net gutting to backing Israel and Ukraine to the misguided effort to contain the rise of China, represent continuity of policy. Though Trump is an extremely aggressive actor, he is far from alone, with a wide range of anarcho-libertarians in his camp, from Musk and his DOGE brownshirts, to crypto bros. Other fellow travelers include surveillance state promoters, fossil fuel interests and foreign policy radicals, from ardent Zionists to hawks who think a hot war with China is a good idea. While Trump and his lot often have valid critiques of the current order, such as poorly-constrained immigration is not such a hot idea, their solutions consist mainly of deploying wrecking balls. Demolition may seem satisfying but rebuilding is hard, even more so with no plan.

But the Trump counter-revolution represents a change in means, above all a lack of respect for anything that gets in his way, be it laws, institutions, norms, or even common sense practices like “You should prepare for high-stakes meetings if you want to ge a good outcome” or “Surrounding yourself with toadies means you will have no idea what is going on.” He’s so dedicated ot bull-in-the-china-shopism that we’ve repeatedly invoked a saying attributed to Sun Tsu: All tactics and no strategy is the noise before the defeat.

Pouring gas on the fires of late-stage capitalism, Trump declared tariff wars on just about everyone, managing to drive one-times US friends like Canada and India, and then having to go TACO, as with China, when they backfire. Many businesses are being whipsawed by Trump keeping the level and extent of tariffs in play. Trump flip flopping on other important fronts, such as negotiations over Ukraine, looks less and less like clever use of radical uncertainty and more and more like not liking his options and flailing about to put off making a choice. The US threatening to attack Greenland, Panama, Mexico (oh, just its gangs), and Venezuela look like displays of manhood to cover for US imperial decline.

And we have other extreme outcomes in motion before Trump, such as Europe committing economic suicide by cutting itself off from cheap Russian gas and the nauseating glee of Zionists in starving and torturing Palestinians.

The domestic tally is similarly long: Trump cutting Medicare and Medicaid. ICE raids and abuses and defiance of Congresscritters. Trump wrecking storied science and education programs out of his hatred of elite schools as bastions of the professional-managerial classes, with no concern to the huge damage he has done to what is left of US scholarly leadership. Browbeating the Fed for not following his dictates. Attacks on free speech. Attempts to take over local policing, either bureaucratically or via National Guard deployments. The faux macho of forcing a weak Intel to sell a stake to the government.

But let’s not forget the looting. The reason Trump has gotten as far as he has is his followers, from Project 2025 to MAGA (now becoming disaffected) to crypto touts to the arms industry to MAHA see profit potential from Trump wins.

Trump’s success in keeping himself in the headlines is crowding out other signs of US decline, such a a big increase in death rates among the young, the ever-rising number of budget-stressed Americans, the AI bezzle, Covid damage denialism, and routine indignities like crumbling infrastructure and ever-worsening bureaucracies.

Even though China is vastly better situated and led than the US, it faces the challenge of overcapacity and deflation. Chinese leaders, as they did in 2016, are embarking on a program to end what in the West has been called ruinous competition and rationalize some key industries like EV manufacturers. But deflation is harder to reverse than inflation, and China faces the additional impediment of flagging export markets (the US due to Trump, Europe due to its faltering growth). In early September, China’s PMI showed it was in the fifth month of contraction in manufacturing, despite the pause of Trump tariffs.

And what about the next year? It appears far too likely that Israel will again attack Iran, again pulling the US into the conflict, with decent odds that neither side will back down as before. How the US engages in a serious-looking campaign against geographically well-defended Venezuela, and Mexican gangs when a revival of war with Iran places new demands is over my pay grade.

France and the UK look set for economic and political crisis, which should but probably won’t focus minds in other European capitals. How long the Ukraine war lasts depends on how quickly its military and government collapse. That process could extend well into 2026.

In yet another set of own goals, Trump’s actions to beat back multipolarity are strengthening it. Even though we see BRICS as an organization as greatly overhyped, the BRICS impulse of increasing alliances independent of the collective West is getting even more momentum. The Trump administration revoking visas of Palestinian UN representatives isn’t just a defense of Israel; it’s also an attack on multipolarity. Recall that a big objective in the Kazan Declaration was to increase Global Majority authority in the UN and other international organizations like the World Bank. Trump may apply his wrecking ball to prevent that from happening.

Domestically, the US may be closer to crisis than many imagine. Trump’s approval ratings have taken a leg down. The economy, key to citizen satisfaction with its rulers, has already entered stagflation terrain. The AI bubble looks set to pop, which will yank the rug out from under spending by the wealthy, which has increasingly become the foundation of what passes for growth. A US stock market unwind as European finances are wobbling is a prescription for a plunge in financial asset prices.

Trump’s power grabs, from pervasive ICE violations of due process to forcing universities to bend to his will to using the National Guard to undermine local control over policing to having the Attorney General target political enemies, all serve to bulldoze obstacles to his control. If Trump’s policies, such as his use of tariffs, are blocked or continue to backfire, he wil lash out even moreat perceived enemies….which cwould amount to large swathes of the American public.

And all of this frantic activity is significantly crowding out coverage of the mother of all crises, climate change. But again, that may also be accident rather than design, since far too many of what passes for our betters seem to have deemed the problem to be too hard and have given up on meaningful course changes.

But what are we to do, given these grim givens?

Many of you come here, some every day, to peer through ever-thicker informational fog and discern what is really happening across a broad and sometimes quickly moving front of events. The gaslighting seems never-ending, from, Zelensky being on his way out to back again as the new Churchill to or that the war on drugs is why the US is threatening Venezuela, to there being nothing to see in a big rise in deaths and ill health among kids to the Democrats’ abundance being anything other than reheated neoliberealism. Those paying attention realize we have been left to fend for ourselves.

As readers have often said, reading Naked Capitalism is like getting next month’s news today. We pride ourselves on our long-standing record of being early and accurate, but we don’t do this alone. This community is ever more important. Naked Capitalism’s globe- and expertise-spanning commentariat tests information and debates issues intensively, from ICE as a war against labor, as opposed to just immigrants, to the rapidly changing political tides in many EU states to the strengths of the Indian versus Pakistan military to to resource footprints of green technologies to difficult bureaucracies to expat havens to book recommendations to our many parody lyrics.

Your intense engagement and faithful financial support enabled us to surmount life after Lambert and add an impressive roster of new writers, Haig Hovaness, Nat Wilson Turner, and Curro Jimenez, as well as a Coffee Break from KLG and a Sunday movie feature from semper loqitur, greatly increasing the range and depth of our work.

If you value this informational heavy lifting, please go straight to the Tip Jar and give generously.

Naked Capitalism has long straddled a position few occupy, providing both hot takes and near think tank-level analysis. A few examples from our regulars:

Conor Gallagher on the US power play in the Zangezur Corridor, bipartisan authoritarianism, and the criminalization of homelessness;

Nick Corbishley on peak Palantir, the dangers of the digital Euro, and US arms smuggling stoking violence south of the border;

KLG on the American science doom loop and MAHA influencers seeking immortality;

Nat Wilson Turner on Gaza driving breakdown in traditional US party/ideological alliances and the political side of AI;

Haig Hovaness’ “Armed Madhouse,” such as bribery as a weapon in war and politics and Trump’s Golden Dome boondoggle;

Curro Jiminez with his on-site report from BRICS 2025 and revived US focus on Latin America as a “sphere of influence”;

Yours truly on the Ukraine conflict, such as the “raw earths” deal and the implications of the Oreshnik missile, and finance and economics, such as “buy now, pay later” loans.

And semper loquitur’s Sunday morning movie feature, from classics to foreign films to gumshoe to horror to the best of schlock.

Michael Hudson has gives us first dibs on his work, such as on Trump’s devastation of US farms and America’s long-standing scheme to break up Iran. Tom Neuburger keeps a steely eye on the continuing dire state of climate change and US political breakdown. Satyajit Das continues to provide commentary on finance as well as culture. Rob Urie weights in on class warfare, Hubert Horan on plans for AI price-targeting by airlines, and George Georgiou, on UK and EU economic topics.

We’d like to do more. We’d like to do it even better. Imagine how much trouble we could cause if we got our hands on serious money!

Please support our efforts. Give whatever you can, whether it’s $5, $50, or $5,000, via our Tip Jar. Even a small donation helps us meet our fundraising goals. If you can, please give generously, particularly on behalf of loyal readers who are under stress and aren’t able to donate as much as they’d like to.

And if you aren’t able to make a financial contribution, rest assured you can still help! More than ever, we depend on all of you to promote Naked Capitalism and bring in more readers. You can help by sending articles, Links, and Coffee Breaks to potentially receptive friends, family members, and colleagues, by linking to our posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, talking up the site, making comments and sending cute animal photos.

In our accompanying kickoff post, we describe what your donations will fund and tell you when we’ve hit each of these monetary goals. Our first goal is $25,000 for digital infrastructure essentials. That may not sound very sexy, but this is our plumbing. When your plumbing is not working, I bet you notice! So big thanks to our tech guru Dave for keeping everything running so smoothly.

We particularly like checks! No processor fees! But you might have to be patient with the state of USPS :-(

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We also want to warn you: as much as we feel very guilty about it, we lack the capacity to thank donors individually. Or to put it another way, with our thin staffing, we’d have to cut way back on posting to be able to do that. We hope you forgive us for having to give top priority to continuing to generate the content you appreciate so much.

Again, we hope you’ll support our work in ways big and small. You’ve helped us build a community, and with your continued backing, we aspire to make it even better in the coming year.