#public knowledge

LIVESTREAM | ADD TO CALENDAR | PERMALINK On Wednesday November 12, 2025, Public Knowledge convenes ‘The People’s Oversight Hearing‘ in Washington DC. For the first 10 months of this Congress, there have been zero full oversight hearings for the Federal Trade Commission – FTC, Federal Communications Commission – FCC, and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – CFPB, making them less accountable and…

The Trump Economy: Extraction Disguised as Policy

How authoritarian economics works in practice—not by building something new, but by hollowing out what remains and turning it to private gain.

James B. Greenberg

Aug 03, 2025

For all the talk of strength and resurgence, the economic logic of Trump’s second term is unfolding as accelerated collapse—not from neglect, but from design. This isn’t a return to industrial America or a defense of the forgotten working class. It’s a systematic transfer of risk, wealth, and control—an extraction economy wearing the mask of governance.

The false premises of Trump’s tariff policies were clear from the start. Framed as tools to rebalance trade and protect American jobs, they provoke retaliatory measures, drive up consumer costs, and disrupt long-standing supply chains. Farmers—once promised protection—face collapsing export markets. Manufacturers pay more for parts and pass the costs down. What begins as a trade war becomes a self-inflicted wound.

Trade agreements, too, are no longer about negotiation but disruption. Deals are torn up or hastily redrawn for spectacle, not substance, leaving uncertainty in their place. Long-term trading partners are alienated. Diplomatic capital is spent for domestic headlines. The result is an erosion of stability that no executive order can reverse.

The mass deportation apparatus, already in motion during Trump’s first term, has expanded in both scale and impunity. Migrant labor, long essential to sectors like agriculture, construction, food processing, and elder care, is treated as disposable. Entire regions dependent on immigrant labor find themselves without workers. Crops rot. Projects stall. Small businesses close. This isn’t about restoring order—it’s about creating chaos that can be exploited.

That same logic extends to the privatization of public services. Core functions once considered government’s responsibility—healthcare, education, disaster response—have been handed off to contractors and profit-driven intermediaries. The effect isn’t greater efficiency. It’s greater opacity, reduced oversight, and a transfer of public wealth into private hands. Where there should be accountability, there’s a contract. Where there should be care, there’s a bill.

The consequences play out quietly. A diabetic pays $600 for insulin. A teacher loses her job when her district eliminates “controversial” curriculum. A farm in California can’t find workers to harvest its crop after an ICE sweep. These aren’t isolated events—they’re how policy lands.

Tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans further tilt the economy toward extraction. Under the rhetoric of growth, the federal government hemorrhages revenue while offering little relief to those who need it. The benefits are uneven by design: windfalls for billionaires, crumbs for workers. That shortfall—created at the top—is then used to justify cuts to the social safety net below.

Meanwhile, the economic landscape grows more volatile. Market chaos isn’t an accident. It’s a feature. These disruptions aren’t the byproduct of mismanagement. They are part of a deliberate strategy: to destabilize public systems, drive confusion, and create conditions where those closest to power can extract wealth while everyone else bears the risk. Crisis becomes profitable: when you already control the exit.

Insider trading has proliferated under cover of deregulation. Federal officials wink through the chaos, offering quiet tips that make fortunes for those who know when to buy. Bankruptcies surge, especially among small and midsized enterprises. The large absorb the weak. Capital concentrates further into the hands of the few. Monopoly power expands across nearly every sector—from food and freight to finance, energy, and tech.

Regulatory protections have been stripped away under the guise of freeing the market. In practice, that means removing guardrails that keep corporations from polluting, exploiting, or defrauding with impunity. Deregulation advantages those who already have leverage and leaves the rest of us to absorb the risk. Public lands and leases are sold off at bargain prices to extractive industries. These aren’t isolated decisions. They reflect an ethos that treats the country not as a society to be governed, but as an asset to be liquidated.

Public institutions have been gutted alongside public protections. Universities lose funding. Scientific research becomes contingent on political loyalty. Agencies lose experienced staff and institutional memory. Expertise is treated as a liability. The social safety net—already fraying—is slashed: Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, housing support. What remains is a patchwork that leaves the most vulnerable exposed and asks the rest to fend for themselves.

In the name of decentralization, responsibility for everything from pandemic response to climate adaptation is offloaded to states, local governments, and individuals—most without the resources to confront the scale of the crisis. What looks like flexibility is abandonment. And that abandonment hits hardest in the very communities already stretched thin—rural counties, inner cities, tribal nations, aging towns where industry left long ago and investment never returned.

Inflation surges, driven in part by these disruptions. But the response doesn’t address root causes. It weaponizes the pain, pits neighbor against neighbor, and blames the cost of living on immigrants, trans people, or “woke” universities rather than on the billionaires quietly profiting from scarcity.

We’re left with a politics of abandonment layered on top of an economy of dispossession. A dollar once seen as the stable currency of global trade is now being questioned abroad. Confidence in federal data declines, not because of error, but because of manipulation. Jobs reports are revised. Environmental data softens. Budget projections skew. Reality itself is reshaped to fit the message.

This is no accident. The erosion of trust, the institutional hollowing, the engineered instability—these are part of a political economy that rewards volatility for those who know how to ride it. The playbook isn’t new. It’s a textbook case of accumulation by dispossession, where crisis becomes a means of profit and disorder a source of control.

Anthropologist Roy Rappaport warned decades ago of what happens when lower-order systems capture and repurpose their regulators—when corporations begin to define the state rather than be governed by it. It’s the logic behind the old line: what’s good for General Motors is good for the country. We’re living through the consequences. That belief was never true.

From an anthropologist’s view, this is a cultural restructuring. Public knowledge—once understood as a shared resource—is now treated as a threat. The systems we used to rely on—universities, public media, statistical agencies—are recast as partisan, elite, or untrustworthy. Once discredited, they become easier to ignore, then defund, then remake.

Power doesn’t just operate through budgets and laws—it works through stories. By painting public institutions as corrupt, elites as enemies, and private profit as neutral, the regime manufactures consent for its own consolidation.

What we’re seeing is not just bad policy. It’s a deliberate reshaping of the economy to benefit those already at the top. The rest of us are left to compete for what’s been carved away.

And that’s the real Trump economy—not a boom, not a revival, but a funnel.

And if that happens, we won’t just lose arguments over policy—we’ll lose the institutions that make public argument possible. What’s dismantled won’t come back quickly, and what replaces it won’t answer to us.

Suggested Readings

Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. New Press, 1998.

Greenberg, James B. “An Anthropology of the 2008 Credit Crisis: Power, Culture, and Ethics in Financial Governance.” In Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital across the Last Millennium, edited by James B. Greenberg and Thomas K. Park, 161–190. Lexington Books, 2017.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Picador, 2007.

Pistor, Katharina. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton University Press, 2019.

Rappaport, Roy A., and Muriel J. Sheppard, eds. Disorders of Our Own: A Book of Diagnostic Anthropology. Suny Press, 1983.

Stoller, Matt. Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Simon & Schuster, 2019.

Tooze, Adam. Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World’s Economy. Viking, 2021.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the Southwest North American Region. University of Arizona Press, 2025.

A Politics That Won’t Stop at Power

How Trump’s is building a totalitarian system—not just through power grabs, but by dismantling the very conditions that make truth, dissent, and public life possible.

James B. Greenberg

Aug 02, 2025

They didn’t shut down the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They just fired the woman who told the truth. The July jobs report landed with a thud: just 73,000 new jobs—far below expectations—after downward revisions erased more than a quarter million earlier gains. Within hours, the president fired Erika McEntarfer, the BLS Commissioner confirmed by the Senate just last year. No hearing. No evidence. Just a Truth Social post accusing her of manipulating data to help Kamala Harris.

Under the emerging regime, the numbers on jobs, the air quality index during wildfires, and the maps of rising heat are no longer treated as data. They’re framed as political assets or threats, depending on how well they serve the regime’s narrative. Any independent institution—public media, statistical agencies, universities, libraries—that might question the official line is being targeted. They’re being hollowed out, defunded, or absorbed. Sometimes the signs are subtle: a reshuffled staff, a mission rewritten. Other times, the attacks are blunt: firings, closures, cuts.

This is where we are. Leaders at the CDC, the EPA, and the NEH have already been removed. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is now on the chopping block. The White House has signaled it may place the Library of Congress under executive review. DEI programs have been eliminated in dozens of public institutions. Teachers have been fired for using curriculum that hasn’t been “approved.” Science funding is being conditioned on ideological alignment. When you stitch these together, what emerges is a strategy to centralize cultural, scientific, and institutional life around loyalty—not truth.

From an anthropologist’s view, this is a cultural restructuring. Public knowledge—once understood as a shared resource—is now treated as a threat. The systems we used to rely on—universities, public media, statistical agencies—are being recast as partisan, elite, or untrustworthy. Once discredited, they become easier to ignore, then defund, then remake.

But this goes well beyond knowledge control.

What’s taking shape is a fully developed machinery of repression and ideological rule. It’s not just about misleading the public. It’s about building the tools to punish, silence, and remove those who don’t conform.

The regime is building the machinery for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, backed by an expanding network of detention facilities and the deployment of the National Guard. Immigration is being weaponized—not to protect the public, but to produce fear.

Today, these centers hold the undocumented. Tomorrow, their use will expand. The homeless are being redefined as a threat to national security. Executive orders now permit their forced removal into federally run “treatment centers.” These aren’t housing programs. They’re mechanisms of disappearance. Poverty is being criminalized under the cover of compassion.

And the list of targets will only grow—because the goal isn’t order. It’s obedience.

Following the Project 2025 plan, tens of thousands of civil servants are being purged and replaced with ideologically vetted loyalists. Federal employees—scientists, economists, public health experts—have been reclassified so they can be dismissed for disloyalty. Public administration is no longer treated as a profession. It’s being remade to serve the will of the regime.

Executive orders are rolling back civil rights. Trans healthcare has been banned in multiple states, with no pushback from the federal government. LGBTQ+ visibility is under attack. DEI initiatives are being dismantled. Voter suppression is escalating—not just through ID laws, but through control of election boards, aggressive gerrymandering, and the purging of voter rolls.

And behind it all, surveillance expands. Protesters, teachers, and journalists are being monitored. Social media is scawnned for dissent. Whistleblowers punished. Agencies that once mediated between society and the state are being reforged into instruments of control.

We’re not just witnessing government assert power—we’re watching it extend a totalitarian reach into every domain once buffered by norms, distance, or civic purpose: education, science, libraries, public health, research, and the press. Not to dissolve these institutions, but to bend them. It doesn’t take formal censorship when a grant disappears, a university is threatened with accreditation loss, or an agency head is replaced with a political operative. The institution remains—but its function is inverted.

This erosion doesn’t come all at once. It comes through attrition: firings, closures, edits, reorganizations. The rules meant to protect independent institutions are being quietly rewritten. The public still sees familiar logos—but underneath, the mission has changed.

We once assumed these institutions were strong enough to withstand political winds. But what’s underway isn’t a gust—it’s a hurricane. And the damage doesn’t just land on experts or civil servants. It falls hardest on those who already live on the edge: the poor, the undocumented, the elderly, the sick. Because once public knowledge collapses, so does public leverage. When the facts are gone, what remains is force.

There is still time to push back—but the window is closing. We need to defend not just the right to speak, but the conditions that make speech meaningful. That means protecting the institutions that preserve public memory, independent analysis, and shared knowledge. It means holding the line on public data. It means defending schools, universities, and libraries not just as facilities—but as spaces where truth is still allowed to be inconvenient. And it means recognizing that this isn’t just about rhetoric. It’s about infrastructure.

Because once these lights go out, they’re not easy to turn back on. What gets dismantled may not return—not in time, not in form, not in trust.

And if that happens, we won’t just lose policy debates. We’ll lose public life itself.

Suggested Readings

Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Doubleday, 2020.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, 1951.

Chomsky, Noam. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. South End Press, 1989.

Greenwald, Glenn. “The Real Danger to American Democracy Is the Fusion of State and Corporate Power.” GlennGreenwald.com, 2023.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the Southwest North American Region. University of Arizona Press, 2025.

On Tuesday April 30 2024, at 11:30-13:00 EDT (15:30-17:00 UTC) Public Knowledge, Civic Nation, National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), and the Digital Progress Institute (DPI) will hold an Affordable Connectivity Program Day of Action Rally in Washington DC. This event is prompted by the imminent expiry of the funding for the 2021 federal program that…

New International Version -- Revelation 8:7 The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down on the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up.

The First Four Trumpets 6 And the seven angels with the seven trumpets prepared to sound them. 7 Then the first angel sounded his trumpet, and hail and fire mixed with blood were hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, along with a third of the trees and all the green grass. 8 Then the second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned to blood.

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Cross References

Exodus 9:23 So Moses stretched out his staff toward heaven, and the LORD sent thunder and hail, and lightning struck the earth. So the LORD rained down hail upon the land of Egypt. Isaiah 28:2 Behold, the Lord has one who is strong and mighty. Like a hailstorm or destructive tempest, like a driving rain or flooding downpour, he will smash that crown to the ground. Ezekiel 38:22 I will execute judgment upon him with plague and bloodshed. I will pour out torrents of rain, hailstones, fire, and sulfur on him and on his troops and on the many nations with him. Joel 2:30 I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. Zechariah 13:8 And in all the land, declares the LORD, two-thirds will be cut off and perish, but a third will be left in it. Zechariah 13:9 This third I will bring through the fire; I will refine them like silver and test them like gold. They will call on My name, and I will answer them. I will say, 'They are My people,' and they will say, 'The LORD is our God.'" Revelation 7:1 After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back its four winds so that no wind would blow on land or sea or on any tree.

The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast on the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

Revelation 16:21 And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great.

Exodus 9:23-25,33 And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven: and the LORD sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground; and the LORD rained hail upon the land of Egypt…

Joshua 10:11 And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Bethhoron, that the LORD cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword.

Revelation 16:2 And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.

Revelation 8:9,10,12 And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were destroyed…

Revelation 6:8 And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.