FEBRUARY 13, 2026

Good (conservative) economics in NYT attack on financialization
Dean Baker, applauding a conservative’s attack on casino financialization, notes “finance is not an end product like housing or education, which directly provide benefits to people. For end goods and services, we can somewhat crudely say “more is better.” Instead, finance is an intermediate good, like trucking. In both cases the sectors are essential to the economy, but we want them to be as small as possible, so we are not wasting resources. … Supposedly, eliminating waste and corruption was the mantra of “free trade” neo-liberals. But the massive waste and corruption in the financial sector is easy for anyone with clear eyes to see. ” A link to the (very longread) original is in Baker’s CEPR analysis. Via Portside

America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs
Many companies that have “recently announced layoffs, have framed them more euphemistically in sunny reports to investors about the rise of automation’ and ‘head count trending down.’ Taken together, these statements are extraordinary: the owners of capital warning workers that the ice beneath them is about to crack—while continuing to stomp on it…. if AI instead triggers a rapid reorganization of work—compressing years of change into months, affecting roughly 40 percent of jobs worldwide, as the International Monetary Fund projects—the consequences will not stop at the economy. They will test political institutions that have already shown how brittle they can be.” The Atlantic

Moltbook was peak AI theater
“OpenClaw marks an inflection point for AI agents, a moment when several puzzle pieces clicked together,” says Paul van der Boor at the AI firm Prosus. Those puzzle pieces include cloud computing that allows agents to operate nonstop, an open-source ecosystem that makes it easy to slot different software systems together, and a new generation of LLMs. But is Moltbook really a glimpse of the future, as many have claimed?” MIT Technology Review

What ICE Should Have Learned From the Fugitive Slave Act — Americans took to the streets to defend their neighbors in the nineteenth century, too. The point is not simply that so much of what Trump represents is unprecedented as that, where his actions have echoes from the past, they are almost universally troubling.The New Yorker via Portside

The Paramilitary ICE and CBP Units at the Center of Minnesota’s Killings
Yes, there’s a private army being created at taxpayer expense, to do who-knows-whose bidding at need. Two agents involved in the shooting deaths of US citizens in Minneapolis are reportedly part of highly militarized DHS units whose extreme tactics are generally reserved for war zones. WIRED

“Marx, Palestine, and the Birth of Modern Terrorism”
A new history charts how Palestinian militants of the nineteen-seventies made common cause with West Germany’s radical left. As Palestinians were crushed by the defeat of their supporters in successive wars with Israel, they sought a new vehicle outside Arafat’s PLO — the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP made common cause with Germany’s Red Army Faction to create a new revolutionary imagery through commandeering commercial airliners. The New Yorker, tx our comrade Dan S and 5 Lefty Links.