There are, of course, the billionaires infecting the economic and political world, but they never last, and will likely never even leave an asterisk on history.

And then there’s Ted.

Or at least there was, until news of his death hit today’s paper. Old as I am, I watched more of his life story than many, and the youngsters of today may not even know who he was. It’s their loss to have missed out.

Founder of CNN, Captain of an America’s Cup yacht race, who was so drunk at his yacht’s win that his face fell in the soup, restorer of huge swaths of American prairies by rewilding buffalo herds, onetime husband of Jane Fonda, the man had many friends, and enough enemies to prove he mattered.

A storied man, and here are but a few of his stories.

Ted lived a half-dozen lives in one lifetime, rebellious, ruthless, media hero before we knew what it meant, racing yachtsman, environmental cheerleader before it was chic, noisy when needed, a good friend to many and a dangerous guy to cross.

More Patrick Mahomes than Tom Brady, his skills were meteoric and failures as public as a face in the soup.

I never met him, but I’m a writer and sit a horse pretty well, so I loved his story.

• in 1980 he launched CNN, the world’s first 24-hour television news network. It had to fail, everyone knows there’s not enough news to fill 24 hours. And it nearly did, hemorrhaging money early on, while he mortgaged heavily and slept little. But CNN was there for the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the Gulf War, the fall of the Soviet bloc, and listeners watched as continuous news mattered.

• Ted was just a bit early. It was his calling card to be early.

• Pretty much the first public man to not-give-a-shit; he mocked network execs, insulted competitors, and once called Rupert Murdoch ‘the Darth Vader of television.’ Funny, outrageous, and quick on the draw, the public loved him because he was so often right, and he spoke in their language.

• He bought the Atlanta Braves and turned the Braves into “America’s Team” by national cable broadcasts. As earlier rural electrification had brought radio to isolated farmers, cable TV reached rural America and those who had never been to Georgia suddenly grew up watching Braves games nightly.

• In 1997 Turner pledged $1 billion to support the United Nations. The largest charitable donation in history by a private individual. Conservatives attacked him for it, but he said global problems required global institutions whether anyone liked it or not.

“I didn’t want to fail my father.”

The backstory of so many driven men. In interviews, he repeatedly described living under immense pressure from a demanding parent who alternated between approval and harsh criticism. After his father’s suicide, still a young man, he inherited his father’s billboard business and drove himself relentlessly to prove himself worthy. “I spent my whole life trying to get my already dead father to love me.”

Buying CNN, he said, “the big networks looked down on us like country bumpkins,” and now we’re inundated with 24 hour news, which is maybe okay and maybe not okay. “I wanted to be the biggest in the world.” Way before he was, he openly admitted he wanted the biggest network, the biggest audience, and the biggest impact. And yet, he talked way more about ‘winning’ than ‘money. That distinction mattered to him, and he was very much like Tiger Woods in that regard. But Tiger was equally dominated by his father’s approval.

Ted Turner was widely reported for years as the largest private landowner in the United States.

At his peak, he owned roughly 2 million acres across several states, especially Montana, New Mexico, Nebraska, and South Dakota, an area larger than some small countries. What made such wide ownership unusual was that he was not looking for speculation. He was deeply interested in wildlife conservation, ecosystem restoration, sustainable ranching, and bison restoration. He built one of the world’s largest private bison herds — reportedly tens of thousands of animals. He often said he believed bison belonged naturally on the American plains and that cattle ranching had damaged ecosystems, particularly those waving tides of western grasslands.

A renaissance man? Surely so.

There is an irony in Turner’s story that he himself sometimes acknowledged: a man associated with satellites, cable television, and global media ended up becoming almost a nineteenth-century western land baron.

Why not? And who better to steward such an almost lost legacy?

I will miss him. I feel he was a friend of most things I hold dear in this world, and am in fear we are losing them all too quickly.

For me, he rode very tall in the saddle.

Share

In a stunning display of “what the hell, we’re rich enough to do whatever we want,” the annual Metropolitan Museum of Art fundraiser has just celebrated how far we’ve come as a nation divided by money.

Entry to the Gala, only by invitation, comes with a single-entry ticket price of $100,000, pocket change to some and several years’ income to others. I guess the food was pretty good.

And I’m not against that, I rather like the Met, and think museums need public funding.

But the public, you and me, and the slightly less than eight million people who visit each year are monetarily inconsequential. As George Carlin might have put it, “It’s a huge club, and you and I ain’t in it.”

• Frame that against an outfit that dwarfs the Met, an organization we call the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian Institution is the largest museum in the world, an education and research complex of 21 museums and the National Zoological Park, as well as research facilities.

• Admission to all Smithsonian museums in Washington is free. You are not monetarily inconsequential as you enter any facility it operates, from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, to the American Art Museum, or the National Air and Space Museum. America gave it to you, and your taxes paid for it…no billionaires required.

So, I have to admit, the Met Gala makes me grind my teeth a bit, rubbing my nose in the fact that in recent decades I have become increasingly monetarily inconsequential.

Maybe you feel that way as well…maybe not.

Admissions at the Met account for roughly $140–$160 million annually, providing average revenue per visitor of twenty-five bucks, children and some students free. The rest comes from the Met’s endowment of $4+ billion, which generates hundreds of millions annually, donations & philanthropy, as well as wealthy individuals, foundations and corporate sponsors.

So, the Met has become a modern form of patronage.

And, correct me if I’m wrong, but I much prefer the old model, where taxpayers built and paid for the Smithsonian, a world-class institution, available for free to those who built it.

Here in Prague, where I have lived for 32 years, the National Theatre was built entirely with small public donations, burned to the ground shortly after opening, and was built again by a public that valued opera and theatre.

That’s an image that can inspire the world in need, with wars in Ukraine and Iran and genocides elsewhere.

Under today’s multiple international crises, that example from a small nation of twelve million puts to shame the over-the-top extravaganza of America’s rich showing off their wealth.

The growing number of America’s monetarily inconsequential citizens might appreciate that as well…

But maybe that’s too much of Jim just being Jim…

Share

That ‘twain’ thing is an idiomatic expression, originating from a Rudyard Kipling poem, describing two people, things, or ideas that are so fundamentally different or geographically distant that they can never coexist, agree, or come together.

And so it is with my favorite president, Harry S. Truman, and the guy sitting in the Oval Office at this moment.

Presidents choose running mates for all kinds of reasons, but FDR had his hands full getting the country out of its worst depression in history, along with presiding over yet another world war. Add to that his fragile health, his age, and the political pressure of a congress not all that happy with Henry Wallace, his former VP.

By 1944, Roosevelt’s fourth consecutive win, Wallace had become too controversial for party leaders, who mostly saw him as too left-leaning and unpredictable. Democratic bosses (yes, those were the days of back-room choices during conventions), big-city machines, and Southern conservatives wanted him off the ticket. It must have been a hard blow to Wallace, because it was pretty clear that whoever was selected as vice president would succeed an aging and clearly unwell FDR. He needed a running mate who wouldn’t fracture the party, and took what was offered, busy with enough already on his plate.

It wasn’t that Roosevelt saw Harry Truman as a ‘nobody,’ but Truman was the least risky acceptable choice in a very tense political moment, and he also had real, if not widely recognized, strengths. He wasn’t identified with any extreme faction. He could satisfy both the New Deal wing and those more conservative Democrats. As a senator, he led the Truman Committee, which investigated wartime waste and saved the country billions, at a time when that was a hell of a lot of money.

Bottom line, he was acceptable.

FDR didn’t know him well and wasn’t deeply invested in him.

Roosevelt’s style had always been to avoid firm commitments and let divided factors battle it out. He allowed party leaders to coalesce around Truman and then gave him a lukewarm blessing. There’s no strong evidence that FDR saw Truman as a future architect of the postwar world.

Eighty-two days later, Roosevelt died and Truman became president, an office he was almost completely unprepared for.

Seventy-three years later, Donald Trump would become president, a job he was completely incompetent to fulfill, but that’s a contrast we will address shortly

Truman hadn’t even been briefed on the atomic bomb. His immediate reaction was pure Harry: “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.” He wasted no time, not because he was eager, but because there was simply no time to waste.

Within months he authorized the use of atomic weapons against Japan, a controversial decision that is still widely debated today. Not a man to shirk responsibility of point fingers elsewhere, Truman called in every available advisor, made the decision based on projected American and Japanese losses, and carried the burden of that decision publicly for the rest of his life. Harry, who retired to mow his own lawn and live simply, was never a second guesser—the buck always stopped with him.

An avid reader of history, Truman never expected to be a writer of it.

Truman had no formal academic training beyond high school, but he read history voraciously, especially biographies of leaders and accounts of war, diplomacy, and statecraft. Figures like Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln mattered to him. He wasn’t interested in theory; he wanted to know how leaders made decisions under pressure.

Unencumbered by bone spurs, he was a Captain of artillery in World War One.

His stance against Soviet expansion wasn’t abstract ideology—it reflected lessons drawn from the failures of the ‘peace in our time’ appeasement in the 1930s.

Equally imbedded in that failure was his dedication to the Marshall Plan and NATO. Neither was simply policy, they were strategic decisions to avoid repeating the punitive World War I Armistice that over-punished Germany both economically and strategically, giving rise to Hitler.

A politician would have announced the Truman Plan for Rebuilding Japan and Germany. Then Secretary of State (and former U.S. Army Chief of Staff during WWII), George Marshall designed the plan, and Truman insisted it carry his name.

Harry thought in terms of “what happens if we get this wrong again?”

Distrusting intellectual overcomplication, he reduced problems to the moral and practical terms of who is responsible, what are the consequences, and what does past experience suggest will happen next? His one regret after leaving office was the creation of the CIA and, again, he made that confession public. “I would never have approved of the founding of the CIA, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo?”

In his seven years as president, he fired a single military commander. On 11 April 1951, he relieved General of the Army (5 stars) Douglas MacArthur of his commands, after MacArthur made public statements that contradicted the administration’s policies in Korea.

After leaving office, Truman did contribute to history through his memoirs (Year of Decisions, Years of Trial and Hope). Not excuses in any way, they’re justifications and explanations, written in the same direct tone he governed with, where the buck always stopped on his own desk.

Donald Trump thinks in terms of where can I exert my power, who can I embarrass in the process, and what’s in it for me?

Trump operates through a lens of personalized power. He measures decisions by how they enhance his leverage, reinforce loyalties, and use the constant threat of dismissal to sustain his public dominance.

In the first year of his second term, and up until now, he has fired or demanded the retirement of thirteen top military officers, creating a never-before-presidential-habit of firing his way down until he gets compliance.

Trump names everything he can under his personal brand and leaves no air in the room for Republican followers, because he wants none, will tolerate none.

Ignoring both the courts and international law, he governs by Executive Order, although the country is under no existential threat that would allow their use. His abandonment of US and international law includes flouting laws directed specifically toward him by the Unites States Supreme Court.

Harry Truman honored the impersonal responsibility of the common American exercising the temporary power of office.

Trump thirsts after personalized power that shows the world his strengths and makes him rich.

Take your pick

Share

Germany was largest exporter of plastic waste in 2025, sending 810,000 tons overseas, analysis finds.

So says a Guardian headline, and one can but cheer those who analyze. Without them, those of us who flush our wickedness in the direction of the poor wouldn’t have a number to boast, much less a number to shame.

Germany’s 810,000 tons in 2025 didn’t scatter globally—it flowed mainly into Turkey plus a Southeast Asian corridor (Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam), with some still circulated inside Europe via countries like the Netherlands and Poland. So, I guess they’re not all poor. All is always (or mostly) an exaggeration.

But, the news is relentlessly sad as we stagger our way toward the end of another species…our own. Scientists at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity concluded that: “Every day, up to 150 species are lost.” That could be as much as 10 percent a decade. That’s an alarmingly fast decline to zero.

Those mammals and fishes and insects that are taken off-grid are mostly unaware that their number is up, but humanity has no such excuse.

We comfort ourselves that we even have a UN Convention on Biological Diversity, while keeping books on less diverse, less diverse and, finally, no diverse. Today’s newly married will have children who will, presumably, have children. Those grandchildren will look around and wonder where it all went. Darwin in reverse…quick-step.

Elon would have us trot on off to Mars, but it’s a long and incredibly expensive trot.

It would cost way too much, take way too long, and there’s no corner grocery. It’s also a boring piece of rock, without enough gravity, and saving this lovely planet we happen to already live on is a far cheaper bet, if we’d actually do something useful right here before it’s too late.

But we won’t. Because, with the greatest brainpower in the animal kingdom, we’re too stupid to save ourselves. Cognitive brainpower is pretty great, but stupid and self-serving goes clear to the bone. Let Elon Musk go, and send us a note back on how he likes it. Then leave him there, and take what’s left of his wealth to pay down just a smidge of the national debt.

Or don’t.

Just disappear as a species, and leave the planet alone to heal. It will be fine.

Give it a couple of million years to clean up our mess and decide upon another species to take up where Darwin left off. The Origin of Species will still be relevant with or without its author. Some things are simply true.

Trust me, the planet will shake us off like water off a dog, and really interesting things will happen. A couple million years is simply an eyewink on this gorgeous, beautiful, and livable planet.

I promise.

Sue me if I’m wrong.

Share

Meet Joseph Nguthiru, an award-winning Kenyan environmental engineer. In these times of wars and power struggles, you’re going to love this story.

(Africa Global News) A natural problem solver, the problem became personal for Joseph when he and his classmates spent hours trapped in water hyacinth during a field trip.. Beautiful, but invasive, it’s a fast-growing aquatic plant originally from South America that now blankets large sections of water bodies from Lake Victoria in East Africa to river systems in West Africa. It chokes ecosystems, disrupts transport, and threatens local economies.

That moment pushed him to look beyond removal and toward transformation, because that’s what his education as an environmental engineer taught him to do—look at problems from an economic point of view.

So, he did what any smart young guy would do and formed a company.

Let me introduce HyaPak Ecotech, a company built around converting an invasive pain in the neck into biodegradable plastic. Rather than treating the weed as waste, HyaPak treats it as raw material, turning an environmental burden into a functional product that replaces single-use plastics.

The model, according to the article, maximizes a local value chain. Communities, as well as individuals, harvest the hyacinth from affected areas, dry it, and channel it into a HyaPak processing system, where it is broken down, combined with natural binders, and formed into biodegradable products. Rather than another cost-based impediment in an already poor country, everyone involved makes a buck.

That’s what engineers do, and scientists aren’t trained to do.

The company’s early focus was on seedling bags, which hold enough water to kick start the plant, then decompose in soil and release nutrients, supporting agriculture rather than polluting it

The impact of Joe Nguthiru’s HyaPak already attracted international attention, signed partnerships, and started exporting products to markets in the United States and Germany, placing water hyacinth biodegradable plastic within the global conversation on sustainable materials.

It’s scalable.

While the billionaire tech bros concentrate of using up available water and electric resources, and polluting what’s left of an already fragile environment…for profit, because that’s what tech bros do…a super bright young Kenyan engineer is investing in solutions.

I knew you’d like this bit of light in an increasingly dark world.

Sleep well.

Invest a couple of bucks in HyaPak.

Share

That’s one of those questions you really don’t want answered, so you ask your wife, because you know she’ll be kind and not tell you the truth…that you’re way past your sell-by date.

Predictably, she came through as hoped for: “Because you care, and you have the life-history to measure against, because you are you, and I love you for it.”

The picture that provoked the question is from a Guardian article by Mohamad Bazzi, titled “Is this what war looks like now?” Subtitled, “Before the war on Gaza, the seed of Israel’s strategy of wholesale destruction was planted in a 2006 war on Lebanon. Today, the playbook repeats itself.”

Jesus, it’s 81 years since I watched Warner-Pathe News at a Cary Grant movie. It showed me and my family the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Germany. We were stunned into silence that early evening…and here we are again…

It’s twenty years since the Israeli destruction of Beirut, the former Paris of the Levant.

Eighty-one years since the Holocaust, twenty years since Beirut’s destruction, three thousand plus years since I began my political essays, 91 years old in another three weeks, and nothing changes, no one gives a shit.

No healing is done, only the enemy and victims have traded places. And the victims are always the same, powerless Jews in the first instance, and powerless Lebanese, Palestinians, and Iranians this morning, greeting my first cup of coffee.

Israel’s motto was, and is “Never again,” and I can but wonder who they meant by that?

In international terms, it’s a stunningly moral statement, and worthy of a standing ovation in every nation on the planet.

In terms of Israel’s more apparent meaning (according to me) it’s quickly become “Only Israelis need apply.” the moral basis fades along with their current, and ongoing genocidal attacks on neighbors. According to Wikipedia, the number in agreement that a genocide is occurring (and continues to occur) includes countries whose governments or senior officials have explicitly used the genocide word.

Those include South Africa, Spain, Ireland, Turkey, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Namibia, Venezuela, Chile, Mexico, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia, Yemen, and many others.

Remarkably, they do not include either the United States, or Great Britain. Britain was responsible for placing Israel in the middle of the Middle East, two weeks before their Palestinian mandate ran out in a nick-of-the-time moment. The U.S., who had no better ideas, armed Israel ever since its inception, standing by in not-so-innocent amazement as a logical two-state solution continued to fail.

Two great, and supposedly democratic nations of the world that couldn’t find their ass with both hands when history called.

Even so, I will not throw my hands up in despair, partly because of my wife’s support and partly because I am a hard-headed old fart.

But it’s tough…and uphill…and unending…

Only 1% of my age group (those born in 1935) are still alive. A great number of those left are sitting on couches watching reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, fumbling around in one stage or another of Alzheimer’s, or taking up space in nursing homes.

I am not there yet, but those who actually lived America’s history are getting fewer and fewer..

Nor am I a guest on Stephen Colbert’s Tonight Show in the few weeks remaining, prior to its cancellation. Stephen will be missed.

I can’t say the same for those who follow my writing, but I’ll be damned if I’ll quit.

Sleep well, too many people in the world at war tonight will get no sleep at all…

Share

It’s Liberation Day in NATO, if Europe shakes off American dominance.

Somehow the NATO members of Europe have been convinced that Trump’s threat to leave the organization is a “woo, woo, lions and tigers and bears” moment.

It is none of those things.

Firstly, it’s unlikely that our president, cornered as he is by a much-tougher-than-expected Iran, would find this particular moment advantageous to jump to his bone-spurred feet and leave. He has too many cabinet members yet to throw under the bus, while he attempts to powder the wig of respectability.

On the European side, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has amply identified the route to independence for NATO, having successfully untethered Canada from the more difficult matter of location, location, location. That may be critical in the real-estate game, but a pain in the ass when Big Brother shares a 5,525 mile common border. Carney seems to have successfully turned Canada’s back on America, looking toward Europe for weaponry and China for trade.

Looking toward Europe for weaponry is no small deal.

When Carney chose Europe rather than the U.S. for weapons procurement, it wasn’t ideological, but strategic. Buying outside America reduces dependence on Washington’s approval mechanisms, such as export controls and congressional oversight but, more importantly, it avoids exposure to policy swings tied to either Trump or future administrations.

U.S. weaponry systems have increasingly come with operational restrictions on software upgrades and US only maintenance restrictions. As an example, the Swedish Grippen is smaller, lighter, and with only a single engine, its reduced size and weight allow it a high degree of maneuverability and a take-off distance of only 500 meters, a strategic advantage in geographically adverse runways.

European sourcing would also enable maintenance and political control across multiple NATO partners, which is particularly relevant in a world of fragile alliances. This integration provides manufacturing capability, technology transfer, and joint development without restraint. It builds European capability that aligns with NATO goals, but is not U.S.-centric, so interoperability is maintained without tying everything to variable U.S. doctrine or platforms.

Weighing the tradeoffs requires looking forward, toward changing power structures.

I have long felt that the American Century is tapering off. I expect the future will find China dominant, but sharing a tripartite power structure with America and Europe. Russia no longer matters, except as a nuclear power. Its $2.5 trillion GDP is dwarfed by Europe’s $37 trillion.

Militarily, that leaves these three areas of world power, one of which depends upon a NATO with or without the United States. If I was in charge of NATO, I would much prefer the latter.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is an intergovernmental military alliance between 32 member states, 30 of which are in Europe and two in North America. Its US member has dominated the organization since its inception by President Harry Truman in 1949. We were the last major power standing at the end of WWII and, to our credit, created the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and NATO.

Yet, power structures and political alliances change over time.

The time, it seems to me, is now for Europe to step up its military capability for the changes yet to come. There will likely be no better time than the present. Russia has its hands full in Ukraine, the United States is quite likely over its head in Iran, and China is taking the long view, as it has done for centuries.

It’s Europe’s moment to build a NATO with or without the US, if it chooses to take it.

“Dow rallies 800 points, S&P 500 tops 7,100 for the first time after Iran declares Strait of Hormuz open,” is the headline.

Ah, yes indeed, let me set the stage for this conversation.

I have never been a gambler on Wall Street, and never fell for the casino belief that ‘this time I hold a hot hand.’ Those who do occasionally become billionaires and, just as often, sink below the surface never to be heard from again.

I was a landscape architect before my retirement, and satisfied that good value and a better than average sense of design was enough to make a decent living. And it did, all those three quarters of a century ago.

Those were good times.

Having said that, there is a persistent myth at the heart of modern finance that ‘markets are rational because they are efficient.’ If you look at post World War II history, the average period between recessions has been roughly 5–7 years.

I don’t see that as efficient, so much as fragile.

There is a difference.

The longest stretch between those embarrassing ‘corrections’ is the one we’re in right now…eleven years, and I find that worrisome. The political world at large, and the economic/social structures inside America have pretty much gone to hell in a handbasket since Ronald Reagan left office.

Trump one, Biden one, and Trump two (in my opinion) lit fuses that were laid down across the decades by both political parties, beginning with Reagan. The Great Communicator (Reagan) communicated his way through busting unions, encouraging the offshoring of American industry, using the CIA for foreign policy, and then riding off into the clouded sunset of Alzheimers.

Blame me if you care to. I voted for him twice, the shame of my life.

Wars then became George Bush policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as encouraging Russia’s attack in Ukraine and Israel’s (with America at its side) in Palestine, Lebanon and (now) Iran. Would you believe, the war Bush lost in Afghanistan was the longest war America ever fought…twenty years…five times longer than World War Two.

A temporary ceasefire involving Iran, Israel, Lebanon, and the wildly unreliable US, is treated by Wall Street as if it were a structural shift in global stability.

It is not.

It is, at best, a pause in only one theater of a much broader geopolitical disorder—one that continues to include potential energy disaster, great-power rivalries, and unresolved supply chain tensions. Yet equity markets, led by indices like the S&P 500, behave like cheering sections at a football game, running up record highs as though a layer of uncertainty has been permanently removed.

It hasn’t. It’s merely been postponed.

Remember, Wall Street is not America, it’s the main toy in the toybox of our billionaire class. If you need confirmation of that, simply look beyond the United States and the illusion becomes even harder to sustain.

Europe remains economically constrained by high energy costs, weak industrial output, and limited fiscal flexibility, with its knickers in a twist over the threat of Trump leaving NATO. Growth is not collapsing, but neither is it robust enough to justify exuberance elsewhere, even though Orban has been knocked off his Hungarian perch. The Ukrainian impasse is emboldening Putin to threaten the Baltic states.

Meanwhile China, long the engine of global commercial expansion, faces structural headwinds with a still strained property sector, growing criticism in America (its major trading partner), and a slow, uncertain transition away from debt-fueled growth.

These realities, along with Trump tariff madness across the world, are not temporary irritations, they’re systemic adjustments.

And, while ‘adjustments’ is probably too kind a word, markets rise.

This is not new. “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.”

Before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, investors convinced themselves that housing prices could only move up, there was no downside. That fantasy nearly crushed the banks, which were saved by the Federal Reserve at a cost of the three million Americans who their homes.

Socialism for the banks, capitalism for the rest of us.

Yet somehow it removed the need to examine what lay beneath; poor-quality loans, excessive leverage, and financial instruments so opaque that even their creators struggled to value them.

Rising prices became proof of soundness. Optimism replaced analysis.

And here we are again, reprising the same old song.

Today’s optimism is more subtle, but way more dangerous.

It doesn’t claim that risk has disappeared; it simply treats it as irrelevant. A ceasefire here, a soft inflation comment there, and the market clowns extrapolate stability into permanence. It’s the same intellectual shortcut taken in 2008, mistaking the absence of immediate stress for the presence of lasting strength.

There are lyrics to this:

• Don’t you love farce?

• My fault, I fear

• I thought that you’d want what I want

• Sorry, my dear

• But where are the clowns?

• Quick, send in the clowns

• Don’t bothеr, they’re herе

Serious investment doesn’t require pessimism, but it does require due diligence.

Optimism, if it is to have any place at all, must be conditional, earned through evidence, not granted through exuberance by a self-serving billionaire class. We have stocks currently trading at 350 times earnings, which makes no sense at all under any circumstances.

When Las Vegas ‘roll ‘em again’ optimism becomes the foundation, rather than the result of due diligence, markets become theaters of belief.

At that point, ‘send in the clowns’ is no longer satire.

It’s description.

And way past time for a ‘too hot, too cold, too deep,’ financial bath.

I live in the Czech Republic, a country the world (annoyingly) insists on calling Chechia. But the dollar, like all world currencies, is traded on currency markets, and so its value is constant no matter if it’s converted to euros, or yen, or British pounds.

Twenty-five years ago, when I first got my social security, it amounted to $1800 a month. Because the Czech currency is still the Czech crown, that converted to 52,000 crowns a month, enough to comfortably live here. With gradual increases over that quarter century, it is now $1909 at the beginning of every month…a time that I have come to designate as “when the eagle shits.”

Converted to crowns, the eagle now craps 38,000 into my bank account. That’s a 5 ½% increase in dollars, and a 27% drop in the crowns those dollars buy.

Meanwhile, a package of Marlboro Lights (which I no longer smoke) cost 70 crowns a quarter century ago and now costs 120 crowns. That’s a 58% inflation rate over 25 years, which isn’t helpful, but doesn’t belong in the conversation, because the subject is the flushing sound of dollars and toilets.

Experts tell me it’s actually not in the toilet.

Over 25 years, they claim, the dollar has lost about half its domestic purchasing power, but held its ground internationally. You certainly couldn’t prove that by what my social security dollar buys here in Prague.

“Statistical confidence” in a currency, they tell me, isn’t captured by a single number the way inflation is. Instead, economists look at a cluster of indicators, and on those, the U.S. dollar still ranks as the most trusted currency in the world.

Hence, I trot out my long-term view that “if you torture them sufficiently, statistics will confess to anything.” Renowned British economist, Ronald Coase, is the author of that quote, although he substituted ‘data’ for ‘statistics.’

Quite often I am convinced that economists will confess as well, if one waterboards them sufficiently.

And so, inflation is the culprit, both here in Prague and there, in Seattle, Berlin, and Beijing.

Horsefeathers.

Over the past twenty-five years, inflation not only destroyed the American worker, it rapped him on the knuckles and sent him home without dinner.

Real wages barely moved, rising just enough for companies to claim progress, while leaving millions working longer hours and effectively running in place. Try living on $1909 a month and let me know how that works out for you. Here in Europe, the streets are full of middle-aged men pedaling delivery bicycles, working without contracts, healthcare, pensions or guaranteed hours.

But the real money is made elsewhere, because of the relentless inflation of assets, a gift to the top 10% (dare we call them billionaires?).

Stocks, real estate, and financial assets soared, piling up bucks for those who already owned them.

Meanwhile, those sent home without dinner were left to absorb rising costs in rent, healthcare, keeping the old family car running, and feeding their families. Many of their kids had moved back into their childhood bedrooms because they couldn’t find work, and that’s true here in Europe as well.

The result is not an accident of economics but a well planned and executed structural outcome.

Businesses, and the American government they now own (see Supreme Court Citizens United), built a system in which money creation and policy choices consistently lifted asset values while allowing purchasing power at the bottom to erode.

Why not? The money’s good and no one stands in the way.

The top 10% now owns nearly 70% of American assets, including private home ownership, businesses, banks and lending institutions, while the bottom third live on credit cards, home-equity loans, and additional jobs.

90% of all tax cuts in America, during both Democrat and Republican administrations, landed in the pockets of the 10%.

Inflation, once it’s stripped of all its technically confusing terminology, is not only a rise in prices, it’s an organized, politically supported and largely illegal transfer of power that rewards ownership, protects debt, and steadily tightens the constraints on those who have neither.

It’s lonely, being sent to bed without dinner.

And the billionaire classes have long ago escaped America to reach out with what can only be described as tentacles across the world.

If you think that’s not the case in China as well, you are mistaken.

‘Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job.

Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

Across the branches of government, the services that are supposed to protect us – nuclear stockpile monitoring, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism – are being undermined, understaffed or trashed. A different kind of protection that consists of public health, vaccination programs, food safety, clean air and water, social services, civil rights and the rule of law is also under attack. The federal government that serves us is being starved while the federal government that serves the Trump agenda and the oligarchy is glutting itself on taxpayer money, including the grotesque sums dumped on the Department of Homeland Security and the US military now being warped into Pete Hegseth’s twisted vision of a ruthless mercenary force. Hegseth has reportedly stood in the way of promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers.

It is striking that the Trump team’s constant refrain is that we cannot afford to protect the vulnerable or provide for the people, which is why the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, atop Doge, destroyed USAID last year, which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths from starvation and preventable disease. The Iran war is creating a fertilizer crisis in Europe, Africa and Asia that may also result in widespread famine. Meanwhile, the former head of homeland security Kristi Noem spent more than $200m on an ad campaign starring herself before she was fired.

Although there are far worse things about the utterly gratuitous and literally unjustified war on Iran, the fact that it burns through billions a day is striking, given that huge cuts are being made to environmental protection and national parks, and the forest service is being effectively sabotaged, while public lands are being offered up to fossil fuel companies and mining interests. The forest service headquarters are being moved across the country, which will probably cause many resignations, like the similar move of the Bureau of Land Management in Trump’s first term. More than 50 forest service research stations are being cut, meaning more loss of irreplaceable ongoing research, data, facilities and staff.

Trump said in his droning dullard speech last week: “We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country ... We’re fighting wars ... It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” Your money, our money, our public lands, our kids. Trump even bribed the builders of offshore windfarms almost a billion dollars to stop, just because he has a personal vendetta against the clean energy systems. The US used to lead the world in scientific research, including medical research, which had led to important breakthroughs in disease treatment and health, but all that has been slashed to the bone and beyond. This is murder.

The old aphorism about how long it takes an aircraft carrier to turn around might be why the nation seems relatively stable, and why reactions have been inadequate; the full impact is yet to come. At some point if the ship doesn’t turn around, maybe it will start taking on water or listing badly or hit an iceberg, or perhaps the iceberg has been there all along and is named Donald Trump. He has started a war for no particular reason – the word fun was deployed – that is further undermining the global economy he already badly damaged with his ever-fluctuating tariffs. Enterprises need to be able to plan, and tariffs that triple and melt away and pop up again like his moods undermine the ability to do so. In much the same way, threats that aren’t carried out, talks that never took place, administration actions that the courts reverse become forms of political whiplash, jerking everyone and everything around, a show of force that is also a show of incoherence and inconsistency.

We need to talk about the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality

But the offensiveness may be a distraction from the destructiveness. A whole sector of mainstream media now functions as spirit mediums attempting to interpret Trump’s actions to try to fit them into the context of competent leadership and coherent and consistent agendas. If there was a coherent agenda, it would be a destructive one, a malevolent one. The newly popular slogan “the purpose of a system is what it does” is useful here, because what this system does is weaken, damage, corrupt and harm. The idea that there’s a coherent agenda driven by Vladimir Putin works in the sense that most of what Trump has done is good for the ageing Russian dictator while also bad for the US.

It’s also evident that Trump wanted to come back into office in part to revenge himself on a country that in 2020 had rejected him, the way an ex-partner sometimes becomes a murderous stalker of the woman who dared to escape him, and specifically revenge himself on the individuals and institutions that had prosecuted him for crimes or otherwise thwarted him. Trump at some level knows he’s failing politically, cognitively and physically and wants to take it all down with him, the way that ancient rulers were buried with their slaughtered horses and servants. He’s also, as mortality breathes down his neck, trying to grab some immortality by sticking his name on buildings and park passes and currency.

But trying to understand motives is something of a hobby when the focus needs to be on consequences. We do not need to understand these criminals in order to try to contain and ultimately remove them. They will not last for ever, and we need to think about what happens when they’re gone – to talk about the kind of reconstruction the US will face for the first time since the civil war, the reconstruction a ravaged and corrupted country has to go through to return to functionality. But not to return to the way things were.

It’s the antidemocratic weaknesses in our system that created the vulnerabilities that let this happen – the electoral college and voter suppression that gave Trump a minority victory in 2016, the gerrymandering that has given a minority party majority power in Congress and statehouses, a grotesquely corrupted and unaccountable supreme court and the corrosive influence of the ultra-wealthy in a system that gives them power on a scale that is a direct assault on democracy. We need to imagine a more democratic, more egalitarian, more generous country, one that operates in recognition of an abundance of wealth that should serve all of us – and nature and future generations too – rather than is driven by the moral poverty of billionaires.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her newest book is The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change

  The Dark Side of the Moon is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or $7 monthly paid subscriber.

  Share

Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mandami are correct about worker movements, but American politics will not be fixed until we have a graduated income tax.

Sanders, at a rally in NYC alongside Mayor Zohran Mandami, argued that the US working and middle classes are facing an existential crisis at the whims of Trump and other billionaires. “It’s absolutely important that all of us here and every American understand that in the ruling class of this country today, there is an extraordinary level of arrogance and cruelty,” he said. “In many ways, these guys believe like the monarchs. I’m not exaggerating, like the monarchs of the 19th century. They believe that they have the divine right to rule.”

And they’re right. Much of that progress in trying to salvage what’s left of the American Middle Class, and build upon it, depends upon the Union Movements that built it in the first place.

But that’s not the whole story or, perhaps, even the opening chapter.

It’s no surprise that we’re approaching the endgame for our billionaire class. While there are many suggestions for how to do that, it seems the most publicly satisfying of those solutions is to tax the bejeezus out of them.

Sorry to disappoint but, for me, that is neither useful, nor equitable.

And inequity is what brought us to this disaster, so it’s a poor choice to expect to use the disease for the cure. Remember 2008, when the bankers that wrecked us were called upon to solve the problem? The banks soared and three million Americans lost their homes.

Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.

I’m weary of growing calls to drag the billionaire class to the guillotine, to sever their wealth from their body. They came by that enormous financial power legally, if not morally. It’s those structures that need to be addressed, or we face the quite proper accusation of revenge rather than equity.

We know what works, because we’ve been there not all that long ago.

I know what works, because I was there at the time, and not as a wet-nosed kid, but a businessman. My clients were millionaires, back in the day when that was enough. Some had hundreds of millions, but no one (so far as I know) had thousands.

Those wealthy people were grateful for the financial blessings capitalism had bestowed upon them, and faithful in paying the taxes of the time. We had a nation that believed in moving up the ladder from immigrant to Middle Class and educating their kids to do even better.

In the 1950s we had no national debt, save a smidgeon left over from the Marshall Plan that rebuilt our WWII enemy nations, and we repaid that quickly. Federal government worked because, Democrat or Republican, we respected one another’s opinions and had no billionaire class to buy legislation.

Think about that for a moment, and think about what enabled it.

A graduated income tax was not meant to be equal, it was meant to be fair.

Let me explain further (the numbers of those days are not those of today):

• $0 to $50,000-5%

• $50,000 to $100,000-10%

• $100 to $500,000-20%

• $500,000 to $1 million-30%

• $1 million to $1 billion-50%

• Everything over $1 billion-90%

No deductions, no earnings carry-forwards, no gimmicks.

Let’s say you earn $62,000. You pay 5% on the first $50,000 and 10% on the additional $12,000. Total, $3,700.

If you earn $3,500,035,000) you pay 5% on the first $50,000, 10% on the next $100,000, 20% on the next $500,000, 30% on the next $500,000, 50% on the next $500,000, 50% on the next $million to $billion, and 90% on the final $2,500,035,000.

Add ‘em all up, my mind doesn’t go that high, but I think that’s $2,300,512,532 on over $3.5 billion, which leaves well over a thousand million dollars for their year’s work and is their fair share.

That’s what a graduated tax looks like, and it’s not taking anyone’s total income at a 90% rate. Yeah, if you make a hundred billion in a year you’ll pay a hell of a rate, but you’ll never be Elon Musk rich…and you shouldn’t, but nor should he.

And this is not the end of the story.

We desperately need to get unlimited money out of politics, but we had at least some control of that before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates. Some isn’t enough either, we need all of it gone. Pay our Senators a million a year, if need be, and Representatives a half-million, but the ‘best government money can buy’ has to come to an end.

There’s an interesting history on how the Congress ran in times gone by.

In the early years Congress typically met for only a few months each year because the country, its government, and its expectations were far smaller and slower-moving than today. The federal government simply did less. In the early republic, most power and responsibility rested with the states. There was no modern regulatory state, no vast federal budget, no permanent committee machinery as we know it. Congress didn’t need to be in constant session because there were fewer laws to write, fewer crises to manage, and far less oversight expected.

All well and good, but the actual time congresspersons are currently in session averages 150 days/year in the House and 165 in the Senate.

Match that against the average common American wage earner, who punches the clocks on 235–240 days. Seems we’re getting screwed by 80 to 90 days and not getting much value in those days the privileged dudes and dudesses finally do take their seats.

Congress these days is so wounded and dysfunctional that it now operates (when at all) primarily as a crisis-management body, rather than a lawmaking institution.

(Confession) I am a lifelong, over-the-top, admirer of Bernie, who should have (and probably would have) become president, had the DNC not illegally decided it was ‘Hillary’s turn.’

What a difference a discretionary stupidity by the Democratic National Committee makes in the history of politics.

Any-old-how, politics functions most properly when fairness is on the menu.

The short answer is that humanity has not yet been invited into the debate.

Is there a God? Perhaps so, but He (or She) is busy at the moment, and not taking my calls. Dial 9 for more information, when and if He or She decides to give it out.

I have coffee most every week with a dear British friend who is current on world events, and one of the few points of agreement we share is that so many facts that would (and perhaps should) be available to the argument are simply shielded behind governmental curtains. Those Wizards of OZ (and there are many of them) shift, and manipulate, pull levers, and fiddle dials with humanity’s future without any proper observation or outside control.

That may sound a bit hysterical, but we simply don’t damn well know.

On the few occasions we are inadvertently allowed to peek under the rug, it seems that those who ‘do know’ pretty much have their knickers in a twist about whether AI will become sentient and run off with humanity in its back pocket, destination unknown.

You and I, one would hope, have a shared interest in that destination, along with the ethics and intentions of whoever might be the winner and what, in fact, they might have in mind once they have won. So far, the main contenders appear to include OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta, xAI, Mistral AI and Cohere, although that list may be out of date by the time you read this.

The Cloud & Platform Giants who control the infrastructure, and provide the computing power and distribution, are the usual suspects.

Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle, all of who’s representatives stood proudly front and center (even in front of family) at President Trump’s inauguration. That was likely a wrongheaded marketing move, as it all too clearly identified them versus us in the political world.

Gotta keep all that secretive stuff apolitical. Big money is supposed to do what it does both quietly and in the background.

The United States is not alone in this international footrace. China, the United Kingdom, France, and the European Union all, have their own competitive runners in the starting blocks, so the stakes are high and information is low. Once you strip away all the marketing gibberish, the ‘who’s winning’ question comes down to three aspects: models, infrastructure, and geopolitics. As you might expect, and different players compete in each.

In models, OpenAI and Google DeepMind are thrashing it out in reasoning, multimodality, and scale. Anthropic is a strong third, especially in what they call reliability and enterprise trust (however anyone chooses to define those). Infrastructure, I’m told is the quiet winner.

Microsoft, by backing OpenAI early, turned itself into the default AI platform for business.

So, they’re winning this part of the game for now. But again, from what I understand, the real choke point for everyone in the game is chips, and NVIDIA is the only source that supplies the GPUs that OpenAI, Google, Meta, and governments all depend upon. Because demand still outstrips supply, NVIDIA is the single biggest winner in the entire AI boom at the moment and, because chips are short worldwide in all sorts of other operations, they’re likely to stay there.

The real story isn’t who wins AI, at least in America, it’s who controls access to it.

The uncomfortable reality is that we’re moving toward a system where a handful of firms own the intelligence, rent the infrastructure, and our government sets the boundaries.

That’s not the open internet model we were promised, but closer to broadcast television in the 1950s, where just a few channels had enormous influence. But this is not the 1950s (don’t we wish it was) and control of AI access will determine which ideas get amplified, which businesses survive, how expensive intelligence becomes, and whether individuals remain independent thinkers, or become subscribers.

I don’t know about you, but my cost of various paywalls is getting out of hand. So, the future isn’t so much about who builds AI, it’s about who you have to pay to use it.

It’s likely to be Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, or some other individual I would rather indict than make wealthier. Whataya bet I simply sigh deeply, grumble under my breath, and pay up anyway?

Sleep well, your country and its richest component is working day and night to make your life as decisionless as possible. There is wheat in the world and there is chaff. You and I, the voting public, are definitely chaff.

There was a time in America when voters selected candidates. Now that the Supremes (my name for the Supreme Court) allowed unlimited campaign spending for corporations, the fox picks the guardians of the chicken-coop. No matter which party wins state elections, gerrymandering now allows the candidates to select voters.

Is that progress, or what?

“I don’t care who does the electing, as long as I get to do the nominating.”

That’s the well-known quote of Boss Tweed, a politician who ran New York City politics in the late 1800s, as dominantly as Richard J. Daley ran Chicago a century later. I was there in Chicago for the Daley years. Long story short, Daley died in his bed and Tweed died in jail, but the principle lives on.

Now there have always been influencers in those murky back-rooms of politics, but it’s a new ball-game in this day and age, when the influencers are billionaires.

Billions are thousands of millions…mind-blowing numbers.

Ponder the cost of a House or Senate candidacy and the pocket-change a billionaire spends to buy a personal voice in congress. The average cost of a successful Congressional campaign is $2 million for a seat in the House and an eye-watering $17 million in the Senate. All this for an annual salary of $174,000.

If it seems strange to you that anyone would spend millions to gain such a ho-hum salary, you’re not alone. There are reasons, we suppose, and indeed there are. Prestige is one, but you have to be personally wealthy enough to carry on after the dust has settled, should you lose. There are, after all, winners and losers, and losers successfully poison the well for any further financial support.

Or, if you’re both smart enough and elected, you are welcomed into the long game.

The carrot is finally within reach and then it gets interesting, because there’s very little stress involved for such wide and influential access.

You will go home every weekend, your airline ticket paid for by the government.

And the definition of ‘weekend’ is very different in Washington.

You will fly. Drive or crawl into DC late on Monday and buzz off again early Friday, perhaps even on a late Thursday night flight. Staff will tell you of the votes scheduled and which way lobbyists have determined you will vote. There will be a variably fancy dinner-party on those scant evenings you’re in town, to which you are an honored guest, and whose attendance is greatly appreciated. Black-tie perhaps, but talent and expertise are not necessarily required. As Mark Twain once said (which proves some things never change),

“I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.”

And it’s not the congressman’s dough that got him there.

Boss Tweed set that standard way back in Twain’s days, and the current successful candidate is merely the standard-bearer.

There are perks. Did I mention the perks?

(Forbes) Here are five major benefits each member of Congress receives:

• The House Speaker makes $223,500. Majority and Minority Leaders, and the President Pro Tempore all earn $193,400. Regular members earn $174,000.

• Outside income is restricted to eliminate conflicts-of-interest, which is a laugh, because congresspeople have long made illegal insider trades on the stock market. To no one’s surprise, Forbes found significant loopholes in the ethics laws. Who knew that powerful members could be employed by federal contractors based in their districts?

• For example, during a 13-year period, Vanderbilt University employed Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) and paid him $250,000 in total salary (2005-2018). The university received $2.6 billion in federal contracts, grants, and direct payments during his term. Vanderbilt is Cooper’s #1 campaign contributor at $135,261.

• As a federal employee, members of Congress can qualify for a pension in addition to Social Security. For each year of service, that annual pension increases by about $2,000.

• In 2004, the U.S. House spent $4.3 million on overseas travel. Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) spent $23,000 on a one-week trip to Australia, while Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) spent $75,000 on an eleven day trip to Italy, Morocco and France. Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) spent $14,357 in transportation costs to Germany, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, and France on a one-week trip.

Over the past 12 months, the Gallop public opinion congressional polling ranged from 17% to 31% approval. Why such disdain for Congress? One reason could be echoed by Mark Twain who famously stated,

“No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in.”

And that’s the small stuff, the nitty and the gritty.

Campaign contributions, unleashed by a Supreme Court finding that corporations enjoy the same free-speech right as citizens, opened a flood-gate of money legally directed into the hands of congressional politicians. A wag said at the time, “I’ll believe a corporation is the same as a citizen when the state of Texas executes one.”

None the less, corporate contributors (and billionaires through their corporations) may now contribute unlimited amounts directly to legislators’ Political Action Committees, and the unused funds become personal assets. And so, I am compelled to ask Mr. Twain (with whom I hope one day to share a cigar) for one more personal comment:

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

Some things change, but others are forever…

Sleep well, tucked in and protected by America’s Billionaire Class.

Share

Those are the words of President James Madison in 1795.

He goes on to say,

“War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Unhappily, in what will be the 250^th anniversary of our nation we have been at war, one way or another, for all but fourteen years.

That included a genocide against our native population who, in our geographic ignorance, we called ‘Indians.’

In the elegant language of his times and education, Madison further reminds us of the discretionary power of the president is extended. Foreseeing the inevitable he understands that the presidential influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied, even to talk-show hosts (as soon as talk-shows are invented) and all the means of seducing the minds (by unending repetitive lies), are added to those subduing (by not yet invented ICE officers) the force of the people.

Has any president so successfully and accurately looked 200 years down the political telescope?

Yeah, a few, but not many. James Madison had a unique ability in that talent. But what it clearly indicates is that those who delivered this fragile entity that we call a republic, knew its flaws full well, and its imperfections even more clearly. We were born a slaveholding nation, where the right to vote was carefully restricted for its first one hundred, forty-four years, until female citizens finally attained the vote in 1920, my mother among them.

We patched and repaired these inconsistencies as best we could, with a written constitution and 27 amendments (thus far) to the Constitution, beginning with the Bill of Rights. Thus we had constructed a document to deal with and correct the inconsistencies we knew were there, as well as those that might come.

We the People are not yet done.

Madison was eloquent in his assessment that a state of war would enhance the ‘inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud,’ growing out of a state of war...and in the ‘degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both.’

Well, I guess.

Need I name the perpetrators and their victims?

The Billionaire Class will do for the former, gathering their unbounded wealth by fraud, and using it to suborn the very checks and balances that separate a republican democracy from dictatorship. The latter are our stolen Middle Class, largely crated up and sent to China, who mainly are composed by what we named the Maga Movement. The balance are the poor, who fill our ghettoes and prisons, live on what scraps our society leaves them, and have little hope of moving up.

As Madison predicted a ‘degeneracy of manners and morals,’ if war became a commonality, we have separated our class warfare into the haves and have-nots. Both Republicans and Democrats are co-conspirators in that half century of social and economic decline. The result has been that Republicans are hated for hoarding all the money, and Democrats hated for letting them do it.

President Madison cannot be charged with failure to predict the internet, today’s firehose for all that rage and hatred. But he accurately named its raisons du jour.

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare, Madison claimed.

We have, and are, testing that prediction.

Stay tuned, for how all that works out…

The routine is clear, and no one is safe.

As long as you please the boss, you don’t need talent or reputation. In fact, it’s a black mark to have either. Trump learned that in his first term.

· Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State, Ceo of ExxonMobile, billionaire with a ton of experience? Bad idea, way overshadowed The Art of the Deal,

· James Mattis, Secretary of Defense, a 4-star Marine General, with way too much rank and a 40-year military career. Worse idea to put that up against bone spurs,

· Attorney General, William Barr, only the second person in history to serve as U.S. Attorney General twice, once for George H. W. Bush.

Admirable, powerful, with spotless reputations, all of them. Three strikes and you’re out, miserably and embarrassingly outclassed in public, no less, for a president who never wanted or has taken advice.

Trump wouldn’t make that mistake a second time.

The first president ever to take office as a convicted criminal, Trump valued compliance before talent, blind agreement ahead of guidance, and personal flattery above all else. What he was best known for was the size of his bus and willingness to throw anyone under it.

Thus far, that included Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi, but the ice is thin in the Oval Office and Pete Hegseth is skating dangerously.

Pete’s selection as Secretary of Defense (War, in his mind, but not yet approved by Congress) seems to have gone to his head, and he was an interesting choice for SecDef. Pete left the Army National Guard, because he felt “betrayed” by a military leadership he believed was pushing out conservative individuals due to ideological reasons. He was flagged as an ‘insider threat’ due to a controversial tattoo, and left the Individual Ready Reserve in January 2024 after his duties were revoked.

For our entire history, civilian control of the military meant oversight, not reconstruction.

Reconstruction normally happened within the military, or in Congress. Hegseth is delivering something else entirely, removing legal gatekeepers, replacing senior commanders, reshaping intelligence leadership, and now reaching into the Army’s operational core.

He began with military lawyers, those who define what cannot be done. Then went after commanders, those who decide what will be done. Then intelligence, what leadership is allowed to know and, finally, the field itself. Step by step, a system that once balanced power was rewired by a recovering (we hope) alcoholic talk-show host to personally concentrate it.

For whose benefit, one might ask?

Possibly, one might suggest it cleared the traditional civilian control over our military for a more direct intervention by a commander in chief with more personal goals, the same kind of intervention Trump expected from Noem and Bondi. Our current commander has a penchant for kidnapping presidents of nations he doesn’t care for, moving the United States Navy around the world as if it was a video game, and attacking a sovereign nation such as Iran without congressional permission.

No great public failures have been cited in these firings. No battlefield disaster demanded such a scale of change. And history is clear about one thing: when systems are redesigned this completely, it is rarely for restraint.

So, it would seem Hegseth is his president’s axe man.

But the war in Iran is a catastrophe, 66% of the American public want the war ended quickly, and 60% disapprove of military strikes. Hegseth just fired the Army’s top uniformed officer, General Randy George, and two other generals. The Pentagon announced that last Thursday, without giving a reason for the departures, in the middle of the United States waging an illegal war against Iran.

Public opinion has, once again, reached the boiling point.

If there ever was a truism about the current presidency, it’s that Trump never admits to being wrong…never.

When something does go wrong, you can bet there will be an advisor, cabinet member, or senior military general about to be thrown under the bus.

A number of advisors and general officers are already there.

If past performance holds true…

…Pete Hegseth better not be wearing his best suit.

Share

This is fascinating (as well as frightening) to me, and yet I have a case to make about Donald Trump’s twice being made president. You’re probably not going to like it, but I’ll make it anyway.

Donald Trump was (and is) the necessary antidote for the slow-cooked and smoldering decline of the American Republic.

Let me first introduce you to what I claim are the elements of that decline.

I come from what many Americans claim are ‘the old days we can never return to.’ Having lived those times, I refute that claim. The 1950s are a mere seventy-five years in America’s rear-view mirror, one third of the lifespan of a nation that, until very recently, was the single place on this earth where most everyone aspired to emigrate.

I was twenty years old in 1955, young and still pretty wet behind the ears, but I was thoughtful even then, and my memories are still clear:

• There were two billion people on the planet, now ten billion,

• The American Marshall Plan had just enabled the rebuilding of a largely destroyed Europe and Asia,

• Soldiers back from WWII earned themselves (and got) free college educations,

• We had a graduated tax code that topped out at 92%,

• The U.S. had no national debt, and now has accumulated $39 trillion,

• Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower were our presidents,

• Our industrial strength and production towered above all others,

• We had millionaires who gladly paid their taxes, rather than billionaires who bought themselves laws of avoidance,

• A bi-partisan Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act, the Federal-aid Highway Act, the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, the Atomic Energy Act, Science, Education & Space Race acts, as well as the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The 1960s that followed weren’t calm.

They were contained tensions, confronting nuclear fears with Russia, and the first cracks in a racial and cultural reordering way too long in coming, that laid the groundwork for the incredible string of assassinations in the 1960s. But we were whole, trusting our government and ourselves because each of us had earned that trust.

During the decade and a half before the Reagan administration, the U.S. seemed strangely economically sluggish, geopolitically uncertain and, like a martini, politically stirred but not yet shaken. The sense, reasonable or not, was of a country slowly losing control over prices, postwar events abroad, and its own prior internal confidence. Jimmy Carter was a lovely guy, but a transitional president between the old liberal politics of the 1960s and an emerging conservative national consensus. In the twenty-four years between Nixon and Clinton, Carter was the Democrat elected.

Reagan’s appeal in the 1980s rested largely on reversing that perception of ennui among the voting public.

But there was manipulation there as well, in that Reagan was an actor, and had the actor’s skills of gazing easily into a camera, learning his lines well, and delivering them with an easy grin and throwaway joke. Reagan didn’t send any factories to China, but his era tilted the system toward globalization, a strong dollar, freer trade, and the corporate incentives that made offshoring to China the rational business decision.

It’s notable that Reagan never personally profited from his office, he was not that class of politician, but his role as an actor led to some pretty serious misbehavior by the CIA in the Middle East and Central America.

Then, following two Reagan terms, the billionaires got their thumbs on the scales and all hell broke loose.

The offshoring of industry to China is a well-known tale and not worth exploring here, beyond the fact that it broke the American Middle Class, including a substantive union movement. The decline of small-town America and working-class jobs set the scene for the coming Trump presidencies a half-century down the calendar.

The Middle Class didn’t go quietly, and both Democrats and Republicans were co-conspirators in its demise. Single wage-earner families disappeared, and standards of living dropped like a rock. The loss of blue-collar jobs required college educations for kids, who then graduated with such debt they could never afford a home.

The generational promise of a better life for kids than their parents became another cruel joke.

After the Supreme Court determined that corporations had the same civil rights as individuals, legislative rights went to the highest bidder, and the rich captained the ship from that day forward. Anger exploded too slowly and quietly for notice, but it grew among the disenfranchised and built, generation after generation.

The stage was set for Donald Trump, and Donald knew from his fourteen-year television career how to engage a crowd. He promised to burn the political house down, and his MAGA followers couldn’t wait to provide the gasoline and matches. “Only I can do this,” he promised, and they rode his horse into a second term. The man who ‘couldn’t possibly win’ went ahead to win, then sat out an election and won again.

Now the pundits all say, ‘he’ll be crushed in the mid-terms,’ but I’m not so sure.

And yet, America is not over, not by a long shot.

We were born a slaveholding nation and survived the end of slavery. It took a Civil War that killed more Americans than all the wars we ever fought, but we survived. Black men and women suffered Jim Crow laws for another hundred years, but we (and they) survived. Two World Wars, further wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and it seems another in Iran, but we survive. We will survive our only truly criminal presidency as well, one way or another, so don’t count us out.

Those who say we can’t go back, haven’t been here long enough to understand how we can.

Time, and time, and time again, we have proven that republican democracy is a winner. It may falter, stumble, even fall on its face, but it has always gotten up and carried on.

Abraham Lincoln broke the chain of new slave states in the mid nineteenth century. Theodore Roosevelt broke the trusts that bound America into servitude in the early twentieth century, and Franklin Roosevelt saved our nation from its worst ever financial collapse, while guiding us through another world War at the same time.

Someone will break the back of the billionaires, or they’ll break their own, because they divided our house, and Lincoln told us…

… “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

We haven’t yet found a leader to right our wrongs in this century, but we have one currently in office who has proven the need.

The rest will come.

It always has.

Share

Think about that.

Don’t rage or complain, we have enough online complaints to last us several generations, and they go nowhere, serve nothing except to blow off steam.

We have mid-term elections coming in November, when the entire House of Representatives, and one third of the Seante will come up for re-election.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, statistically, 95% of those facing election will be re-elected no matter how unpopular.

Let me explain how, in politics, meow has come to rule.

It didn’t ‘just happen.’ It’s the cumulative effect of several structural advantages that heavily favor incumbents, regardless of broad voter dissatisfaction. Most House seats are drawn to be safely Democratic or Republican. We call that gerrymandering, and it happens in favor of either party that controls state legislators. So, that means the real contest isn’t the general election, it’s the primary. Once a candidate wins that, reelection is largely automatic.

Then, there’s the incumbency advantage. Sitting members of Congress have built-in visibility, staff, constituent services, media access, and cash superiority. Voters may dislike their Congressperson in the abstract, but piles of cash are important, and incumbents raise far more campaign funds. Donors back likely winners, which reinforces the cycle. Challengers often can’t afford enough exposure to compete seriously. Voters these days are now strongly aligned with party identity, and many voters simply pull the party handle regardless of who the candidate is.

Then there’s the tools available, like franking (free official mail), and constant visibility in the district, due to free flights back and forth from Washington that reinforce a sense of personal connection.

Bottom line: As George Carlin quite accurately put it, “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”

The 95% reelection rate isn’t proof voters love incumbents, it’s simply evidence that most elections are effectively decided before voters get anywhere near a ballot box.

Beyond that (as if it wasn’t enough), there’s the perks.

Who would possibly spend $millions to nail down a job that pays less that 200 grand a year? How does the Congress love thee? Let me count the ways.

• Generous federal pensions, $17 to $60 thousand, beginning after as little as 5 years of service. I don’t know what you-ow get in Social Security, but me-ow banks about 21 grand, after a lifetime of work. But hang on.

• While they continue to threaten Social Security and cut taxes for the rich by hammering you-ow’s access to the most expensive health care in the world, their’s is a gold-level employer-sponsored ACA plan with a strong subsidy and convenient in-house care.

• The real difference isn’t the plan itself, it’s the security, subsidy, and continuity, which most Americans don’t have.

• Then there’s their Thrift Savings Plan, a government 401k with matching funds, book deals, speaking fees, and future lobbying/consulting opportunities, once out of office. What that really means is seats on boards of directors that typically pay a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, because they bought themselves (the companies) a direct pipeline to the House or Senate by that membership.

• They get large taxpayer-funded office budgets (House: $1–2million; Senate: several million depending on state size), teams of staff in Washington and their home districts, as well as the ability to hire specialists in any damn subject they deem necessary.

• Oh, and free flights home every week (generally on Thursday afternoon, returning on Monday late). You-ow and me-ow work a 40-hour week, if we-ow are lucky, and commute an hour a day.

Bottom line: None of these perks alone guarantee reelection—but together they create a powerful ecosystem that makes incumbents far harder to dislodge than any challenger.

Last, but certainly not anywhere near least, we come to pay-for-votes.

We have no bribery or fraud in American government because Congress, backed by the Supreme Court, made it legal. This wonderous achievement had its origin in a 2010 Supreme Court ruling called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, further tilted political influence toward wealthy donors and corporations.

It took the case in 2007, when a conservative nonprofit organization challenged campaign finance rules that stopped it from promoting and airing a film criticizing then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The Court decided 5–4 that Citizens United was within its First Amendment rights to spend its money disseminating the film.

But rather than finding solely on the case before it as it had been asked to do, the Court took the opportunity to entirely strike down century-old prohibitions on corporate “independent” spending — money that doesn’t go directly to a candidate or party.

This applied to labor unions as well. Lower courts applying the ruling extended it to invalidate almost all fundraising and spending restrictions for groups that purport to be separate from candidates, many of which are today known as “super PACs.”

This ruling doubled down on a 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, which was the first case to say that campaign expenditures, or money spent to influence voters, was a type of “speech” and that the only permissible justification for most limits on money in politics was to prevent outright bribery, or as the Court’s opinion called it, “quid pro quo corruption.”

Thus, the United States Congress was bought and paid for, allowing all of us free speech, but awarding the largest megaphone to corporations.

So, we don’t have that particular problem with fraud and bribery, although it’s rampant in what our president continues to call ‘shithole countries.’

As Mark Twain declared over a hundred years ago, “It is the foreign element that commits our crimes. There is no native criminal class except Congress.”

And I don’t want you to rant about all this, because ranting solves nothing. It’s the cats meow.

But, I dearly want you to think…and think hard, about you-ow and we-ow…and why so many problems come from meow.

Share

Don’t let the paparazzi catch you without a book in your hand. Intellectual is the new low-cut blouse, and celebrity guys are in it too, spiky hair and Iain Sinclair.

A Guardian article tickled my fancy today, making me wonder if I’d be (or at least look) more hip by carrying one of my own books around on the Prague metro. I’ve nearly 20 of them, but they were written long before it was intellectually chic. In those long-passed days, it was what writers did if they cared to share something they felt was worthwhile. But now…

We Are Living in a Period of Political Anti-Intellectualism. But in Pop Culture, Clever Is the New Cool.

That’s the Guardian headline.

Ah, there you go. We’re not actually reading, we’re wearing the look, riding the book, and hooking the hook. Cliff Notes provides the chit-chat and a book in the hand beats two in the library.

Gotcha.

It all began, the Guardian tells me, when Kim Kardashian decided a few years ago to pursue a legal career, to test if admission to the bar would polish up a celebrity career.

Thus far, celebrity was her career, and its legs were getting tired. We won’t know, because she failed three times, but I’m told the fourth was a charm. Although she most likely won’t actually try any cases, she set the stage for intellectual curiosity as a requirement in any celebrity’s wardrobe.

Kardashians are good at that, if not much else.

Kardashian’s pivot towards legal study, we are informed, was an early experiment in whether intellectual seriousness could be folded into celebrity without destroying its commercial appeal.

According to the Guardian, once proven, the folding continues. Eager to promote their commercial appeal, “Pop stars are launching book clubs – the 1970s had Studio 54, this decade has Dua Lipa’s online literary salon Service95 – or joining Substack, where Charli xcx recently published a 1,800-word essay interrogating why it is that as a pop star “you cannot avoid the fact that some people are simply determined to prove that you are stupid.”

It took 1800 words to make that case?

“This is real,” says trend forecaster Lucie Greene. “There is a backlash against visually focused lifestyle content, which has become so co-opted by brands (ah, one doesn’t dare to get co-opted on the way to the Bentley dealer). Gen Z want more. They want knowledge. They want to go deep down the rabbit hole, on podcasts and on Reddit as well as on TikTok and YouTube.”

Well, you won’t find a Bentley on Reddit, TikTok or YouTube, but it’s worth a try. Interesting to me, that a ‘trend forecaster’ would lean in on what is real, and what is only the whiff of a Kardashian breaking wind.

“This is bigger than books,” the article continues to gush. “It is thinking, as well as reading, that is cool again.”

Well, thank God for that.

I had no idea we had fallen so far that ‘going deep down the rabbit hole’ was thought of as surfacing. Thinking has finally lifted its head far enough above that surface that it’s cool. Doddering will be next, as soon as Gen Z approaches the age of reason, and dodders through their second or third mid-life crisis.

Ah but wait a moment.

“It is worth interrogating” (we read on) “the skepticism that creeps in, any time fashion or glamour are put in the same category as thought or intellect. I refer you here to Dua Lipa’s author interviews, which are superb. In a chat with David Szalay, the author of Flesh, she asked him about the authorial decision to omit the protagonist’s father from a story that has so much to say about masculinity – a point that, Szalay notes, no reviewers had picked up on.”

Cliff Notes strike again.

I suspect, but insist it is only a suspicion, that Dua Lipa wouldn’t know an authorial decision from a coat-rack, unless she was well prompted by her trend forecaster.

But if reading and thinking are actually on the upswing, I’m willing to march in that parade.

Sign me up…on Substack, of course.

Share

But statistics, as you know, ‘will confess to anything if they are tortured sufficiently.’ And our current administration is expert in waterboarding.

(Wikipedia) The US and Israeli surprise attacks on Iran were supported, at least in part, by Ukraine, Albania, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Romania, and Trinidad and Tobago. More recently Germany, France and the United Kingdom piled in as critics of Iran.

Interestingly, (my take on it) what opposition there was, came from Afghanistan, Armenia, Brazil, Chile, China, Kazakhstan, Oman, North Korea, Norway, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Spain, and Vietnam. The US-Israeli attack was further condemned by a number of progressive and left-wing parties, as well as trade unions, anti-war organizations, and some far-right parties.

Someone must have whispered in Trump‘s ear about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, prior to WWII, having occurred during peace negotiations in Washington. He copied that subterfuge in both his Iranian attacks.

That’s a criminal act, by international standards, to say the least. But criminality is foretold in his book, The Art of the Deal.

The question that comes to my mind, is why so many nations would blame Iran, for being the victim of an attack by Israel and America.

I don’t recall anyone blaming America for Pearl Harbor…and I was there to recall. But there is a difference, and the difference is absolutely critical to understanding why so many American allies are blaming the canary for being eaten by the cat.

Ninety-seven nations, 50% of the U.N. membership, are not actually all that willing to be on friendly terms with the United States.

Excuse me?

They are, in very real terms, pseudo-colonies, in an undeclared American empire. In lieu of more recognized colonializations, such as those the Persians, Romans and Brits imposed, we Americans were (and are) somewhat sneaky about how we’ve managed ours.

It might come as a surprise to you (as it certainly did to me), that we have 877 military bases and CIA presences in 97 nations of the world, over 40 in Germany alone. You and I, along with ordinary American citizens, were not intended to find offense in that, because it was quietly done. That policy has actually been the American way since the end of World War Two.

First, we gave our defeated enemies the Marshall Plan to rebuild themselves. Secretary of State and former four-star general, George Marshall was not going to repeat the 1918 Armistace that so crippled Germany, it brought the world to war again in only twenty years. Europe and a large part of Asis accepted this with gratitude, aand Europe has remained peaceful.

Then the skies turned cloudy, as America followed up that amazing act of largesse with military bases, for your protection. Along with that, but not so well advertised, we added CIA intelligence, to maintain our satisfaction that all 97 would remain grateful.

Donald Trump talks a good deal about gratitude.

Not his, but others, always others.

Those on the receiving end know the Trump version of gratitude always comes at a heavy price, and is delivered in public, quite often from the Oval Office, the prelude to further requirements. Those usually include formal military bases, access agreements, and CIA intelligence facilities, although the latter are unwritten and seldom acknowledged.

All this is broadly consistent with how analysts describe the global U.S. footprint, although none dare call it empire.

But I refer you to former President Harry Truman’s comment, made shortly after he retired from office: “I would never have allowed the CIA to be founded, had I recognized the fact that we were creating an American Gestapo.”

In the context of the recent end of World War Two, ‘Gestapo’ was a term Truman didn’t take lightly. Never a man to mince words, he meant it for exactly what it was. Both America and the world at large have paid a heavy price ever since, mostly without recognizing the source.

The political effects were profound, as you might imagine. But not uniform, cutting in several directions at once.

A global network (call it what you will) allows the United States to act quickly almost anywhere, and the ramifications of that are evident in its most recent and uniformly unlawful consequences.

Those include enabling and, worse yet, providing munitions and encouragement for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, kidnapping the sitting president of Venezuela, attacking Iran without warning, threatening Greenland, and openly discussing the takeover of Cuba.

Our military and CIA footprint claims to reassure ‘partner governments,’ that America is stabilizing regions that might otherwise tip into conflict. Even so, conflict seems to be the present administration’s flavor-of-the-month internationally.

As the lopsided response blaming Iran for being attacked would indicate, American military bases are never politically neutral inside the countries that host them.

Take the Japanese, South Korean and Middle Eastern bases as an example. Those countries have each experienced nationalist political backlash that destabilized their governments, along with an awkward reputation at home, finding themselves politically aligned with the present Washington administration. This has become increasingly uncomfortable as our current president is publicly dismissive before the world to their emissaries, cameras running in the Oval Office, and including Prime Ministers and presidents.

Victims have lately included Ukraine, Japan, Canada, and the UK, as well as a host of others seeking smooth waters and finding only turbulence.

As Churchill once said, “you can always depend upon America to do the right thing, once it has considered all the alternatives.” The alternatives in this administration have been bleak at best.

And yet, as Iran is the subject here, it was Winston Churchill and the CIA that pulled the rug out from under Iran’s first democratically elected president, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Ah yes, as Mark Twain said, over a hundred years ago, “history may not repeat, but it rhymes.”

When Mosaddegh, included among his groundbreaking social reforms, nationalizing the Iranian oil industry (it was only realizing a 16% return on its own oil), it threatened British Petroleum. That was enough for Sir Winston. After the Mosaddegh coup, America and Britain brought in the Shah, and Iran would never see democracy rise again.

The U.S. does not administer its colonies in the usual sense.

But it exerts an influence, similar in all aspects to an imperial system. It keeps a lid on whatever it might consider global conflict, while steadily raising the pressures underneath to reflect its own benefit.

Forgive me another quotation, but history demands voices from the past, lest we forget. It was Henry Kissinger who said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

America did not always have imperial goals, nor can they possibly be in our long-term national interest.

A multi-polar world would seem to be in the best political interests of small nations, and the United Nations was founded with that goal in mind. Yet 877 military bases and a CIA presence in 97 nations of the world, would indicate an unbalanced foreign policy, offered with a false smile and a hidden agenda, at the end of a gun.

We Americans, and the world at large, are the poorer for it.

Sleep well…

Share