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Donald Trump Is a Real Life Scrooge McDuck—But Not Even a Little Funny
Mar-a-Lago is his Money Bin, and the world is his playground for schemes to add another billion or two to his and his family’s growing fortune.
Jan 22, 2026
Writers often try to gild their tawdry times or dignify their flawed leaders with lofty literary analogies—notably, America as the New Jerusalem; Lincoln as Moses leading his people through the wilderness of the Civil War; the Kennedy White House as an incarnation of King Arthur’s “Camelot“; or Lyndon Johnson living his last years as a latter-day King Lear, cast off by his ungrateful children into the moors of south Texas.
But what are we going to do with Donald Trump? Wouldn’t his vanity, his vulgarity, and his relentless pursuit of money and minerals in every corner of the globe turn any literary analogies into soggy clichés? Like the showman P.T. Barnum, Trump is an American original, whose true metaphors can be found only in comic books (America’s one true art form), not literature. As Ariel Dorfman reminded us once upon a time in How to Read Donald Duck, that classic guide to US cultural imperialism in Latin America, there was always more to a Disney comic book than gags.
To understand Trump’s America, we need our own comic guidebook to his global misadventures, which might be titled something like “How to Read Scrooge McDuck.” After all, in case you never had the pleasure of his acquaintance, Scrooge McDuck was the predatory billionaire in Disney comics, who was amazingly popular among teenagers in Cold War America. In that era when American corporations scampered around the global economy extracting profits wherever they saw fit, Scrooge McDuck put a friendly face on US imperialism, making covert intervention and commercial exploitation look benign, even comic.
From 1952 to 1988, a period coinciding almost precisely with the Cold War, the comic’s creator, illustrator Carl Barks, filled the country’s magazine racks with more than 220 comic books celebrating Scrooge’s schemes to accumulate ever more billions by dispatching Donald Duck and his triplet nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) to scour the world for riches—gems, minerals, oil, and lost treasure. No place on the planet was too remote, not even the Arctic or the Amazon, and no people too poor or obscure, not even Hondurans and Tibetans, to escape his tight-fisted grasp. And yet in that innocent world of the comic book, every adventure, no matter how twisted the plot, always ended with a light laugh for those duckling heroes and the diverse peoples they encountered on their global travels.
Just as Scrooge McDuck scoured the world in a relentless, even ruthless search for wealth, so our real-life Donald has made mineral deals everywhere on the planet his top presidential priority.
Let’s visit a few of my favorite comic books from my Cold War childhood, starting with the 1954 story “The Seven Cities of Cibola.” Its initial panels show a butler showering the billionaire duck with coins while he swims around in his Money Bin’s “three cubic acres” of cash. At first, Scrooge McDuck seems content as he gloats about making money from “about every business there is on Earth” (from “oil wells, railroads, gold mines, farms, factories”).
Suddenly, however, saddened by the realization that he’s exhausted every possible domestic path to profit, Scrooge decides to lead his nephew Donald and the triplets into the desert borderlands between Mexico and the US. There, they come upon a lost Eldorado, a towering, multitiered city with gold-paved streets and a cistern filled with opals and sapphires. But caution intrudes when Huey, Dewey, and Louie discover that the whole edifice is poised dangerously atop a spindly stone pillar. Then, at their moment of near triumph, the ducks are denied any treasure by Scrooge’s recurring nemesis, the comically criminal Beagle Boys, who break in and grab the city’s bejeweled idol, triggering a hidden mechanism that fractures the pillar. As those fabled cities collapse into a heap of rubble, our duckling heroes escape unharmed, ready for their next adventure.
The first panel in a 1956 comic book, the “Secret of Hondorica,” shows Scrooge McDuck pointing to a map of the Caribbean as he dispatches Donald Duck and his three nephews deep into tropical jungles near—yes, how sadly appropriate almost seven decades later—Venezuela to recover his lost deeds to the region’s rich oil wells. After crossing steep mountains and crocodile-infested creeks, the Ducks happen upon a Mayan temple filled with spear-carrying “savages” arrayed around their idol. By translating the “picture writing” on the temple walls with the help of their handy encyclopedic “Junior Woodchuck Guidebook,” the nephews deceive the natives with incantations in their own language and escape with the idol’s crown of gold.
President Donald Trump is, of course, our real-life Scrooge McDuck. Mar-a-Lago is his Money Bin. And the world is his playground for schemes to add another billion or two to his and his family’s growing fortune. Just as Scrooge McDuck scoured the world in a relentless, even ruthless search for wealth, so our real-life Donald has made mineral deals everywhere on the planet his top presidential priority—rare earths from Ukraine, oil from the Middle East, and (someday perhaps) a frozen treasure trove of minerals in Greenland. And just as Scrooge dispatched Donald Duck on a mission to recover his lost oil wells from the jungles of “Hondorica,” so our real Donald did indeed send US special forces to capture President Nicolás Maduro and win yet more of Venezuela’s oil fields for American companies.
Back to the Reality of the Old Cold War
Alas, my innocent childhood is long gone. The world is no backdrop for comic book adventures, and imaginary heroes don’t flit from frame to frame to amusing endings. In the real world of 2026, we are already deep into a “new Cold War” against nuclear-armed powers, and President Donald J. Trump’s comedic foreign policy is dragging us toward a dismal defeat.
First, let’s snap back to reality by taking stock of the world we’ve actually been living through all these years and review how we got here. During the real Cold War, the global conflict that lasted from 1947 to 1991 (when the Soviet Union collapsed), the one I describe in my new book, Cold War on Five Continents, Washington’s geopolitical strategy was brilliantly ruthless in its basic design. After fighting quite a different global conflict, World War II, for four years with the aim of defeating the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) entrenched at both ends of Eurasia, America’s leaders of General (and future president) Dwight D. Eisenhower’s generation knew instinctively that geopolitical control over that vast continent was indeed the key to global power.
If Washington’s strategy for waging the Cold War was a successful exercise in geopolitics, its use of “unipolar” power in the decades to come was... much less so.
Guided by that fundamental strategic principle (which had, in fact, held true for the last thousand years or so), Washington’s early Cold War leaders worked hard to “contain” the Sino-Soviet communist bloc behind an “Iron Curtain” that stretched for 5,000 miles around the rim of Eurasia. With the armed forces of its NATO alliance securing that continent’s Western frontier and five bilateral military pacts ranging along the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia for its eastern border, Washington bottled up the communist superpowers. That strategy freed the US to make the rest of the planet into its very own “free world.” In exchange for open access to the markets and minerals of the countries in much of that free world, the US distributed a few development dollars of aid to the emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which often served to fatten up the bank accounts of their nominally “democratic” dictators.
After two decades of being locked up inside Eurasia, however, Beijing and Moscow tried to break out of their geopolitical isolation by arming allies for revolutionary warfare on Cold War battlegrounds stretching from South Vietnam across the Middle East and through southern Africa, all the way to Central America.
To counter that gambit and push those communist powers back behind the Iron Curtain, the US sometimes sent in its own troops, whether successfully to the Dominican Republic in 1965, or disastrously to South Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. But most of the time, Washington dispatched individual CIA operatives armed with impunity to do whatever—and I do mean whatever—they wanted to deflect Moscow and Beijing’s gambits and secure contested terrain. Usually misfits, even oddballs at home, those surprisingly significant historical actors, whom I’ve come to call “men on the spot,” often proved quite successful abroad. Using the cruelest instruments in the toolkit of modern statecraft—assassinations, coups, surrogate troops, torture, and psychological warfare—those covert operatives fought for control of foreign capitals as diverse as Kinshasha, Luanda, Saigon, Santiago, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, and Vientiane. And then, with the Soviet Union significantly “contained” geopolitically within its borderlands, Washington could just sit back and wait for Moscow to make a strategic blunder.
That blunder came in 1979 in one of those classic military misadventures that often hasten the deaths of empires in decline. When Moscow sent 100,000 troops to occupy Afghanistan, Washington sent just one CIA operative, Howard Hart, to defeat that occupation. Acting as Washington’s “man on the spot,” he used the agency’s millions of dollars to form a guerrilla army of 250,000 Afghan fighters. By the time the Red Army was bled dry and left Afghanistan a decade later, defeated and demoralized, Moscow’s satellite states in Eastern Europe were erupting in mass anti-communist protests. With the Red Army generally unable or unwilling to intervene, the Soviet bloc broke apart as the Soviet Union broke up, ending the Cold War with an unqualified US victory.
Toward a New Cold War
If Washington’s strategy for waging the Cold War was a successful exercise in geopolitics, its use of “unipolar” power in the decades to come was, as I also argue in Cold War on Five Continents, much less so. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington stood astride the globe like a Titan of Greek legend—the sole superpower on Earth, at least theoretically capable of remaking the world as it wished. Convinced that “the end of history” would make its free-market democracy the future of all mankind, America’s leaders, “drunk with power,” advanced sweeping plans for a new world order, grounded in a globalized economy that served their short-term interests but would have deleterious long-term consequences for their global hegemony.
Only a decade after the Cold War ended, Washington started facing serious strategic challenges across the Eurasian continent, which, then and now, has been the epicenter of geopolitical power. In the heady aftermath of its Cold War victory, the US attempted some bold strategic gambits that would soon prove to be distinctly ill-advised. Above all, Washington’s leaders believed that they could co-opt Beijing’s rising power by recognizing China as an equal trading partner. In a parallel attempt to curb any of Moscow’s future imperial ambitions, the US also presided over NATO’s expansion until that alliance surrounded Russia’s western borders, sparking security concerns in Moscow. Such ill-fated initiatives, combined with ill-considered military interventions in Afghanistan and also Iraq, created conditions for the revival of a great-power rivalry that, since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, many observers have called “the new Cold War.”
For over a century, the Caribbean region had consistently experienced the most brutal, least benign aspects of US foreign policy and now that reality has only worsened.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its socialist economy in 1991, Washington seemed to feel its post-Cold-War globalization would both promote democracy there and integrate that country into an emerging American world order, perhaps as a secondary power supplying cheap commodities, including oil, to the global economy. For the Russians, however, such globalization produced the dismal decade of the 1990s that would be marked by what economist Jeffrey Sachs has called a “serious economic and financial crisis” and a privatization of state enterprises “rife with unfairness and corruption,” creating a coterie of predatory Russian oligarchs.
When Vladimir Putin became prime minister amid the post-Soviet malaise of the late 1990s, he reverted to Russia’s centuries-old imperial mode. He found his vision for the country’s revival as a “great power” in the sort of geostrategic thinking that Washington’s leaders seemed to have forgotten in the afterglow of their great Cold War victory. Following a 2005 address calling the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin set about systematically reclaiming much of the old Soviet sphere—invading Georgia in 2008 when it began flirting with NATO membership; deploying troops in 2020-2021 to resolve an Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in favor of a pro-Moscow regime in Baku; and dispatching thousands of Russian special forces to Kazakhstan in 2022 to gun down pro-democracy protesters challenging a loyal Russian ally.
Concerned above all with securing his western frontier with Europe, Putin pressed relentlessly against Ukraine after his loyal surrogate leader there was ousted in the 2014 Maidan “color revolution.” First seizing Crimea, next arming separatist rebels in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region adjacent to Russia, and finally invading Ukraine in 2022 with nearly 200,000 troops, he would spark a protracted war that has yet to end.
At first, as Kyiv fought the Russians off, Washington and the West reacted with a striking unanimity by imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, dispatching armaments to Ukraine, and expanding NATO to include all of Scandinavia. Moreover, Ukraine showed a formidable flair for unconventional operations—clearing Russian ships from the Black Sea with naval drones and sabotaging that country’s massive gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
As Russia’s war on Ukraine reverberated across Eurasia and beyond, geopolitical tensions also rose in the Western Pacific, sparking a renewed great power rivalry that became worthy of the phrase “the new Cold War.” In a striking parallel with the 1950s, in February 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Beijing and Moscow forged a multi-faceted economic and strategic alliance that they claimed had “no limits.” In an eerie reprisal of the early Cold War years, Russia and China were in that way united against a Western alliance, once again led by Washington with its military forces still deployed in Western Europe and East Asia.
After two years of continuous combat in Ukraine, however, cracks began to appear in the West’s anti-Russian coalition. Most critically, American domestic support for Ukraine started to falter under partisan political pressures, amplified by a rising populist opposition in both the US and Europe to the globalized economy and its military alliances. After successfully rallying NATO to stand with Ukraine, President Joseph Biden opened America’s arsenal to Kyiv until Republican legislators, at Donald Trump’s behest, delayed military aid throughout much of 2024.
President Trump’s Second Term
Following his second inauguration in January 2025, President Trump’s initial foreign policy initiative was a unilateral attempt to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war—an effort that would be complicated by his underlying hostility toward NATO and his sympathy for Russian President Putin. On February 12, Trump launched peace talks through a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with the Russian president, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” Within days, Defense Secretary (or do I mean Secretary of War?) Pete Hegseth announced that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” and Trump added that NATO membership for Kyiv was no less unrealistic—in effect, making what a senior Swedish diplomat called “very major concessions” to Moscow before any talks even began.
At month’s end, those tensions culminated in a televised Oval Office meeting in which Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying: “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.” That unilateral approach not only weakened Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, but also degraded NATO, which had, for the previous three years, supported Ukraine’s resistance to Russia. Recoiling from the “initial shock” of that utterly unprecedented breach, Europeans quickly appropriated $160 billion to build up their own arms industry in collaboration with both Canada and Ukraine, thereby reducing their dependence on US weaponry.
Although it has little chance of success, Trump’s attempt at a tricontinental grand strategy will likely leave a residue of ruin—alienating allies in Latin America, weakening NATO’s position in Western Europe, and ultimately corroding Washington’s global power.
For the rest of the year, Putin continued to work on Trump. He even scored a state visit and meeting with the American president in Alaska, without making any concessions whatsoever. In the process, he reduced US envoys to messenger boys for his unyielding demands, while using disinformation to drive a wedge between Washington and Kyiv. Even if the Trump administration does not formally withdraw from NATO in the years to come, the president’s repeated hostility toward it, particularly its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to weaken, if not eviscerate the alliance.
Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements from the White House, the design of Trump’s de facto geopolitical strategy soon took shape. Instead of focusing on mutual-security alliances like NATO in Europe or NORAD with Canada, Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered leader like himself—with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling the Americas. That aspiration to hemispheric hegemony lent a certain geopolitical logic to Trump’s otherwise quixotic strikes on Venezuela (and his capture of its president and his wife), as well as his overtures to claim Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, and even to make Canada the 51st state.
Last November, formalizing that approach, the White House released its new National Security Strategy, which proclaimed a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” aimed at achieving an unchallenged “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Think, of course, the Donroe Doctrine. To that end, the US will reduce its “global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere,” deploy the US Navy to “control sea lanes,” and use “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” to make the Western Hemisphere “an increasingly attractive market for American commerce.” In essence, “the United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity.”
For over a century, the Caribbean region had consistently experienced the most brutal, least benign aspects of US foreign policy and now that reality has only worsened. Not only has Trump reverted to the gunboat diplomacy of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but he’s done so with a caricatured cruelty—sinking boats in the Caribbean in the name of drug interdiction and sending troops to invade Venezuela, a sovereign state.
Just as Theodore Roosevelt used the Navy to seize land from Colombia for the Panama Canal, so Trump sent Special Forces into Venezuela to gain control over its oil. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies… go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said at a January 3 press conference just hours after President Maduro’s capture. “We’re gonna rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It will cost us nothing. It’ll be paid for by the oil companies directly.” Such a caricatured assertion of economic interest is likely to inflame resentment in a region where anti-imperialist sensibilities remain strong.
Although it has little chance of success, Trump’s attempt at a tricontinental grand strategy will likely leave a residue of ruin—alienating allies in Latin America, weakening NATO’s position in Western Europe, and ultimately corroding Washington’s global power. From a strategic perspective, a staged US retreat from its military bastion in Western Europe would end its long-standing influence over Eurasia, which remains the epicenter of geopolitical power in this new Cold War era, just as it was in the old one. Such a retreat, at the very moment when Russia and China are expanding their influence over that strategic continent, would be tantamount to a self-inflicted defeat in this era of a new and intensifying Cold War.
To return to those Donald Duck comic books for an appropriate analogy: Just as that bungled grab for a bejeweled idol collapsed the spindly stone pillar holding up the “Seven Cities of Cibola,” so the Trump administration’s inept foreign policy is potentially destabilizing a fragile world order with dangerously unpredictable consequences for us all. And count on one thing, unlike in the comic books, it won’t be even a little bit funny.
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We're Not Crazy—But This Rigged System Is
The evidence is overwhelming. The American economic system is no longer failing by accident; it is succeeding at its new design: concentrating wealth and power for the few while dismantling the foundations of a dignified life for the many.
Sep 17, 2025
Nine days ago, I laid out a draft of a pledge akin to Newt’s Contract for America. First, we must agree on what is broken. If you can’t agree on the scale of a crisis, you can never agree on the scale of a solution.
This is my attempt to lay out the first and most important reality, one that so many of us know in our bones but that the establishment continues to deny.
The people in charge—the politicians in Washington, the economists at Hahvahd, the CEOs in boardrooms—all describe a nation that does not exist for most of us. Strongest economy EVER! Record GDP! Look at the MARKET FOLKS! “Real Wages” are up across the board!
Our greatest economic minds reckon we oughta be in awe of the riches that their management has bestowed upon us.
Every official metric tells us we're richer than our parents and grandparents, and that all who have come before us would look at even the poorest among us green with envy. The story goes that even Kings and Queens could only dream of trading their lives for those of trailer park dwellers or Section 8 residents. We're living the dream.
Alas, it’s a lie. A goddamn lie. It's the big lie.
Why does it matter that we share this understanding of reality? Why can’t you think things are okay but need improving? Because this lie paralyzes us. If the prevailing wisdom is to be believed then there is no problem. No need for fundamental shifts in the foundation of our system.
Also, implicit in this lie is that failure is our fault if we struggle financially or socially. It means that if we’re poor, we’re fuck ups that didn’t heed Dave Ramsey’s advice. After all the fantasy of America and the data tell us the same story. America is the land of opportunity. You fail, you suck.
Politicians, voters and non-voters alike all look at the stats to determine a plan of action. Is the good life out there waiting for us?
Unless we share this reality we have no chance in mobilizing the strength to overturn a system that constantly fails us. To overcome the corporations, the billionaires and the yes men in our government that have their boots on our throats economically it’ll take a lot of political will. A lot of political fights. Brave people, terrified people, but united people.
The odds of a child earning more than their parents have fallen from 90% for those born in 1940 to 50% for those born in the 1980s.
People that agree in this simple truth: We are not failing. The system is failing us.
We're Not Crazy. The System Is.
Let's start with what we know in our bones.
Our parents and grandparents could afford a home on one income. Now we struggle on two. Our grandparents raised a family on a factory wage. Today even with a college degree many can't afford daycare. That degree once cost a summer job. Now it's a lifetime of debt.
They want to tell you about personal responsibility, bootstraps, or about the choices you've made. The elite, academics, and CEOs want us to believe that if we’d worked a little harder, gotten a different degree, made a different decision, we’d have risen above it all.
But when an entire generation is locked out of the stability their parents took for granted, the problem isn't the generation—it's the system.
According to a 2017 study we’ve long lost social mobility. We're not better off than our parents. Our kids probably won't be better off than us.
We need to understand that the people telling you otherwise are invested in not seeing the truth. They are tracking the portfolios of the rich instead of the lives of the working. They are celebrating the health of the parasite while the host, you and me, get sicker every year.
The Scale of the Heist
You don't need an economics degree to see the crime scene. You just need basic arithmetic.
Housing: In 1950, the median household income was about $3,073 and the median home cost around $7,500. 2.8 times a household’s yearly pay. In 2023, the median household income was $80,610 and the median home cost $430,000 or 5.3 times a household income. No inflation though. Just ask experts.
Keep in mind that more and more homes had two people working full-time. So what once took 2.8 years of income for one worker now requires 5.3 years from TWO. The one-income household is DOA.
Education: In 1973, you could pay for a year of public university tuition (about $400) by working roughly 250 hours at the federal minimum wage ($1.60). Today, with average public university tuition at $11,610, you'd need to work over 1,600 hours at the current minimum wage—most of a full-time job just for tuition. Forget food, rent, or books.
The game has been fundamentally changed. The cost of entry into the middle class now requires a lifetime of debt and labor that was unimaginable two generations ago.
Where’s The Money, Lebowski?
So where did all the prosperity go? It didn't vanish. It was taken. Housing, healthcare, education, transportation, and food make up the bulk of our spending. And corporations have gobbled it up.
A landmark study from the RAND Corporation calculated the scale of the heist. If income had been distributed as equitably as it was from 1945-1975, the bottom 90% of Americans would have earned $79 trillion more over the past 50 years.
That's not a typo. Trillion. With a T.
In 2023 alone, the transfer was $3.9 trillion. That's enough to have given every single worker in America an additional $32,000.
Stop and think about that number. Every American worker in a single year, 2023, was robbed of 32 grand. What would an extra $32,000 have meant for your family last year? A down payment? An end to credit card debt? The ability to see a doctor without checking your bank account first?
That money is our money. It was earned by our labor, our infrastructure, our markets. Then stolen with interest, inflation, and policy choices.
CEO pay exploded from 30-to-1 in 1978 to 290-to-1 today. The top 1% now owns 31% of all wealth—up from 23% in 1989.
Why are people so pissed? Why is xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, on the rise in the West? This is one of the reasons. We’ve spent the last 50 years being mugged with policy. Blaming immigrants or leftists or right wingers and Trump and everyone in between is simpler than acknowledging the truth. They are easier fixes too. Walls, bombs, bullets, and deportations. Much easier than rebuilding an entire economy and society.
The Gaslighting Machine
How do they hide a crime this massive in plain sight? They build a gaslighting machine “experts say” or “the News” or "economic data."
They use sophisticated, elegant-sounding mathematical formulas to tell us it's raining while they piss all over us.
The official inflation number is their primary weapon, engineered to hide the affordability crisis. Here's exactly how they do it:
"Substitution": When steak gets too expensive, the statisticians quietly assume you now buy hamburger. When hamburger gets too expensive, they assume you switch to chicken. When chicken gets too expensive, it's beans. They are not measuring the cost of living; they are measuring the cost of surviving. By constantly moving the goalposts downward, they report that prices are stable while you are eating worse for more money.
"Hedonic Adjustments": When a new car includes a backup camera that used to be an option, they count that as a price decrease because you're "getting more car for your money." But you can't buy the old, cheaper car anymore. You are forced to pay the full sticker price, while the government reports that your cost of living went down.
"Averaging the Absurd": TVs got 94% cheaper while healthcare costs have tripled since 2000—from $4,900 per person to $14,570. They call it a wash. But you need healthcare to live. A TV is optional. It's like saying "Sure, chemotherapy will bankrupt you, but have you seen the deal on flatscreens?"
The lies, the blatant lies that we're told about our economy, our living situations, are just enraging and offensive.
More Than Money
The $79 trillion heist was never just about cash. They didn't just steal our money; they stole our capacity. They stole our ability to do things, to build, to create, and to care for our own.
We can't build infrastructure projects anymore. We can't complete a high-speed rail system. The road on I-40 between Asheville and my home is still down to two lanes because part of it collapsed into a river, and God knows how many years that'll take to fix.
They've got us in a situation where 54 percent of this country can't read beyond a sixth-grade level, and 20 percent of us are functionally illiterate. At the same time, they tell us we have a 99 percent literacy rate because people can read a sentence.
We are the only developed nation where mothers are three times more likely to die in childbirth than 25 years ago. Our life expectancy is falling.
We are literally sick from the stress, the debt, and the garbage food that's all many can afford. Over 130 million Americans have multiple chronic conditions.
The Hidden Costs
The average family now spends $13,174 annually on transportation—more than double what most people think. Childcare costs average $11,582 per year, often exceeding college tuition. We're spending more on basic necessities than we earn.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' own data shows that families in the bottom 80% spend more than they earn just on necessities—before accounting for anything else. This isn't overconsumption; it's mathematical impossibility sustained only through debt.
They haven't just taken the fruit; they've poisoned the tree. They've left us a nation rich on paper but poor in the real capacity to provide decent lives for our people.
Stop Debating on Their Turf
The evidence is overwhelming. The American economic system is no longer failing by accident; it is succeeding at its new design: concentrating wealth and power for the few while dismantling the foundations of a dignified life for the many.
This is the rot beneath the floorboards of our democracy. This is the economic carnage that fuels the political chaos. January 6th, Minnesota, Kirk, Pelosi...
Trump’s election victories were outlandish. They were the predictable consequences of telling a drowning country that it's not even wet. When you gaslight people about their own lives for long enough, they will eventually burn the whole thing down. Blame anyone they can find—an immigrant from Guatemala, some trans kid, whomever—because the people who actually robbed us live in walled-off communities or a yacht in the Mediterranean. We're not running into them at the grocery store.
We have a choice. We can keep pretending. We can keep tweaking the machine that's grinding us into dust. Or we can admit the truth. The experiment failed. The system is broken. It's time to build something new.
We have a choice. We can keep pretending. We can keep tweaking the machine that's grinding us into dust. Or we can admit the truth. The experiment failed. The system is broken. It's time to build something new. An economy where we build things again. An economy where one job is enough to raise a family. An economy where the goal is the prosperity of our people, not the fiction of our spreadsheets.
We did this before, from 1933 to 1975. We can do it again. But first, we gotta stop lying about where we are and how we got here.
Our eyes aren’t lying to us. The spreadsheets are.
Help spread a shared reality. Share this. Post it on social media. Restack it. Forward it. And comment on the thoughts below.
Did any of these numbers or comparisons surprise you? Which ones stood out most? If you were explaining this to a friend, which example would you start with? What’s the best way to show people that the system is failing us—not that we’re failing as individuals? If you could put just one chart, story, or fact on a billboard in your town, what would it be?
For the economists reading this: The data supporting these claims comes from Carter C. Price's extension of the RAND wage divergence study (WR-A516-2, 2025), Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts (WFRBST01134), Census Historical Income Tables (P-60 series), NCES Digest of Education Statistics, BLS Consumer Expenditure Surveys via FRED (CXUTRANSLB0101M), CDC National Vital Statistics Reports, Commonwealth Fund maternal mortality analyses, NAEP Reading Assessment data, and Chetty et al.'s work on intergenerational mobility (Science, 2017). The productivity-compensation gap documented by EPI, the PCE deflator biases analyzed by the Boskin Commission, and the hedonic adjustment critiques from Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi all support the core thesis: our measurement systems systematically obscure declining affordability and eroding living standards for the bottom 90% of Americans.
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Progressives Launch 'Tax the Greedy Billionaires' Coalition to Counter Trump-GOP Agenda
"Enough with the attacks on working people in order to fund billionaire tax cuts," said Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas). "Tax the billionaires instead of funding the billionaires."
Feb 25, 2025
As House Republicans prepared to vote Tuesday on a budget blueprint that calls for ravaging Medicaid and other programs to help fund trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthy, progressive lawmakers joined community members and organizers outside of the U.S. Capitol to launch a new coalition demanding a radically different approach.
"Enough with the attacks on working people in order to fund billionaire tax cuts," Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said at a press conference. "Just tax the billionaires instead of funding the billionaires."
Speakers at Tuesday's event cast the "Tax the Greedy Billionaires" coalition—which includes People's Action, MoveOn, and other advocacy groups—as a direct challenge to President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans' legislative agenda, particularly the push for $4.5 trillion tax cuts primarily for the wealthiest Americans, financed by deep cuts to Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other key programs.
"The Republican plan is about making government more efficient for big corporations and billionaires who are screwing us over," said Casar. "We don't need to cut Social Security; we can expand it. We don't need to cut people's healthcare; we can expand it. We can have a country that is better off for small businesses and workers alike."
LIVE: The Congressional Progressive Caucus Holds Tax the Greedy Billionaires Press Conference https://t.co/ZCKGk61r1a
— Congressman Greg Casar (@RepCasar) February 25, 2025
The press conference included remarks from organizers who warned the House GOP's proposed $880 billion Medicaid cuts over the next 10 years would have devastating—and potentially deadly—impacts on their communities.
"Medicaid afforded me the opportunity to get on life-saving medication," said Elissa Tierney, co-founder of an organization that helps people negatively impacted by substance addiction. "I am asking, begging: Please protect these programs."
"If your vote is going to result in someone dying or losing their home," Tierney added, "vote no."
A full House vote on the budget blueprint, which Trump has endorsed, could come as soon as Tuesday evening, though there could be delays caused by divisions in the narrow Republican majority as GOP lawmakers face mounting constituent backlash in their home districts.
Politico noted Tuesday that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) "faces some bleak arithmetic: No Democrats are expected to back the budget plan, and if all members are present and voting, he can lose only one Republican and still approve it."
"Do not take your eye off the ball—and the ball is always the money."
In a letter to members of Congress on Tuesday, the new coalition urged lawmakers not to "slash programs that working families depend on."
"Tax the greedy billionaires now," the letter adds. "The American Dream is dying in a system where unlimited wealth for the few destroys opportunity for all."
Last month, according to an analysis unveiled Monday, the world's billionaires saw their collective wealth surge by $314 billion—roughly $10 billion per day.
The GOP's proposed extension of expiring provisions of their 2017 tax law would be a major boon to billionaires in the United States, who saw their wealth skyrocket in the years following the law's enactment.
"Republicans are not thinking about regular people ever," Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) said at Tuesday's press conference. "It's about who's at the top who we can give more money to while the rest of us are scrapping around for every little bit that we can get. It's not right."
"Do not take your eye off the ball—and the ball is always the money," Balint added. "Who has the money, who's getting the money, and how are the rest of us being screwed."
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If Joe Biden Doesn't Intervene to Stop Mass Layoffs at John Deere, Who Will?
The president should let Deere know that they can’t continue to receive taxpayer money if they ship taxpayer-funded jobs to Mexico.
Jun 12, 2024
The greed of the John Deere company is giving President Biden the perfect opportunity to win back working-class voters. All he needs to do is put up a major fight to stop Deere from shipping U.S. jobs to Mexico.
Really, the company should be renamed “Greed R Us.” Amid layoffs totaling approximately 1,000 U.S. workers in Illinois and Iowa, the company has posted $10 billion in profits in the 2023 fiscal year and paid its CEO $26.7 million.
But the real motivation for Deere to can workers and flee to Mexico is to finance $12.2 billion in stock buybacks. What are stock buybacks? A way to boost the price of the company’s shares—a blatant form of stock manipulation that was illegal until deregulated by the Reagan Administration.
Come on Joe, go to bat for these workers.
Stock buybacks are a quick and easy way to shovel corporate money straight into the pockets of the company's largest shareholders, mostly hedge funds and other Wall Street entities, and to the top officers who receive most of their compensation in stock incentives. When the company rushes into the market and buys back its shares—as listed below—ka ching! The stock price goes up and the biggest shareholders get richer and richer. But it takes a lot of U.S. layoffs to pay for these buybacks over the last two years alone:
- April 30, 2024: $1.1 billion
- January 31, 2024: $1.3 billion
- October 31, 2023: $2.6 billion
- July 31, 2023: $2.1 billion
- April 30, 2023: $1.3 billion
- January 31, 2023: $1.3 billion
- October 31, 2022: $1.2 billion
- July 31, 2022: $1.3 billion
- Total: $12.2 billion
It’s time for Biden to take a page from the Trump playbook. Trump stopped the Carrier Air Conditioning company from moving to Mexico in 2017. Polling shows that Trump’s effort was extremely popular. Even a third of those who voted for Hillary Clinton had a more favorable view of Trump after he pressured Carrier to keep 800 jobs in Indiana.
Why did Carrier give in? As its president said, “I was born at night but it wasn’t last night. I also know that about 10 percent of our revenue comes from the U.S. government.”
If they want to lay off workers, it must be voluntary. The company should offer pay and benefit packages so that workers agree to leave. Clearly, Deere has more than enough money, given what they're pumping out in stock buybacks.
John Deere also gets considerable revenue from Federal contracts. Its website boasts, “John Deere manufactures every kind of power generating, land moving, base building, grass cutting, people transporting equipment you can imagine through AFNAF, DLA and GSA contracts.”
Biden should let Deere know that they can’t continue to receive taxpayer money if they ship taxpayer-funded jobs to Mexico. He might even threaten to use the Defense Production Act to prevent the move. He should pressure them to accept a “no compulsory layoff” agreement. If they want to lay off workers, it must be voluntary. The company should offer pay and benefit packages so that workers agree to leave. Clearly, Deere has more than enough money, given what they're pumping out in stock buybacks.
Come on Joe, go to bat for these workers. Put the heat on John Deere and show the working class that you’re tougher than Trump when it comes to saving American jobs.
Your election and the future of our democracy may depend upon it.
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His Lips to God's Ears: Tired of Winning
"Donald Trump realizes that recent financial judgments against him are losses, not wins. But, like a desperate gambler, he plays on, believing that delays in future judgments will win him the presidency again."
Mar 31, 2024
Back when many in the media found it unthinkable that Donald Trump would win the U.S. presidency, he told a cheering crowd of thousands that he and they would win so much they'd "get tired of winning."
It's happening in front of our eyes. Dull, fat, exhausted, and confused, Trump is the embodiment of his prediction. He's tired of winning.
But he can't stop playing. He realizes that recent financial judgments against him are losses, not wins. But, like a desperate gambler, he plays on, believing that delays in future judgments will win him the presidency again. And by dictatorial fiat, he will make all charges disappear.
I kept People magazine's Decade In Review from the 80s. My children were born then, so it was history. Donald Trump is on the cover, and the movie Wall Street is quoted - "Greed is good!" That became the battle cry of a new generation of business leaders who defied old moral norms. Winning was no longer everything but the only thing, to quote UCLA coach Red Saunders (later attributed to Vince Lombard.) Restraint was weakness. Unbridled ambition was rewarded and revered.
Forty years on, Bernie Sander's disgusted "Enough is enough!" answered that excess and became so popular it resonates, still, across our political divide. But in 2016, it was Trump who won the White House - not Bernie and not Hilary, despite winning two million more popular votes. It was a bitter spectacle for many of us to see "Greed is good!" become the organizing principle of our country's policies, foreign and domestic, overt and covert. It was, and is, testament to the spell of TV celebrity that so many Americans, frightened by changes that seem beyond our control - mass migration, climate catastrophe, vanishing wealth, toxic pollution in our neighborhoods, sexual changes in the new generation – believed that a fabulously wealthy white man could restore their supremacy under the old order. Trump clothed himself in that belief and added to it a promise of national religious salvation, invoking a Bible he can't even quote. But believers believed in his belief, and trusted a biblically righteous president to stop climate change, end the emergent changes in the biological binary order, and end what Catholic AM radio host Mother Angelica daily decried to listeners as "the Holocaust of abortion."
Following Mitch McConnell's refusal to allow Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice, Trump obediently filled the empty positions with judges who reliably overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump was proven godly, as was the GOP. His personal promiscuity and dishonesty were also proof: God can do good with the most flawed of human beings. Trump's persistent ubiquity in the media marketplace makes him seem a kind of secular saint, an immortal in the pantheon of our celebrity-worshipping culture. The marketplace can't resist Trump. He sells. He's a long-running soap opera, an adrenalin rush. Here I am writing about him, though I've resisted doing so for a long time. Because, in fact, I'd really rather ignore him.
But I can't. Because he and his followers are now devoted to replacing our country's imperfect democracy with a repressive dictatorship that would outlast him and require great suffering to dislodge.
The tragic irony now seems to be that the only person with a direct connection to Trump who can stop Trump is Trump. While the American people voting in overwhelming numbers may yet rise up to stop his self-described winning streak, even his wife appears to have little power in their partnership. She warned us sartorially, long ago, that she really doesn't care. She may care more, now that the money that keeps her comfortable - and her son safe – dwindles. I remember the sad spectacle, during the 2016 campaign, of a nude photo from her past. It was unearthed supposedly to show us a norm that would be violated by a Trump presidency. For me, it served primarily as an unpleasant but telling glimpse into her rationale for becoming the third Mrs. Trump. Surely marriage to a wealthy and powerful man was security against ever having to be exploited – including by herself, in desperation – again. To me, her First Lady photos of public reverence show how deeply she aspired to being a Madonna, a faithful wife and loving mother. Donald Trump provided that. Whatever consequences she faces now, of having married him, he first appeared to her as a savior.
Wishing this man would go away – as many of us, Republican and Democrat, do – inspires deeply uncomfortable and ghoulish thinking. And perilous: we instinctively know that wishing harm on another is poisonous, and brings harm to us. One of the most painful things about the spectacle of Trump's exhaustion, and his followers' gradual disillusionment, or furious denial, is the effort it takes to obey the moral imperative of not wishing him ill. He spreads his exhaustion like a pandemic.
I am aware that many religious Americans believe a God-fearing dictator could better secure our nation's future than a president obeying the Constitutional oath to protect religious freedom and preserve equal rights. They think a president serving a dogmatic, Omnipotent Deity would attract that Deity's help in eradicating our national problems. If this required reward and punishment, so be it. The dictator could do, to whomever did not get in line, "whatever the hell they want."
To the religiously fearful, I would point out the godly government, including Christian ones, are dangerous. Hitler was a Catholic but saw no problem with genocide. In fact, his religious views may have sanctified his resolve to kill Jews, homosexuals, and their sympathizers. The Rwandan massacre saw Christian neighbors, friends, and relatives commit mass-murder on one another, due to tribal hatred fomented for years by popular radio hosts. In Uganda and the Congo, the Lord's Resistance Army employed rape, torture, murder, and child soldiers forcibly recruited to commit atrocities, all towards the stated goal of establishing the Ten Commandments as the supreme law of the land. Stalin was an atheist, but Putin isn't. Yet his publicly observed Russian Orthodox Christianity seems no obstacle to poisoning, impoverishing, imprisoning, starving, and killing political opponents. In Ukraine, his Russian soldiers kill Ukrainian ones who bear the image of Jesus' mother, Mary, on their uniforms. Which nation is the Christian God's favorite?
Jesuit priest Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboys Industries, the most successful gang recovery program in the world, bases his work in the inclusive and unconditional love taught by Jesus of Nazareth. If your God inspires to you to fear, dominate, hate or kill, Boyle writes, you've got the "wrong God."
Realizing that one may have "the wrong God" is usually something that takes place in private conscience or an affirming community. But when your God wants you to kill, torture, impoverish, and imprison your fellow human beings, "wrong God" must be publicly pointed out. And, in a democracy, voted down.
I believe in a God of mercy. Could it be that mercy is allowing Trump to be proven right, by his own prediction? And that exhaustion might show him how so much winning missed the mark?
I do not envy him his remorse for the sorrow he sowed for the nation and his family. The cosmic circumstances of anyone's birth are a mystery, and Donald Trump's father was, by all accounts, terrifying. Donald seemed to want to be different: more charming, more generous, more loved than feared. But he succumbed to "Greed is good," and winning to vanquish his demons. To stay on top, he had to reward and punish. And he did, with mercurial approval and disdain stemming from a chaotic refusal to self-examine. His children's various mothers, except for Barron's, are invisible. Ivana is six feet under the Bedminster golf course, a source of much mirth from our late night wags. To me it is sad blasphemy in a world where even the poorest of the poor generally seek reverence for their loved ones' earthly remains.
Tired of winning: his lips to God's ears.
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Tonight, Biden Must Vow to Go Even Further to Combat Corporate Greed
Instead of telling Americans the economy is great — which many won’t believe — he must tell them the truth: that most of the economic gains haven’t been felt by average working people because the gains have been going to the top.
Mar 07, 2024
President Biden is addressing the country tonight in his State of the Union address. Here’s some free advice about what he should say about the economy — which is the issue most voters care most about.
Instead of telling Americans the economy is great — which many won’t believe — he must tell them the truth: that most of the economic gains haven’t been felt by average working people because the gains have been going to the top.
Biden should denounce the greed and political corruption that have caused this.
He should explain that the biggest change in America over the last four decades — lurking behind the insecurities and resentments of many working people — has nothing to do with “wokeness,” immigration, critical race theory, transgender kids, the “deep state,” or any other Republican boogeymen.
It’s been a huge upward shift in the distribution of income and wealth.
The nation’s economy has seen massive gains, but the income and wealth of the bottom 80 percent of America have barely budged while the income and wealth of the richest Americans have exploded.
This change didn’t happen because of the so-called “invisible hand” of the free market.
The nation’s economy has seen massive gains, but the income and wealth of the bottom 80 percent of America have barely budged while the income and wealth of the richest Americans have exploded.
It happened because of policy decisions pushed by the monied interests — decisions that deregulated Wall Street, allowed corporations to bash unions and monopolize their industries, opened the American economy to Chinese imports, let pharmaceutical companies charge exorbitant prices, cut taxes on the rich and bailed out the biggest banks while saddling working people with student debt and medical debt.
In Biden’s first term he reversed much of this. He negotiated lower drug prices, funded infrastructure that will create good jobs, forgave some student debt, attacked monopolies, and protected workers’ rights to organize. He even walked a picket line.
But Biden needs to tell Americans that in his second term, he’ll go even further.
Mr. President, tell us:
You’ll stop CEOs from raking in a record-breaking 350 times the pay of average workers. You’ll support legislation linking the rate of taxes a corporation pays to the ratio of its CEO pay to average worker pay.
You’ll enforce the antitrust laws against grocery chains and food processors that have kept food prices high.
You’ll make it illegal for hedge fund and private equity managers to buy up houses to drive up rents when average Americans can barely afford to keep a roof over their heads.
You’ll stop big banks and credit card companies from adding junk fees and charging usurious interest payments approaching 30 percent.
You’ll prevent monopolies like Amazon from hurting small businesses and firing their workers for unionizing.
You’ll raise taxes on the rich and lower them on average working Americans.
You’ll end corporate welfare — the special tax loopholes, bank bailouts, unconditional subsidies, loan guarantees, and no-bid contracts that have lined the pockets of the wealthy.
And you’ll stop big corporations from pouring money into politics to keep the corporate welfare flowing. You’ll get big money out of politics with legislation that prevents federal contractors (20 percent of big companies) from making political contributions.
And you’ll appoint Supreme Court justices who know the difference between money and speech, between corporations and people.
Let Republicans criticize corporate “wokeness.” You’re taking on corporate greed.
Let Republicans obsess about critical race theory and abortion. You’ll protect the freedom of speech of Americans, and their freedom to decide when and whether to have children.
Let Republicans rail against transgender kids. You’re focusing on how obscenely unfair and unequal America has become.
Let Republicans try to divide Americans into warring factions so we don’t look upward and see where the wealth and power have really gone. You’ll pull us together to get that wealth and power back for the people.
You wouldn’t be the first Democratic president to do something like this. On the eve of his 1936 reelection, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the American people that in his first term of office:We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
FDR won by a landslide.
Give ’em hell, Joe.
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'Shameless Greed': Pharma Giant Merck Sues to Kill Medicare Drug Price Negotiations
"This lawsuit is a desperate attempt by the industry to beat back popular legislation that would curtail Big Pharma's ability to price gouge Medicare," said one consumer advocate.
Jun 06, 2023
Merck on Tuesday became the first pharmaceutical company to sue the Biden administration over a recently enacted law that empowers Medicare to directly negotiate the prices of a small number of high-cost prescription medicines with drug makers—a change that could threaten Merck's bottom line.
Filed in a federal court in Washington, D.C., Merck's lawsuit characterizes the drug price negotiation policy established by the Inflation Reduction Act as "tantamount to extortion" and claims the "singular purpose of this scheme is for Medicare to obtain prescription drugs without paying fair market value."
The lawsuit against the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) also alleges that the drug price negotiations make "a mockery of the First Amendment" by "conscripting companies to legitimize government extortion."
The suit asks the court to "declare that the program effects compensable takings under the Fifth Amendment, and enjoin its compelled 'agreements' under the First Amendment."
Patient advocates and lawmakers responded with disdain to Merck's lawsuit, which likely won't be the last from an industry that fights aggressively to maintain its power to drive up prices at will. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data last week showing that more than 9 million Americans are delaying medication refills, skipping doses, and taking smaller dosages than prescribed due to high costs.
"Merck is doing everything it can to protect its profits at the expense of patients who need their prescriptions to stay healthy and get treatment for everything from cancer to diabetes," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a senior member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. "While big drug companies may not want to be at the negotiating table, the American people are sick and tired of giant pharmaceutical corporations putting their executives' paychecks above patients."
Keytruda, Merck's cancer drug, carries an annual list price of $175,000, and the U.S. government has spent billions helping patients cover the cost of the medicine in recent years.
"Merck is claiming the U.S. Constitution requires the U.S. government and people to be suckers. That's not true," Robert Weissman, president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement Tuesday. "This lawsuit is a desperate attempt by the industry to beat back popular legislation that would curtail Big Pharma's ability to price gouge Medicare and secure monopoly profits. Full stop."
"While Big Pharma's litigation gambit plays out, it is critical that the federal government continue its preparation for price negotiations," Weissman added. "Delay in the commencement of long-overdue negotiations will result in billions of dollars in excess costs for taxpayers and consumers."
"No one needs to read Merck's fancy lawyer talk or PR spin to know what this is all about—it is about them wanting to continue to fleece taxpayers and gouging seniors."
In September, CMS is expected to release a list of the first 10 Medicare Part D drugs that will be subject to direct price negotiations. Manufacturers of the selected drugs will then have until the following month to sign an agreement to conduct negotiations, and the agreed-upon prices will take effect in 2026.
Dozens of additional prescription drugs covered by Part D or Part B will be subject to price negotiations in the years following 2026. Though the prices of just a small number of drugs will be negotiated under the Inflation Reduction Act provisions, the policy could have a significant impact given that a sliver of medicines accounts for a large percentage of Medicare's prescription drug spending.
The Congressional Budget Office concluded earlier this year that "price negotiation will lower average drug prices in Medicare and will reduce the budget deficit by $25 billion in 2031."
As The New York Times noted Tuesday, Merck's Keytruda "could be among the first products targeted when negotiations begin in 2028 on drugs administered in a healthcare setting."
"Merck had been expecting to bring in significant revenue from a new formulation of Keytruda it is developing that can be more easily given under the skin," the Times reported. "That could be subject to negotiation, too, under the government's plans for the program."
Margarida Jorge, head of the Lower Drug Prices Now campaign, said Tuesday that Merck's lawsuit is "nothing but a political stunt motivated by the same shameless greed that we're used to seeing from drug corporations that have made decades of inflated profits at the expense of patients' health and taxpayers' hard-earned money."
"No one needs to read Merck's fancy lawyer talk or PR spin to know what this is all about—it is about them wanting to continue to fleece taxpayers and gouging seniors so they can keep sky-high profits and soaring executive pay," said Jorge. "It's time for big drug corporations like Merck to give up their monopoly control over prices and negotiate fair prices for the medicines we need."
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Regulate Their Greed or Pay the Price
As philosophers from Socrates to Jesus to Adam Smith have told us over and over: unregulated greed always ends up enriching the few while devastating the rest of society.
Mar 13, 2023
The failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) shows us, once again, that unrestrained greed isn’t good. For even modest greed to have a positive effect in society, it must be regulated.
The CEO of SVB didn’t like the regulations imposed after the 2008 financial meltdown by Congress’ Dodd-Frank legislation, and spent over a half-million dollars bribing…er, influencing…legislators (legalized by 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court) to change the law and exempt his and other smaller, regional banks from what he argued was the heavy hand of government.
While SVB and other smaller banks were generally prosperous and profitable, many wanted to escape from the regulations Congress imposed to protect both depositors and the economy, so they spread some money around Washington DC. Donald Trump then enthusiastically signed the deregulation of smaller banks like SVB into law in 2018.
As Senator Bernie Sanders noted this weekend:
“Let's be clear. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed. Five years ago, the Republican Director of the Congressional Budget Office released a report finding that this legislation would increase the likelihood that a large financial firm with assets of between $100 billion and $250 billion would fail.”
Five years later — predictably — the bank went into receivership and people who’d put their money in its trust were looking at substantial losses while, once again, confidence in the entire system is shaken.
At New York’s First Republic Bank, people were standing in line as the weekend began, suggesting there may be a full-blown run on that bank today. And New York’s Signature Bank was just closed by banking regulators.
The CEO of SVB had pulled millions out just two weeks before, money that Congressman Ro Khanna says should be clawed back and used to make depositors whole:
“There should be a clawback of any of that money,” Khanna told The Washington Post. “It should be going to the depositors.”
Politicians and op-ed writers tight with banksters spent the weekend, of course, demanding government action and bailouts, like in 1987 and 2008. And this morning, President Biden announced he’s going to do it by bending the rules at FDIC. Frankly, he had little choice.
The CEO’s greed didn’t work out well for average taxpayers — who ultimately must backstop the FDIC if this spreads — and bank customers.
These same banksters are the first types of people to tell student loan borrowers that if they can’t repay their debts they need “discipline,” to suck it up, reduce their standard of living, and to “learn the lesson of responsibility.”
But when their own stupid decisions — in this case, investing in largely illiquid long-term bonds — come back to haunt them, they stand before Congress with their hands out.
The era from the 1850s through the 1920s was punctuated by periodic greed-driven bank failures and a lack of federal response to them. One of the biggest of those crashes presaged — some scholars argue, triggered — the Civil War.
Before running for public office Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer in private practice working for the railroads. On August 12, 1857, he was paid $4800 in a check, which he deposited and then converted to cash on August 31. That was fortunate for Lincoln, because just over a month later, in the Great Panic of October 1857, both the bank and the railroad were “forced to suspend payment.”
Of the 66 banks in Illinois, The Central Illinois Gazette (Champagne) reported that by the following April, 27 of them had gone into liquidation. It was a depression so vast that the Chicago Democratic Press declared at its start, the week of Sept. 30, 1857, “The financial pressure now prevailing in the country has no parallel in our business history.”
Unregulated greed wasn’t good back then, either: over 600,000 people died in the Civil War that bank crash contributed to.
Fast forward sixty years.
During the 1920s, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), “On average, more than 600 banks failed each year between 1921 and 1929.” In the process, billions of dollars were lost to depositors, mostly farmers, working people, and small businesses who’d been locked out of the big banks and didn’t have the resources to lobby Congress.
To make matters worse, because the Republican administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover all believed bank regulation was a bad thing that interfered with the greed-driven “invisible hand of the marketplace,” each allowed the trend to continue until the entire system collapsed in the 1929-1933 era.
That was another era, almost 100 years before ours, that proved how unregulated greed could damage our nation and create widespread misery (except among the greedy).
In January and February of 1932, respectively, Congress created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) and the Glass-Steagall Act, regulating banks to prevent their rich owners from continuing to steal depositors’ cash and then walk away from the banks they’d plundered.
President Franklin Roosevelt, who took office in March of 1933, imposed further stiff regulations on banks and Wall Street, creating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and putting Joe Kennedy in charge of it.
The late Gloria Swanson, who knew Kennedy well and intensely disliked him (he’d robbed and exploited her), told me over one of our many dinners in her New York apartment back in the 1980s that FDR told her he’d appointed Kennedy because, “It takes a crook to catch a crook.”
And FDR was going after the greedy crooks in a big way.
Between Glass-Steagal and the SEC, banking became a boring if reliably profitable business from the 1930s to the 1980s.
The nation prospered. The middle class grew. The banksters’ greed was hemmed in by FDR’s regulations, then kept there through the administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, and Carter. Bank directors and executives did well, but few were buying their own private jets.
Then, President Reagan, as part of his neoliberal “greed is good” agenda, experimented with bank deregulation by lifting many rules governing the operation of Savings and Loan institutions.
They’d been created in 1932 with the Federal Home Loan Act, which heavily regulated the industry and made it functionally subordinate to commercial banks.
But in 1982, Reagan pushed through the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, eliminating previous S&L loan-to-value ratios and interest rate caps while killing their main oversight, Regulation Q.
Soon S&Ls were gambling with junk bonds and risky commercial real estate, leading over 1000 of them (almost a third of all S&Ls in the nation) to crash and burn.
Their greedy CEOs and senior executives made off with billions, leaving depositors in the lurch and the Federal government to clean up the mess. Once again, deregulating greed ended up costing the nation hundreds of billions while making a small group of S&L hustlers richer than the pharaohs.
In 1999, Republicans and a few neoliberal Democrats took another run at deregulating banks themselves, spurred into action by a pile of campaign cash made legal by Republicans on the Supreme Court when Lewis Powell wrote the 1978 opinion in First National Bank v Bellotti, writing explicitly that corporations were “persons” entitled to use their “First Amendment-protected free speech” (money) to influence politicians.
Deregulation would both increase bank profits while keeping the banking sector safe, we were told that year, because no banker or stockbroker in his right mind would risk being “embarrassed” by taking such big chances that a misstep could wipe out large sectors of the nation’s economy.
Greed, they told us, was self-regulating. Predictably, it didn’t quite work out that way.
Republican Senator Phil Gramm made that “self-regulating” point on the floor of the Senate in 1999 when selling the end of the 1933 Glass-Steagall law that prevented checkbook banks from using their depositors’ money to gamble in the stock, bond, and real estate markets.
Bought-off legislators fattened their campaign coffers while banksters started gambling and became billionaires. And, of course, it led us straight to the Bush Crash of 2008 when the entire system seized up and you and I bailed out Wall Street with trillions of dollars, hundreds of billions of which the banksters simply pocketed for themselves and their big business buddies as loans and massive bonuses.
Greed paid off for them, although you and I are still paying for it with our taxes via the national debt.
As with so many things, a kernel of truth — in this case about greed and self-interest — has been twisted into a gamed and rigged system by the morbidly rich. They’re quick to quote from the first chapter of Adam Smith’s 1776 classic The Wealth of Nations:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.”
While true, advocates of deregulation completely ignore its corollary, expressed in the second chapter of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he argues:
“Man is considered as moral because he is regarded as an accountable being. But an accountable being, as the word expresses, is a being that must give an account of its actions to some other, and that consequently must regulate them according to the good liking of this other.”
When Senators Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) pushed their 2018 Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, dubbed by Elizabeth Warren and others as the Bank Lobbyist Act, many argued it would lead to more bank consolidations (it did) and let smaller banks like SVB take risks that could endanger depositors (they did).
Senator Warren noted on Twitter at the time:
“The #BankLobbyistAct takes 25 of the 40 biggest banks in the country off the watch list for more federal oversight. It weakens consumer protections on mortgages — and makes it harder to fight racial discrimination in housing,” adding that the legislation would “be paving the way for the next big crash.”
Unregulated greed, she predicted, would lead to disastrous outcomes.
And here we are. Whether the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) will spark a wider contagion or just be a two-week story illustrating the stupidity of deregulating and trusting billionaire banksters to do the right thing is, as yet, unknown.
But the principle is known. When money, power, or political advantage are at stake, a small number of unscrupulous (sometimes called “sociopathic”) individuals will say or do any and everything they can to game the system for themselves to keep everybody else out.
It may be selling opioids that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans; or poisoning children’s metabolisms with processed, plastic-packaged, forever-chemical-laced “food” that leads to cancer, obesity, and diabetes; or pushing cigarettes or opposing wind and solar farms. There’s always somebody willing to sell their soul for the right price, and somebody else who can afford to pay that price.
We’ve all seen greed working in real time. My father was killed — knowingly — by the asbestos industry and my brother was killed with full knowledge and intention by the tobacco industry. If there’s not such a similar story in your life, you’re an outlier.
And what we all experience on a personal level is amplified a million times when a single greedy person seizes the power to help or destroy millions of lives, like the CEO of a giant employer that is fighting unionization, safety, or environmental regulation.
Often, these are the most high-functioning and well-educated/well-connected sociopaths among us…and the good ones (as in those “good” enough to make billions but only pay 3% income tax) are particularly successful at selling their own personalities: this is the compounding overlay of narcissism.
Donald Trump is its poster child.
Can we stop the sociopaths, the greed-heads, from continuing their destruction of our food supply, our housing stock, and our environment/climate?
It’s a fight, but the greed side literally can mobilize trillions, if necessary. Still, the human and intrinsic love of democracy and fairness mean the outcome is, at this moment, up in the air.
What we do know, however — as philosophers from Socrates to Jesus to Adam Smith have told us over and over — is that unregulated greed always ends up enriching the few while devastating the rest of society.
And, as we learned from the Iroquois and I write about in my next book, The Hidden History of American Democracy, working on behalf of and protecting society from greedy predators should be the first job of every government.
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How Concentrated Wealth and Corporate Power Nurtures the Greed of Thieves
Larceny from our corporate world’s most “respected” chief execs supplies the con artists among us with rationalizations for their own scamming behaviors.
Jan 28, 2023
What makes for a thieving culture? An overabundance of pickpockets? Tsunamis of burglary and shoplifting?
Most definitely not. To truly gauge a society’s larcenous leanings, many of us would posit, we need to look beyond the nimble-fingered and focus more on the smooth-talkers, the power-suited flimflammers who thrive in any society where significant numbers of people feel a driving need to get rich quick.
The most recent example? Federal prosecutors last month charged the crypto currency CEO phenom Sam Bankman-Fried with committing “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” The 30-year-old billionaire, the Securities and Exchange Commission charges in a separate filing, built an immense financial empire on a “house of cards.”
The executive now trying to pick up those cards — the new CEO of Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency exchange — says his predecessor simply engaged in “old-fashioned embezzlement,” not even stopping to bother with the “highly sophisticated” thieving of Enron’s fabled executive crooks a generation ago.
Right before Bankman-Fried’s brief appearance on America’s economic stage, the nation’s face of fraud belonged to Elizabeth Holmes, the founding CEO of the health-tech company Theranos.
Holmes raised some $900 million from a “star-studded” list of investors who ranged from media mogul Rupert Murdock to Henry Kissinger. Early in 2021, a federal jury convicted her of various frauds in what the Washington Post called “the most high-profile test of whether Silicon Valley’s “fake it until you make it” ethos could withstand legal scrutiny.”
The hustles of our Bankman-Frieds and Elizabeth Holmeses can certainly make for entertaining reading. But Freya Berry, a veteran corporate fraud investigator, sees their scams “as not as unusual as you might think” — and not as entertaining either. With “rewards high” and “penalties higher,” she notes, corporate miscreants “go to great pains to conceal” their nefarious ways, even “making death threats to whistleblowers.”
We need these whistleblowers. We also need to understand that our thieving culture rests on more than the outright larceny of our indicted corporate crooks. Our most accomplished corporate thieves, in fact, never fear indictment. They steal in broad daylight. They regularly steal livelihoods — from the thousands upon thousands of men and women who’ve worked ever so diligently, sometimes for many years, to make them fabulously rich.
We’re now living through an intense stretch of this theft. Tech’s top execs are now laying off workers at a fearsome rate. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced plans to pink-slip some 10,000 workers. Amazon is cutting 18,000, Google parent Alphabet 12,000, IBM nearly 4,000. Overall, estimates Forbes, tech firms have so far this month alone given the heave-ho to 56,000 employees.
What makes these layoffs “thefts”? Simple avarice. Investors on Wall Street “expected more growth,” explains Grid economics analyst Matthew Zeitlin, than Big Tech companies “are currently showing.” That has Big Tech share prices sinking, “and any time share prices fall, investors and executives get antsy — and workers often pay the price.”
Meanwhile, the antsy CEOs slashing all these jobs are continuing to stuff dollars into their own personal pockets, at overall pay rates that rarely dare drop below a quarter-million dollars a week.
This past October, Microsoft disclosed that chief exec Satya Nadella’s annual compensation had jumped 10.2 percent to just under $55 million. Nadella now makes more in one year than the typical Microsoft employee can make in 289 years. Back in 2018, the typical Microsoft worker only had to labor 154 years to earn what the company’s CEO made in just one.
This past December brought news that Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai has a new three-year “performance” package that stands to award him $210 million.
Execs like these set a thieving tone for our entire society. Their grand fortunes don’t just make the rest of us feel ever poorer. They leave us ever more vulnerable to the con artists who promise shortcuts to jackpots.
And this larceny from our corporate world’s most “respected” chief execs supplies the con artists among us with rationalizations for their own scamming behaviors. The corporate big boys play their games, they tell themselves, we play ours.
Societies that let enormous wealth concentrate in the pockets of a few make all this inevitable. They nurture greed and grasping. They always have. They always will.
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Trump, Bankman-Fried, Musk: Monsters of American Capitalism
Absent any moral code, greed is a public danger. Its poison cannot be contained by laws or accepted norms.
Dec 26, 2022
If this past week presents any single lesson, it’s the social costs of greed. Capitalism is premised on greed but also on guardrails—laws and norms—that prevent greed from becoming so excessive that it threatens the system as a whole.
Yet the guardrails can’t hold when avarice becomes the defining trait of an era, as it is now. Laws and norms are no match for the possibility of raking in billions if you’re sufficiently ruthless and unprincipled.
Donald Trump’s tax returns, just made public, reveal that he took bogus deductions to reduce his tax liability all the way to zero in 2020. All told, he reported $60 million in losses during his presidency while continuing to pull in big money.
Every other president since Nixon has released his tax returns. Trump told America he couldn’t because he was in the middle of an IRS audit. But we now learn that the IRS never got around to auditing Trump during his first two years in office, despite being required to do so by a law dating back to Watergate, stating that “individual tax returns for the president and the vice president are subject to mandatory review.”
Of course, Trump is already synonymous with greed and the aggressive violation of laws and norms in pursuit of money and power. Worse yet, when a president of the United States exemplifies—even celebrates—these traits, they leach out into society like underground poison.
Meanwhile, this past week the S.E.C. accused Sam Bankman-Fried of illicitly using customer money from FTX from the beginning to fund his crypto empire.
From the start, contrary to what FTX investors and trading customers were told, Bankman-Fried, actively supported by Defendants, continually diverted FTX customer funds … and then used those funds to continue to grow his empire, using billions of dollars to make undisclosed private venture investments, political contributions, and real estate purchases.
If the charge sticks, it represents one of the largest frauds in American history. Until recently, Bankman-Fried was considered a capitalist hero whose philanthropy was a model for aspiring billionaires (he and his business partner also donated generously to politicians).
But like the IRS and Trump, the S.E.C. can’t possibly remedy the social costs that Bankman-Fried has unleashed — not just losses to customers and investors but a deepening distrust and cynicism about the system as a whole, the implicit assumption that this is just what billionaires do, that the way to make a fortune is to blatantly disregard norms and laws, and that only chumps are mindful of the common good.
Which brings us to Elon Musk, whose slash-and-burn maneuvers at Twitter might cause even the most rabid capitalist to wince. They also raise questions about Musk’s other endeavor, Tesla. Shares in the electric vehicle maker dropped by almost 9 percent on Thursday as analysts grew increasingly concerned about its fate. Not only is Musk neglecting the carmaker but he’s appropriating executive talent from Tesla to help him at Twitter. (Tesla stock is down over 64% year-to-date.)
Musk has never been overly concerned about laws and norms (you’ll recall that he kept Tesla’s factory in Freemont, California, going during the pandemic even when public health authorities refused him permission to do so, resulting in a surge of COVID infections among workers). For him, it’s all about imposing his gargantuan will on others.
Trump, Bankman-Fried, and Musk are the monsters of American capitalism—as much products of this public-be-damned era as they are contributors to it. For them, and for everyone who still regards them as heroes, there is no morality in business or economics. The winnings go to the most ruthless. Principles are for sissies.
But absent any moral code, greed is a public danger. Its poison cannot be contained by laws or accepted norms. Everyone is forced to guard against the next con (or else pull an even bigger con). Laws are broken whenever the gains from breaking them exceed the penalties (multiplied by the odds of getting caught). Social trust erodes.
Adam Smith, the so-called father of modern capitalism, never called himself an economist. He called himself a “moral philosopher,” engaged in discovering the characteristics of a good society. He thought his best book was not The Wealth of Nations, the bible of modern capitalist apologists, but the Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he argued that the ethical basis of society lies in compassion for other human beings.
Presumably Adam Smith would have bemoaned the growing inequalities, corruption, and cynicism spawned by modern capitalism and three of its prime exemplars—Trump, Bankman-Fried, and Musk.
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