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oligarchs
The ICE Barbarians Are at the Gates
They’re trying to convince all colors that resistance is futile, that Trump is all-powerful, and that a totalitarian government with him as its head is inevitable.
Feb 27, 2026
In early February, the barbarians reached my gate. There could be no more comfort or denial here on this island where I live. The masked thugs were roving through a town just across the water, a short ferry ride away, harassing and arresting long-time residents.
I was shocked, but not surprised. What do we do now? Yes, we all knew they were coming, still….
I was raised in the post-World War II “it can’t happen here” era. Hadn’t my parents’ generation crushed the Nazis for all time? While we’d been taught that democracy, like a faith or a marriage, did need tending, we had mostly taken it for granted. Yes, I did understand that life as I had lived it was under attack, but there was still, I thought, some time to respond.
The Republicans would come to their senses, right? They weren’t the Germans of a past era. The monster would sooner or later be brought down. And yes, he was bad, but he certainly wasn’t Hitler. And he looked so sickly. Eventually, the court system would kick in or the Epstein files would produce the Big Bang, whatever that might be. This was America, for God’s sake. We didn’t deserve to go down like this.
I also began to understand, however belatedly and somewhat sheepishly, what an enormous difference there was between my leftish friends and me and the mostly white men who now rule America with their cruel selfishness and moral disability.
Like most of my friends, I’d been thinking of little else for much too long and talking about it incessantly in a tone of wonder. Can you believe this shit? Yet living here on my island allowed me the destructive luxury of refusing to understand that we were all Minneapolitans, no matter where we were, even if our portfolios kept rising. Sure, we felt anxious and depressed, were wary of Trumpish neighbors, more generous donors to liberal causes, and active consumers of the media, but we were able to deflect the dangers, given our blind belief that being right was the best defense.
And I had an extra advantage: I was protected by a moat.
Shelter Island is a 28-square-mile town near the eastern end of New York’s Long Island in a region called the East End. It’s surrounded by water, but accessible by ferries from Greenport to the north and North Haven to the south. A third of the island is a protected nature conservancy. There are no street lights. The population in winter is around 3,000, which triples in the summer with tourists and second-home owners.
I’ve owned a home here for more than 30 years and lived here full-time for almost a decade, just about the right amount of time to appreciate the local mythology without entirely absorbing it—that Shelter Island is a quasi-independent republic, populated by rugged individualists who take care of their neighbors, especially seniors, through volunteer organizations (including a fire department and ambulance corps), while stoutly eschewing the glamorous greed of the nearby Hamptons.
It’s not been hard to feel above this country’s recent rush toward autocracy. Meanwhile, in recent decades, the island has been revising its sensibility in some progressive ways. For example, when I first arrived here in the 1980s, Shelter Island’s early history as a place of enslavement and provisioning for the slave trade was not a topic of polite conversation. Now, Sylvester Manor, once one of the earliest and northernmost slave plantations in this country, is internationally known for research and the preservation of slave remains and artifacts. It is also an integral local pillar through its educational farm.
The Pharmacy
It wasn’t until last year that I even realized just how vulnerable this island was to the whims of wealth and power. Yes, rich people routinely built houses and renovated hotels on the island that violated local zoning rules and they got away with it. But it wasn’t until one of our very own oligarchs casually betrayed our trust that I realized just how naïve we had been.
The Soloviev Group, one of the nation’s largest property owners, particularly of agricultural land, had bought a number of buildings on the island, including an iconic hotel, several stores, and the only pharmacy. Town officials mostly applauded the newcomers as “saviors.” Thanks to them, there would be an injection of money and jobs that would cover up the failures of those officials to come up with a comprehensive plan for taking care of Shelter Island, installing affordable housing, and protecting the water supply. They wouldn’t have to raise taxes, already low by regional standards.
“Shelter Island is like a womb,” said Stacey Soloviev, the ex-wife of Soloviev Group CEO Stefan Soloviev and the company’s cheery local face. “You feel very good when you come to Shelter Island.”
And for a while, the Solovievs did indeed go about their business on the island quietly feeling good without doing much good. Their parent corporation was busier. It tried and failed to build a gambling casino in midtown Manhattan. It negotiated with a nearby town to create a large residential development that would include a luxury spa. And then, out of the blue, in a stunning move with little notice, it suddenly shuttered the local hotel and closed the pharmacy, the only dispenser of medicine for a population that (like me) skewed elderly.
Like most Shelter Islanders, I was furious. As a board member of the town’s Senior Citizens Foundation, a support group for municipal senior services, I understood what an existential problem this could pose for people with limited mobility and resources, which just happens to be a large part of the population.
Us and Them
I also began to understand, however belatedly and somewhat sheepishly, what an enormous difference there was between my leftish friends and me and the mostly white men who now rule America with their cruel selfishness and moral disability. Our compassion, our tendency toward basic decency, our belief in fairness and equality were an enormous disadvantage in the battle against Trumpism, as was the faint shame so many of us felt for what seemed like a righteous posture, a sense of simply being better than those MAGA voters, handicapped as they were by manufactured fear and distinct inferiority complexes.
As for those super rich and intricately well-connected guys like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel, they were just more intellectually refined models of the genuine nightmare of our world, Donald Trump!
Sadly, of course, like so much else, it was even more complex than that. The rich guys were acting out of their best interests and were not even secretly ashamed, while the rural poor who had played such a role in getting us into this mess with their votes in 2016 and 2024 had not acted malevolently. They were flailing against a society that had ignored their needs.
And I was finally becoming truly woke myself.
As long as we stay in denial, in the bubble, clinging to the dream that goodness or Bad Bunny can save us, we are lost.
In late January, while I was still wallowing in rage at the closing of that pharmacy, a massive snowstorm hit the island. I was sitting in my warm house watching three Latino men wrestle with the foot of snow outside that held me hostage. I knew and liked them from past work, but I had no idea what their citizenship status was (or wasn’t), though I could imagine them becoming targets of the same sort of gang of thugs terrorizing Minneapolis and making sporadic forays into the East End. I assumed, of course, that I was safer than they were. But maybe that was only true for now. After all, out in Minneapolis, white American citizens were being executed—“cruel and unusual punishment”—for bearing witness to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Only a day before that Island snowstorm, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, had been gunned down in Minneapolis for observing and recording masked ICE agents too closely and trying to help a female protester they had assaulted. He should have known better. After all, two weeks earlier, poet and mother of three Renee Good had been killed for a similar “offense” in the same city.
The Vigil
A week later, on an 18°F night, we Shelter Islanders held a vigil in front of the community center.
Such a passive demonstration evokes both pathos and courage. It’s pathetic in the sense that nonviolence always seems weak in the face of blatant Trumpian-style aggression, however brave it may, in fact, be in its restraint and promise of commitment. In the long run, however, it is also the strategy most likely to succeed. The campaigns for civil rights and women’s rights provide the best historic lessons about that reality: Just keep coming out and ultimately the secret police and the criminal lunatic who sent them will get the message.
Because of that, I felt very proud that night of my 70-odd neighbors at the vigil, including the local Presbyterian pastor who read the names of the 32 people who had died in ICE custody last year. Most of them had Latino names, a grim reality which obscures for all too many whites the degree to which everybody remains in danger. I remembered that the killer thugs of 1964, the Ku Klux Klan, in their campaign to intimidate resistance and suppress Black voting, killed two young white men, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, along with their Black fellow civil rights activist, James Chaney. As then, it was the killing of whites that got national attention, the bad guys’ intent.
By the night of that vigil, the early tutorials about dealing with ICE—including reminding people of their right not to speak to agents or allow them to search their homes and cars without a judicial warrant—seemed almost quixotic. After all, President Trump’s belligerent rhetoric had clearly set the stage for them to disregard both our rights and court orders. More important now, according to an activist friend I called in Minneapolis, was organizing groups to lower the vulnerability of people who might otherwise be prime targets of “our” secret police—drive them to work sites, do their shopping, and act as their lookouts. The shrilling of warning whistles, he said, had become the soundtrack of resistance to the totalitarian goons.
Arrests at the Gate
As the media has shrunk from its responsibility to bear witness and inform (while also shrinking in size), the involvement of everyday people (who might not yet be directly affected by the crisis) becomes ever more critical—as is sending money to legal defense groups. That need became even more apparent to me one early weekday morning in early February when ICE raided a line of cars waiting at the North Ferry terminal in Greenport, New York to come to our island for their jobs. Three men were arrested, all long-time residents of the area, none with criminal records (other than alleged illegal entry from Mexico many years ago). One of them, Hugo Leonel Ardon Osorio, was on his way to work at Marcello Masonry on the island. My wife and I remembered him from the crew that had rebuilt our driveway several years ago.
The next week, the snows returned and so did the three men who had cleared it away the last time around. I was happy—and relieved—to see them again.
Make no mistake: The barbarians are still at the gates. The Shelter Island Town Board has been holding meetings to determine what to do if they come across the water and land on our island. Will our local police department cooperate with them in any way? Will ordinary citizens be restricted in their demonstrations? Will the school lock its doors to ICE? (On the day ICE breached that ferry line, a quarter of Greenport’s students stayed away from school.)
The barbarians are now coming for most of us. Their mission has extended well beyond deporting some brown-skinned people. They’re trying to convince all colors that resistance is futile, that Trump is all-powerful, and that a totalitarian government with him as its head is inevitable.
And as long as we stay in denial, in the bubble, clinging to the dream that goodness or Bad Bunny can save us, we are lost. I know that my whistle and enhanced wokeness won’t be anywhere near enough. And I don’t have a plan yet, other than to stay the course, fight despair, support the most vulnerable, and preach to the choir that they—that all of us—should hang tough.
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Pedal to the Metal on California's Billionaire Tax
I have no problem with hitting billionaires with a much higher tax bill than they now face. The deeper issue is how to prevent the creation of billionaires in the first place.
Jan 28, 2026
A coalition of unions and other progressive groups is trying to get an initiative on California’s ballot this fall which would impose a 5 percent tax on the wealth of the 200-250 billionaires living in the state. The tax would be retroactive, so it applies to billionaires who lived in the state as of January 1 of this year. The supporters estimate that it could raise $100 billion, almost 30 percent of the state’s annual budget, although the tax could be paid over five years.
Many people have asked me what I thought about the tax. I confess to originally being hesitant. I have no problem with hitting billionaires with a much higher tax bill than they now face. After all, they are the ones with the money.
The right likes to push the story that billionaires won’t have incentive to become ridiculously rich if we tax them more. I always found that absurd, but even taken seriously what would it mean? Will Elon Musk spend less money and effort bribing politicians to get government contracts and favorable regulatory treatment if we tax him too much?
But that aside, I do take seriously concerns about evasion and avoidance. Billionaires care a lot about their money, and they are prepared to go to great lengths to avoid having to surrender it to the government. There clearly is some point at which we get less tax revenue by raising rates, as a result of evasion and avoidance. And that point is lower at the state and local level than the national level, since it’s much easier for billionaires to move out of New York City or California than to leave the United States.
On this point, I was influenced by research by Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu showing that the state lost 60 percent of the revenue anticipated by California’s 2012 Proposition 30. This raised the marginal tax rate on people earning more than $1 million a year from 10.3 percent to 13.3 percent. This suggested to me that California was very close to this tipping point. (It got closer when Trump’s 2017 tax bill limited the deduction for state and local taxes on the federal taxes.)
Rauh works at the conservative Hoover Institute, so I naturally viewed the work with suspicion, but I could not see anything wrong with it. (If anyone can tell me where they messed up, I’m all ears.)
Anyhow, recognizing that avoidance and evasion are real, I have always been cautious about efforts to whack the rich with very large taxes. I am open to the California wealth tax because its structure seems to minimize this risk.
By making the date at which the wealth tax applies in the past, rich people cannot leave going forward. I was concerned about some billionaires fleeing when the tax was being discussed in the fall, and it seems some did, but at this point that’s water under the bridge.
To be clear, I’m absolutely certain that many of the people facing the tax will do everything they can to try to escape the tax, starting with defeating the initiative, and then tying it up in the courts as long as they can. With the ultimate decision likely to rest with the Republican Supreme Court, I’m not at all confident that the state will see the money, but we can’t preemptively surrender. At this point it seems worth going full speed ahead with the initiative.
The Longer Term: Let’s Not Have Billionaires
My bigger complaint with the effort to tax back some of the billionaires’ billions is that we should be more focused on not letting them be billionaires in the first place. There is an incredibly lazy view that we just have a market sitting there, which generates inequality, and then we need the government to step in to redistribute income.
More than a decade ago, Elizabeth Warren, who I greatly admire, did a viral video that was dubbed “you didn’t build that.” The gist of it was that the success of rich people depended on a social and physical infrastructure that was paid for by the whole of society, not just the hard work and ingenuity of the person who happened to get rich.
This is very true. To be profitable, a factory needs the roads and ports to bring their materials in and ship their finished product out. It also needs a skilled workforce to be both on the factory flaw and to handle business operations. No one can get rich by themselves.
Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Go Far Enough
But this is only part of the story. In addition to the physical and social infrastructure, we have a massive set of rules that determine who gets to keep the goodies. I keep harping on government-granted patent and copyright monopolies, both because there is a huge amount of money at stake (easily over $1 trillion a year or $8k per household) and because they so obviously could be different.
We can make these monopolies shorter and weaker, allowing their holders to profit much less from them. Also, we can rely more on alternative mechanisms, like direct public funding of research, as we do currently with more than $50 billion a year in biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health. Many of today’s yacht-loving billionaires would still be working for a living with different rules on intellectual property.
Labor law is another obvious case where governments set the rules, and they could be structured in a way far more beneficial to workers. In the early post-World War II era it was widely recognized that large corporations with monopolistic power dominated the economy, but that was not necessarily seen as a bad thing, because their workers also benefited from higher wages. This was due to the fact that they were unionized and able to demand their share of the benefits from monopolistic power.
This is much less the case today because unions are far weaker. But that is not a natural outcome, the rules on labor-management relations were written to make workers weaker. There is no natural market in this story, the government writes the rules to make them more beneficial to one side or the other.
Just to give a few examples: the prohibition on secondary boycotts in the US is a regulation that unambiguously weakens unions. A secondary boycott would mean Elon Musk’s suppliers could be struck over sending him steel, if he didn’t give the auto workers at Tesla a big pay hike.
The ban on union shops (“right-to-work”) in most states, where all the workers who benefit from a union pay their share of the union’s costs, is a government intervention against freedom of contract. This also weakens workers. Restrictions or outright bans on collective bargaining by gig workers is another example. In addition, there could be serious penalties for violating labor laws, as in millions of dollars in fines from real courts, rather than joke sanctions from the National Labor Relations Board.
None of this is “the market.” This is a story of government policy designed to give more money to the oligarchs.
The list goes on. Mark Zuckerberg, and now Larry Ellison, would be much poorer without Section 230, which protects their massive social media platforms from the same sort of liability for spreading lies that print and broadcast media face. Different bankruptcy laws that made private equity firms liable for the debts of the companies they take over and then push into bankruptcy would likely have prevented many of today’s billionaires, as would applying a sales tax on financial transactions similar to the sales tax people pay when they buy clothes or shoes.
This is the topic of my now dated book Rigged (it’s free). The point is that the market is infinitely malleable. We can structure it in a way that leads to far more equality or in ways that gives all the money to billionaires, as we have done in the last half century.
In that context, by all means we should try to find creative ways to tax back some of the wealth we have allowed them to accumulate, but it makes much sense, and it’s much more efficient, not to structure the market in a way that gives them all the money in the first place.
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Our Unequal Economy Means the US Can't Quit War
The unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a group of oligarchs pushes the United States toward a military economy.
Dec 29, 2025
The United States is drawn to war on every front, like a moth to a candle. It does not matter that Americans are sick of foreign wars stretching back 25 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now Venezuela, wars that have bankrupted the nation. It has no effect that the United States lacks the economic, technological, and manufacturing capacity necessary to sustain a conventional war. Nor would the United States likely win an unconventional war employing nanotechnology, biotechnology, and information warfare.
The critics allowed to appear on TV like John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs attribute this warmongering to the foolishness and the ignorance of political leaders like President Donald Trump, or to the incompetence of bureaucrats. They intentionally avoid any analysis of the economic structure of the United States, or the role of multinational banks and corporations in the formulation of policy. Their only explanation for the drive for war is the foolish actions of a “few bad apples.”
No one wants war, including the rich and powerful on all sides, in Beijing and Washington, in Berlin and Moscow, in Tehran and Tel Aviv. Yet the beating of the drums of war continues, and it grows louder. The appetite for war spreads like a vermillion fungus across the entire nation, with a military culture pushed through newspapers, movies, and television broadcasts. Preparation for war is a means of controlling the “little people” in a totalitarian manner.
The US government is pressuring every ally to rapidly increase defense spending, up to 5%, and to do so far more rapidly than can possibly be done in such a short time without massive corruption and waste. The military buildup is but a transfer of wealth, not an increase in security.
So, Why War?
The United States is collapsing as an economy, as a society, and as a civilization, weighed down by a massive debt, burdened by collapsing infrastructure and dying educational and research institutions, and strangled by a culture of pornography and narcissism. Above all, the extreme concentration of wealth over the last 20 years, since government was captured completely by the super rich, has meant that a handful of conceited frauds can determine the policy for the entire nation, and decide the fate of everyone. The basic interests of the vast majority of citizens are entirely ignored. The republic, and all traces of participatory democracy, have been consigned to the trash bin of history.
The international trade system and the embrace of “free trade” ideology played a major role in pushing the United States toward war around the world. Supply chains link together factories in loops that encircle the globe. Manufactured goods and agricultural products are brought into the United States from over the world, not because doing so is good for Americans, but because the multinational banks that control the economy seek out the cheapest labor and cheapest goods. Virtually all consumer goods in the United States go through logistics and distribution systems controlled by multinational corporations. Unlike the situation in 1945, a large part of the money that citizens (rebranded as “consumers”) spend at Walmart, Best Buy, or Amazon goes to the stockholders of those corporations and offers little or no benefit for the local economy.
The increase in military spending is a policy choice; it is the only way to avoid economic collapse.
Until the 1950s, most of what Americans ate came from local, family-owned farms. Clothes and furniture were also produced locally. Now that production and distribution have been spread all over the globe, events far away directly impact the US economy, and sometimes politicians feel pressure to use military threats, or responses, to protect American corporate interests (repackaged as “national security”).
So, too, US dependency on petroleum did not exist in the 1920s or dependency on rare earth metals in the 1980s. These are problems created by the decisions of corporations to introduce technologies that offered some conveniences, but at the price of extreme dependency of citizens on technology, which has generated large corporate profits.
The relocation of American manufacturing overseas also means that the only employment available in many regions, especially rural areas, is as police officers, guards at prisons, soldiers, or other positions in the military, police, or surveillance system. These days, security and the military are the only parts of the government budget that are growing.
The last decade has seen employment in defense surge by 40%, reaching 1.4% of the total employment base. In 2022-2023 alone the workforce expanded by 4.8% in contrast to an average of 1.7%.
No politician can oppose the increase in the military budget because, although constant foreign wars do great damage to the economy as a whole, the military has become the only part of government that increases opportunities for employment locally.
The US economy is increasingly controlled by a small number of rich families. The wages of American workers have been reduced, and the costs of living greatly increased for the profit of the few. The unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of a group of oligarchs has changed everything. This restructuring of society may not seem to be military in nature, but it pushes the United States toward a military economy.
The End of the Welfare State
The disposable income of workers increased beginning in the 1940s because of the redistribution of wealth forced by the reforms of the New Deal. These reforms also allowed for corporations to make enormous profits after the 1950s by selling consumer products to working people who had the disposable income to purchase them. From the 1960s on, consumption, growth, and the stock market became the primary tools for assessing the health of the economy.
Particularly from the 1970s on, this system effectively funneled wealth from working people to the wealthiest. But today consumption by workers, the middle class, and even the upper-middle class is no longer sufficient to generate profits for corporations because the people cannot spend any more. Banks have been forced to look for some other source of profit to pay off their debts. One direction they looked has been the military. Military spending creates steady demand that is not tied to market conditions, or economic booms and busts. It is funded by the people through taxes, or through the inflation created by the deficit spending that funds military expenditures.
The increase in military spending is a policy choice; it is the only way to avoid economic collapse. It must be justified by threats from China, Russia, and Iran, or terrorism. Intelligence agencies responding to the demands of banks to do everything they can to create trouble with those countries.
The true three branches of government are the politicians, the bankers, and the generals.
Companies like Oracle, Palantir, Google, and Amazon not only grow fat like ticks feeding on the military and intelligence budgets, they are merging with banks and using their control of the IT systems that power banks as a means to seize control of money itself through digitalization of the dollar, or the introduction of cryptocurrencies.
One of the most powerful billionaires, Larry Ellison, has launched a campaign to dominate media through the control of social media, entertainment, and news broadcasting. The Trump administration forced TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to turn over its operations in the United States to a consortium headed by Ellison’s company Oracle in December 2025. Oracle grew to global influence as a major contractor for the CIA, and Ellison is a strong Trump supporter.
Since Ellison’s son David was installed as CEO in August 2025 of the new entertainment conglomerate Paramount Skydance—the merger of Paramount Global, Skydance Media, and National Amusements—father and son have been raising enormous funds for a hostile takeover of Warner Brothers that would give them unprecedented control over entertainment and journalism in the United States. Already CBS, under Ellison rule, has cancelled at the last minute a "60 Minutes" report on the notorious El Salvadorian prison CECOT.
These IT firms made those billions by taking out massive loans that they then used to buy back their own stock. They have nothing but debt and money in digital form. War, the threat of war, the buildup for war, is what keeps them going.
Impact on Governance
The United States government is a republic consisting of three branches: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. The three branches complement each other, and they also regulate and balance out each other. This system ensures that power is not concentrated in any one place.
That was a long time ago. How does politics really work today?
There are three real branches of government today, and they are quite different than those described in the Constitution. The true three branches of government are the politicians, the bankers, and the generals. They are the ultimate powers behind the government, and they balance each other out because they operate at different levels and have different strengths.
The concentration of wealth has almost eliminated the impact of citizens on policy.
The politicians are able to form temporary alliances among interest groups in business, finance, and government and negotiate among them to determine policy. The bankers control money and have the power of financial manipulation to shut down the entire economy, or the activities of opponents. The generals possess a chain of command that cannot be easily broken by exterior forces, even by money, and they have the ability to use force directly, without relying on a third party, to achieve their goals.
In a healthy society, where citizens actually play a role in politics, the politicians rise to the top because their primary mission is serving the needs of their clients, whether they are bankers, businessmen, generals, or other interest groups in the general population. Politicians can play the central role because they reflect the needs of citizens. As long as politicians can effectively meet the needs of the bankers, the generals, and the citizens, and keep the money flowing to them, the system remains stable.
If wealth is too concentrated, however, to the degree that the bankers can pay off everyone and gain complete control of the economy, then they rise to the top because bankers need only service a small number of the super rich to obtain absolute power. The politicians become their puppets, and the generals are paid off by the bankers. That is what the political system in the United States has become today.
A political system run by bankers, however, will encounter enormous problems over time because everything will be decided on the basis of short-term profits, and no one will do anything for the sake of others, or follow an ideal greater than personal interest. As a result, the foundations of government, and of society, will crumble. Eventually the government will collapse into anarchy, or it will drift into war as a means of generating profits and enforcing the bankers’ iron-fisted rule over the people.
At that historical moment, the generals rise to the top because they have a viable chain of command that continues to function even as the government fails, and because they speak the language of force and violence, which will become the only language that has authority once the legitimacy of politicians and bankers has been destroyed.
The concentration of wealth has almost eliminated the impact of citizens on policy. The finance-driven speculative economy has brought trust in government and business to a new low. As a result, the only politicians in the Democratic Party who are able to take on the Trump administration are all former military and intelligence, and the election of a former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger as governor of Virginia suggests that the “CIA Democrats” have become the driving force in an ideologically bankrupt Democratic Party.
The financial kings, the bankers and billionaires, need make only one little mistake in order for the chain of command to be handed over to the military in the United States. Although military officers may not want war as individuals, once the order goes down, the entire process, especially in light of the massive increase in drones and robots in the military, will be literally on automatic.
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A Jeremiad for the Working People of the United States
The prevailing issue that demands consensus is the economic exploitation and deprivation of our economic model for working people of all demographics.
Mar 25, 2025
The oligarchs are laughing. The corporatists are laughing.
They are laughing at working people as the big con continues. They are laughing at the corporate Democratic Party whose genetic code lacks the heart to challenge the autocracy now unfolding. “Good billionaires vs. bad billionaires.” Really?
The political left spectrum is largely catatonic. Progressives lament the ineffectiveness of their wing of the Democratic Party. “Outsider” leftists are skeptical of both political parties, but too small in numbers yet to pose a threat to corporate Democrats.
The time of milquetoasts is over. It is time to recognize what must be done.
Liberals on the left spectrum are flummoxed; some stalwarts attribute their recent political debacle to the inability of the Democratic Party to distribute a cogent message of their accomplishments.
It was not the message that flopped. Rather economic numbers proved that our economic model continued to squash the interests of working people. They then sent a clear message that they were not buying the corporate Democratic dose of doldrums. They voted for President Donald Trump.
Economic Classes
Working people are comprised of the middle-working class and working class. The middle-working class identifies itself as “middle class.” The term is designed to divide working people.
Economic class has nothing to do with salaries or wages; it is about economic power. “Middle class” interests are closer to the working class than the dominant economic class.
Michael Zweig pointed this out in an insightful book in 2000 and revised in 2012. He identified the working class at 63% and the middle class at 35%. The combination presents a significant percentage of Americans who live and work largely by the undemocratic capriciousness of the 2%.
Real Economic Numbers
The income disparity in our country is at record levels as reported by the Congressional Budget Office. The income gap between the rich and everyone else is stunning. Income disparities are now so pronounced that America’s richest 1% of households averaged 139 times as much income as the bottom 20% in 2021.
The wealth disparity is just as shameful. Statista reported that in the first quarter of 2024, almost two-thirds of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10%; the lowest 50% only owned 2.5% of the total wealth.
Make no mistake, If Americans do not take seriously the activities of the dominant economic class, it will be too late for working people.
The Ludwig Institute for Shared Prosperity (LISEP) reported an actual unemployment rate. LISEP tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job, wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
Their actual unemployment rate for this January was 23.3%.
Shadow Government Statistics (SGS) reported another actual unemployment rate. A significant demographic was mysteriously defined out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in 1994. Those discouraged workers who searched for work for more than one year simply vanished from the BLS unemployed numbers.
SGS reported that the actual unemployment rate for this January was 26.8%.
Inflation
The government’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a measure of the cost of maintaining a constant standard of living and measuring the cost of out-of-pocket expenses. However, since the 1980s the BLS has been altering its methodologies to decrease the actual inflation rate provided to the public.
The BLS ignores food and energy prices in “core” inflation numbers as if food and energy are not basic necessities for living.
The BLS transitioned from their historic fixed-weight basket of goods and services to a quasi-substitution-based basket of goods.
It also changed from arithmetic weighting to geometric weighting and to owners’ equivalent rent (OER) numbers.
Another BLS method to decrease the real inflation rate was a transition to hedonic measures, which actually attempts to measure how much enjoyment a person receives from changing from one product to another.
These changes reflected the BLS intentional artificial deflation of accurate CPI numbers from the American public.
SGS reported that the actual inflation rate for this January was 10.81%.
Big Picture Not So Good
Naturally, working people are seeking relief from this economic suffocation; according to the Council on Foreign Relations we have the largest disparity in wealth and income than any other developed country.
Good paying manufacturing jobs with other benefits left the country in dramatic numbers in the 1960s and 70s. How did this happen?
We can begin with an abysmal fact:
The economic empire of the U.S. is presently over, done, finished.
Our demise began when corporations moved to countries with low wages, regulations were minimal or nonexistent, and unions were absent. This was paradise for the corporate owner class.
This trend is continuing, and those good paying jobs are gone with no reason to return despite the bluster and gibberish emanating from the Trump administration.
The Economic Policy Institute reported that the U.S. lost 5 million manufacturing jobs in the last 25 years. To place our country in an advantageous position again will require transformation to a different economic model with smart negotiations and intelligent diplomacy with other countries.
A troubling result of the massive exodus of manufacturing jobs is the U.S. declining Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Consider in 2024, the GDP of the U.S. grew 2.8%; the GDP of China grew 5%. India, another member of the BRICS economic bloc, grew 5.6%.
Economic Tree
It is not that complicated here.
Our economic model is characterized by an economic tree for working people. At the root of the tree is the primary issue of wages and salaries.
Moving up the tree are branches that comprise secondary issues. They are viable employment opportunities; effective, affordable healthcare; comprehensive educational opportunities; comfortable, secure housing opportunities; wholesome nutrition; safe, reliable transportation; environmentally clean water, air, and land.
Will progressive organizations coalesce into a national movement for economic and political democracy and seize the Democratic Party?
The third branch are cultural issues: They are reasonable gun control, effective immigration reform, women’s healthcare rights, and LGBTQ rights. These issues are important to their demographics; however, they have been manipulated into wedge issues that distract working people from the real source of their discontent—that is the political power that maintains the privilege and power of the dominant economic class.
Working people must accept cultural issues without necessarily agreeing with them. The prevailing issue that demands consensus is the economic exploitation and deprivation of our economic model for working people of all demographics.
Emphasizing cultural issues with so called “woke” identity politics over economic class politics has resulted in the grotesque policies of Mr. Trump and the Republican Party cult.
It is these tertiary issues that Mr. Trump used to provoke and frighten MAGA working people. It distracted them into ignoring their economic class malaise.
An effective political party must work to transform primary issues into an inclusive party. Until then, cultural issues will be little but distractions for marginalized groups without actual progress for their causes; Democrats will continue to bay in the wind and lose elections while an autocratic political model is established. Project 2025 is that model and a blueprint financed by the corporate and oligarch class.
A Smart Direction
The shelf life is over for assorted corporate Democrats and corporate union leaders. Their vapid strategies and tactics unwittingly encouraged working people to support Mr. Trump. Consider that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) defeated Mr. Trump in polls in 2016 and 2020. Yet the Democratic Party corporate sycophants denied Sen. Sanders the nomination.
The time of milquetoasts is over. It is time to recognize what must be done.
The arc of our progressive history includes the abolitionists, labor rights, women’s suffrage, civil rights, anti-war activities, and environmental movements. All had a common theme: They were mass movements that began as large groups of people who knew they could do better.
This may be what it requires to shake us free from the dehumanizing, exploitative crimes and corruption of neofascism that Mr. Trump and his MAGA cabal have been implementing. As contradictions sharpen and immiseration increases, the choices are stark.
Make no mistake, If Americans do not take seriously the activities of the dominant economic class, it will be too late for working people. The flurry of political attacks on our Constitution are not some frivolous actions that will be remedied in two or four years. The Trump cabal is playing the long game. Even the legal foundation of American democracy, Marbury v. Madison, is in jeopardy.
The judicial branch may strike down some of the more absurd legal and constitutional excesses of Mr. Trump’s supporters. However, his cult leaders of Project 2025 are preparing for a permanent autocratic model to replace our democratic republic. It will have the veneer of democracy, but will be an autocracy in form.
Remedies
Each day, the administration plows ahead with truculent policies chipping away at the lives of working people. Will the time arrive for working people to create a national database of progressive organizations as an informational foundation for an authentic progressive movement? Will it facilitate petitions, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, and general strikes?
Will progressive organizations coalesce into a national movement for economic and political democracy and seize the Democratic Party? Third-party options, while advancing democracy, are chimerical at this time. ICE is the new Gestapo, and waiting for a new political party to emerge is delusional.
Will our spiritual and secular organizations lead a movement or remain docile?
Pope Paul VI wrote Populorism Progressio in 1967. He stated that the restructuring of society was a welcome possibility. Though he admonished against violent means, he acknowledged a form of violence was an option:
Everyone knows, however, that revolutionary uprisings—except where there is manifest, longstanding tyranny which would do great damage to fundamental personal rights and dangerous harm to the common good of the country—engender new injustices, introduce new inequities, and bring new disasters. The evil situation that exists, and it surely is evil, may not be dealt with in such a way that an even worse situation results.
The question must be asked about a time table for ameliorating the poverty, deprivation, and suffering that will surely follow the scabrous policies of Mr. Trump. Each day is a new attack on our political and social norms; neofascist laws appear like a new head regenerated on a hydra. The courts may strike one down and another one is hatched immediately by the Trump cult.
This is addressed in a quote from Mexican poet Homero Aridjis in 1991: “There are centuries in which nothing happens and years in which centuries pass.”
We will certainly find out soon enough. We must ask ourselves are we Americans willing to take the risk; as Victor Hugo stated in an essay in 1845: “You have enemies, Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
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Sanders, AOC Draw Biggest Crowd of Their Careers at Rally to Fight 'Oligarchy' in Denver
"The American people will not allow Trump to move us into oligarchy and authoritarianism. We will fight back. We will win," said Sanders.
Mar 22, 2025
On the heels of record-breaking attendance at a "Fighting Oligarchy" event in Tempe, Arizona earlier this week, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York held a rally in Denver, Colorado on Friday evening that drew more than 34,000 people—making it largest event that Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez have ever held.
Sanders, an Independent, wrote on social media on Friday that the turnout is a sign that "the American people will not allow Trump to move us into oligarchy and authoritarianism. We will fight back. We will win."
According to Anna Bahr, Sanders' communications director, the senator's largest rally prior to Denver took place in Brooklyn, New York in 2016, when he was running for president.
Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, wrote online that "something special is happening... Working people are ready to stand together and fight for our democracy. Thank you Colorado!"
At the rally, which took place at Denver's Civic Center Park, the two lawmakers hit on the same themes they spoke about in Arizona.
"The American people are saying loud and clear, we will not accept an oligarchic form of society," Sanders said, according to Colorado Public Radio. "We will not accept the richest guy in the world running all over Washington, making cuts to the Social Security Administration, cuts to the Veterans Administration, almost destroying the Department of Education—all so that they could give over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1%."
"If you don't know your neighbor, it's easier to turn on them," said Ocasio-Cortez, per CPR. "That's why they want to keep us separated, alone, and apart. Scrolling on our phones thinking that the person next to us is some kind of enemy, but they're not."
Sanders launched his "Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here" tour in February, with the aim of talking to Americans about the "takeover of the national government by billionaires and large corporations, and the country's move toward authoritarianism."
The series of "Fighting Oligarchy" events have been taking place as some Democrats have gotten an earful at town halls back home, where constituents have come out to implore them to do more to counter efforts by the Trump administration.
Earlier in the day, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders also held a rally in Greeley, Colorado—which is represented by Republican Gabe Evans in the House of Representatives—which drew more than 11,000 people.
Semafor reporter David Weigel, who attended both the Greely and Denver rally, posted online that at the Greeley rally it wasn't easy to find people in the crowd who had voted for Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary. Weigel also wrote that the Sanders team told him that half of the RSVPs to the rallies were not from the lawmaker's supporter list.
Eric Blanc, an assistant professor the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, wrote on Bluesky on Saturday that it is "pretty remarkable how AOC and Bernie have become leaders not just of lefties, but of the Democratic Party's mainstream liberal base."
While its dangerous that "establishment liberals" are yielding to Trump, he wrote, "the silver lining is that this has enabled anti-corporate forces such as labor unions and AOC-Bernie to set the tenor of Resistance 2.0."
"Because today's anti-Trump resistance is more focused on economic concerns, more rooted in labor unions, and more anti-billionaire, it has the potential to sink much deeper roots among working people and, in so doing, to definitively overcome MAGA," wrote Blanc.
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Why Elon Musk Is Wrong About Empathy
History has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbor is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbor thrives.
Mar 21, 2025
“The fundamental weakness is empathy,” Elon Musk recently told radio podcast host Joe Rogan. “There is a bug, which is the empathy response.”
As Musk has established himself as at least the second most powerful person in an administration seeking a wholesale remaking of institutions, rules, and norms, what he said matters, because it encapsulates a political plan. What the Project 2025 report set out in over 900 turgid pages, Musk’s remark captures in a simple pithy mantra for the social media age.
And as (let us acknowledge it) the Trump revolution is currently popular with at least large parts of the U.S. electorate, and some overseas too, what Musk said summarizes also the worldview of a social-cultural moment and movement on the march.
Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away, “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.”
Core to the argument against empathy is the claim that ethical and practical considerations run counter to each other. The guardrails of rules and norms about caring for others, it argues, don’t only hold us back, they tie our hands behind our back.
Morality is for losers, it suggests, and who wants to lose? Only when we cut ourselves free of the burden of looking after and looking out for others, it posits, can we soar. The practical applications of this worldview are all encompassing.
They include the ripping up of international cooperation; the gutting of life-saving programs for people in poverty abroad and at home; and the violating of due process for protestors, prisoners, migrants, minorities, and anyone (who can be made to be) unpopular. That’s not how it ends, that’s how it starts.
A collapse of empathy would be an existential threat to the world. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on her witness to, and escape from, the rise of fascism in the 1930s, concluded, “The death of empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” The stakes are too high for us to fail.
So how can we respond to the argument against empathy?
One way would be to stick only to ethics, arguing, simply, “it is our duty to sacrifice for others, and failing to do so is just wrong!” This has driven what has come to be known as the charity narrative.
This approach seems like a flawed strategy because by refusing to engage in the practicality conversation, it concedes it to the cynics and nihilists, accepting the framing of morality as a kind of self-immolation that brings only noble suffering and that cares only about stances, not consequences.
Another way would be to give up on ethics, and make only the most selfish arguments for doing good, like “we should not show ourselves to be unreliable because that would get us knocked off the top perch by our rivals when we must be Number One!” This too seems like a flawed strategy because it reinforces variations of dog-eat-dog as the only frames for success.
What both of those approaches get wrong is that they accept the frame that ethics and practicality are separate. Older wisdoms have long understood them as inseparable. What can in current debates seem like a rivalrous relationship between “what is good?” and “what is smart?”, or “what is moral?” and “what is wise?”, we often find when we look more deeply is not.
That often, the way in which societies developed moral principles was that they are ways to abstract what people have learnt from experience works. When, for example, people say in the African principle of Ubuntu “I am because you are,” that is not just a moral or theological point, it is literally true.
It is what public health teaches us: that I am healthy because my neighbour is healthy. (Even Musk was forced to concede to public pressure on this with his partial admission that “with USAID, one of the things we cancelled, accidentally, was Ebola prevention, and I think we all want Ebola prevention.”
Fearful of the reaction to his initial cancellation of Ebola prevention, he even claimed, falsely, to have fixed that “mistake” straight away, but what matters here is that the case against Ebola prevention collapsed so fast because interdependence was so quickly understood.)
So too, history has continuously shown that I am only secure when my neighbor is secure, and that I thrive when my neighbor thrives. Perhaps, for oligarchs, a ruthless, rule-less, world can work. (Perhaps not, however, when the fall-out comes between the “two bros.”)
But for the 99.9% of us, as John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” We are interdependent and inseparable. Alone we are weak, but together we are strong. Or, as the brilliant bleak joke of old ascribed to Benjamin Franklin put it, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.”
The mutual interest argument, which highlights to people “we each have a stake in the well-being of all, looking out for others is not losing,” does not take us away from values, it reinforces them.
“There is an interrelated structure of reality. We are all tied in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” That was Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, and yet he was making an argument that you could say is the argument of mutual interest.
Empathy is not pity. It is rooted in mutuality. As as an ethical frame, it looks at a person in need, perhaps a person that some others don’t fully see, and says straight away, “I ought to connect, as that could have been me.” Interdependence, as a practical frame, reflects on the situation of that person, and comes through that reflection to understand that “I need to connect, as that could next time be me.”
Morality and wisdom guide us in the same direction; and as the fastest way there is empathy, that makes empathy not humanity’s weakness but our superpower.
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Crime of the Century: An Old Soundtrack to Our Current Nightmare
How Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem foreshadowed 2025’s catastrophe.
Mar 16, 2025
Listening to Supertramp’s album Crime of the Century in 2025 is like dusting off an old diary and realizing you were right about everything.
Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem was not meant to be trapped in a decade drowning in idealism. Rather, it was a collection of elegies that resonate with me more now, in our current nightmare, than when I first listened to it. The mournful melodies and plaintive lyrics (by Richard Davies and Roger Hodgson) speak of the crises of vague spiritual thirst, self-loathing, money culture, schools churning out compliant citizens, and unabashed corruption.
It came to a head in the 2025 inauguration of an American president with the grand unveiling of a well-worn power system but with a staggering level of audacity. Near the president and out of the shadows, there stood magnates of seemingly incurable hubris who reached their bliss points, invited to take reign of sensitive policy and firing authority and gain access to the country’s secrets and public money. A new administration wasted no time unveiling a “billionaires’ row” of insatiable elites who aren’t just playing the game. They own it. Collectively worth $1.35 trillion, they have become brands in human flesh, more recognizable than the corporate empires they built.
The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture.
And somehow, it’s all there… in the album.
Four years after its release, I came across Crime of the Century in a used album store on the main strip of Carbondale, Illinois, during my undergraduate years at Southern Illinois University. Every other week or so, I’d walk to the music store that always smelled like stale cannabis and was managed by a large man with cannabis-stained teeth and a lot of opinions. He was clearheaded enough to have promised me that he’d keep an eye out for Supertramp cassettes and vinyls.
Back in the apartment, I had Crime on repeat for longer than I will confess. Somewhere in the silage of existential angst, I decrypted the pangs that augured the coming of a novel strain of corruption and indifference capable of shaking the moral foundations of anything in its path, including a nuked-up, power-bloated country, exulting in its hegemonic dominance, yet hanging on to conceits of global moral leadership.
There were plenty of suspects to point fingers at back in the 70s, but the hardest part—which the album still dares us to do—was staring down ourselves, we the self-satisfied searchers, critics, and activists with bell-bottoms, inebriated by our magical thinking of independence and convincing ourselves that we were above the detritus and contributed nothing to the collective rot. You’ll find this indictment in the concluding lines of the title track, “Crime of the Century”:
Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?
Rip off the masks and let’s see
But that's not right, oh no, what’s the story?
Look, there’s you and there's me
I can’t say I saw today’s condition coming when I was 20. But it does seem close to a kind of Bayesian reasoning, where you have an initial, under-substantiated certitude about something and then see new evidence that confirms your most primitive claims and worries.
The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture. Former President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and Vice President Kamala Harris have exited the stage, but their hollow-point scruples remain contagious, repurposed by their successors. What we are witnessing is not a change in direction but a seamless handoff, a continuation of the same imperial prerogatives, now dressed in different rhetoric.
The Oval Office openly covets resources and land that belong to other people. The perverse logic of supremacy and strange level of entitlement (epistemic assumptions of Empire) are rubber-stamped by compromised elected and appointed men and women of Pharaonic arrogance, who have narcissistic visions of taking Gaza’s seashore and gas fields, Greenland’s minerals, Canada’s lumber and oil, Ukraine’s massive rare earth reserves, and Panama’s canal.
So do we need more proof of active colonial appetites?
The existential dread of Crime of the Century should have shown us an imp squatting on the chest of a defeated counterculture that my generation thoughtlessly held on to. The costumes and performance of rebellion ultimately became products themselves, mass-packaged and sold back to consumers, as the edited book Commodify Your Dissent painfully argued a bit too late in 1997. To identify with grunge or goth moods, for example, subsequent generations purchased the look from fashion brands who created inventories, price points, and a market that preyed on real feelings of alienation and disillusionment in youth culture.
At the heart of Crime of the Century is a troubling accusation: We’re complicit in the corruption we claim to despise. It’s easy to cast blame on political elites, but the rot runs deeper. Media personalities, especially the high-profile journalists of broadcast celebrity and late-night comics, make their careers selectively criticizing these very figures and what they represent—only to rub shoulders with them at off-camera galas, clink wine glasses, invite them onto their shows, and turn critique into entertainment.
Each day, the celebrity reporters and broadcasters spew hundreds of thousands of words to demonstrate their erudition, apparently depleting their allotment of verbiage for the day, leaving no room for “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”
The oligarchs of influence thrive because, in part, we fund them. We engage the platforms, consume and share the storylines, and chase virality. We freely give away the inventories of our privacy. We do this knowing that the details of our inner sanctums are the products that social media giants are trafficking for great profit. The hard truth is, no one’s fully off the grid. We’re entangled in the wires we trip over and then curse at them like podcasters.
So, what do we do? Keep spinning the album and nervously thumb prayer beads (misbaha, in colloquial Arabic), cowering in the album’s pastel and gloomy brilliance?
With the exception of those who dared to speak truth to power (mainly through alternative presses that captured the right kind of radical), my generation watered the tillage that sprouted our current conundrum. One of the tracks of Crime exposed many for what they were: “For we dreamed a lot / And we schemed a lot / And we tried to sing of love before the stage fell apart.” That’s right, we were cantors of phantom ideals that were about to fall apart early in the 1980s, when John Lennon was murdered in New York City and Ronald Regan sired trickle down economics, which “foolishly trusted the collective greed of a people” to care for the needy and marginalized.
Songwriters like Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, and Rick Davies, along with scholars like Christopher Lasch, sounded the alarm early, but most of us dismissed it, assuming the warning had to be for someone else. In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch saw through the cracks of idiot-proof idealism and noticed the shape of social and psychological narcissism that soon enough would be given the key to the Oval Office.
My generation’s surviving tenants need to stop lecturing and stop recounting imagined glories of the past. It’s time to move out of the way, especially for the generation of young people now whom we bitterly complain about, but who actually are better positioned to succeed where we failed. They have ideals but are not idealists, and they are jaded, but not overly so, just enough. Former and current students of mine, they are not content with just listening. With hunger and the right kind of impatience, they will write new songs. Can’t wait to hear them, for if we’re still noticing the crimes of 1974 in 2025, it can only mean the crime never stopped. It just learned to dress better.
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You Will Cry Out Because of Your King
When we eventually become aware of what we have given up, what it really means to surrender participation, voice, and responsibility, it will be too late.
Mar 14, 2025
As a clergy person who has served congregations in the Black and of-color communities in Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C. for over 45 years I am acutely aware of the traumas and anxieties that are encountered because of changing political administrations nationally, regionally, and locally, and how they impact families and lives.
Politicians and even the media often speak in broad generalities of what a change means statistically, according to the latest poll, and its implications for government and how it may set a precedent or not. But those of us serving pastorally in local communities are called upon to allay fears, to bind the wounds, make meaning out of the meaninglessness, find silver linings amid the dark clouds, and to identify hope in the despair and confusion. We have done this many times, but at no time has the impact been as stark, devastating, or as frightening as it is now.
With U.S. President Trump, Elon Musk, DOGE, and their radical approach to government there are many lives traumatized by the fears who are suffering from the emotional abuse inflicted on those who have worked for the federal government and their families. There are also many contractors and vendors associated with government work experiencing the same high anxieties that come with the uncertainty and worries associated with the political battering of uncertainty and threats inflicted on families and their sense of stability and security.
Now is the time to stir from our shock and catatonic state and begin to act, demonstrate, drown out town hall and community gatherings wherever they occur before we completely lose all memory of participatory debate, discourse, dialogue, or what the compromise and tensions of democracy look and feel like.
Living in Washington, D.C., I along with my colleagues feel that we are in the epicenter of this upheaval and must deal with this psychological tsunami. But by no means does this affect only Washington, D.C., because 80% of government employees are outside of the Washington, D.C. area. However, the perception is government equals Washington, D.C. and the message telegraphed by the Trump-Musk-DOGE fraternity is that they are dismantling The District of Columbia, its "deep state," putting Blacks and people of color in "their place" (as D.C. serves as a symbol of a Black and diverse town with a "woke" population, and where DEI abounds). They are stridently trying to demonstrate that they are reestablishing the good ole days of white supremacy and Manifest Destiny by taking the country back and making it Great Again in terms of absolute control both at home and abroad.
The imperialistic whim is expressed in changing the name of the Native American-associated Alaskan mountain peak, Denali, to Mount McKinley. The name Denali is largely used by Alaskans and Native people and translated to mean "The High One," referring to the more-than-20,000-foot mountain peak that dominates the landscape. The royal decree is amplified in the assertion that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America and in punishing The Associated Press by banning them from the White House press corps for not acquiescing to the imperialistic name change. The list of royal decrees has suggested that Canada be annexed along with Greenland, and insinuated that Panama come under the control of the U.S. again. These are all imperialistic assertions and fantasy.
These assertions should be stridently questioned and analyzed by various media. However, in January 6 fashion the media forums historically entrusted to be defenders of democracy by maintaining a free and non-government controlled press have been bullied and overrun by a royally inspired overtaking that has usurped democratic order. Diverse and robust political discussion have been taken over by an imperialistic demand to assert the order of a feudalistic system of oligarchs, dukes, duchesses, billionaires, and courtiers seeking lands and fortunes by supporting the royal order. This is evident in Jeffery Bezos' nullification of The Washington Post's editorial board's endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris for president in 2024. It has been reported that more than 250,000 Washington Post subscribers have cancelled their subscriptions in protest since owner Bezos interfered in the endorsement and recently demanded that the paper's opinion pages reflect libertarian priorities excluding opposing points of view.
Bezos wrote in a March 2025 memo to the paper's staff, "We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets..." In other words, the opinion page will be slanted toward less or no criticism of the Trump dynasty, its policies, or its encroachment on democratic order. The Post's former Executive Editor Marty Baron called the new direction "craven" and suggested that Bezos is "basically fearful" of Trump. Whether it is fear or greed motivating these oligarchs only they know. But we cannot overlook the lucrative government contracts awarded Bezos, Musk, and many others currently feeding at, or hoping to feed at, the royal trough.
The contraction and absence of media that are independent and distant from the Trump royalty pose an immediate and imminent danger to the freedom of political debate and moral discernment. Columbia University has been penalized $400 million by the Trump dynasty for not shutting down the protests and encampment on Columbia's campus last Spring that educated the public of the genocide and war crimes in Gaza. Mahmoud Khalil, who is a green-card holder, a graduate of Columbia, and married to a U.S. citizen, having led some of the demonstrations and protests at Columbia, was arrested by ICE because his political expressions ran counter to the proclivities of the Trump dynasty. The Trump monarchy is weighted toward imperialistic initiatives that are expressed through Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands; ethnic cleansing; the attempted annexation of Ukraine by Russia; or by its own fantasies of seizing Canada, Greenland, and Panama.
People are perplexed by how quickly and radically these changes could have occurred in the United States. The national narrative has been that fascist takeovers, and the emergence of tyrants and dictators, happen other places but not in the U.S. But now we are confronted with what we believed was commonplace elsewhere having happened here. I find myself turning to tools of my trade trying to explain to people this current moment and why and how this could have happened.
In the scriptures that I use, First Samuel, chapter 8 offers a hauntingly accurate explanation for this historical moment. The words in this text describe people who felt let down by government, troubled by the state of the economy, fearful of an uncertain future, scared of changes, living where one set of political leaders was perceived as ill-equipped to serve the interest of some people, and where apparently a few had grown richer at the expense of the poor becoming poorer. Whether this was true or only perceived to be true we do not know.
The 2024 elections appears to have similarities with the text, where the framing of the issues were the ruinous effects of inflation; immigrants taking jobs and criminally violating communities; and where Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies forced the hiring of incompetence and overlooked those who were more deserving and were white, male, and straight. A significant portion of the population wanted a leader who would address their fears and resolve their anxieties of an inclusive world. The political ideologies of the campaigns either cited an increasingly diverse population or the dangerous nature of democracy as it strived to include diversity and create equal opportunities. The ideologies were on a collision course. One ideology warned of the threat to democracy, and the other offered the protection of the American way of life through a strongman that would protect the country by reclaiming and protecting its past. When talking about the things that were seen or felt as wrong with the nation, the strongman pledged, "I alone can fix it." Some people clamored for this strongman—this king, the restoration of the past, and the good ole days.
It was just like the people in 1 Samuel 8, who demanded, "Give us a king" so that they could go back to the familiar; the fears of the future could be tamed; and they would not have to wrestle with or agonize over anything that was unfamiliar, frightening, or defined as "woke." "Give us a king" that will solve all our problems, navigate us through a frightening world, and ensure we don't have to deal with the messier things of democracy. And this is what we got. In 2024 we have unconsciously or consciously given up a president for a king.
But this scriptural text goes further by warning what a king will do, and it is not pretty but so relevant to today. It warns that by giving up discourse and participation we will become victims of the wants and desires of a king. The king will reward his patrons and supporters and harm his detractors. The billionaires who lust after more billions as well as those fearful of the loss of billions fall into line and tout the monarch's political framing of issues. He will take a portion of all that we have worked for and earned, and he will give it in tax breaks and lucrative contracts to his patrons and supporters. He will press us into his service, and likewise our children. We will parrot the fears of diversity and inclusion. We will turn in those who we suspect of being undocumented and accept it as natural when people are stopped and arrested for driving while Hispanic or Black. And when we eventually become aware of what we have given up, what it really means to surrender participation, voice, and responsibility, it will be too late.
The damage will have been done and will be revealed in disasters because the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), that predicts atmospheric and weather changes, has been dismantled. There will be an increase in diseases such as measles that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000. Unemployment will increase because of firings and layoffs in the governmental sector that will spread into the private sector because of protectionism, tariffs, and the interconnection of one economic sector to another. And there will be fewer places to challenge the royal decrees as the courts, informational platforms, and people are silenced out of fear of retribution and punishment. In all, democratic order will disappear, become extinct in practice, and eventually fade from memory. All of this will occur because we have chosen the dictates of a king over the messier and cumbersome discourse of the democratic process. The scriptural text warns, "In that day you will cry out because of your king." So many of us are crying out now because of this wannabe king.
So, what can be done? Now is the time to stir from our shock and catatonic state and begin to act, demonstrate, drown out town hall and community gatherings wherever they occur before we completely lose all memory of participatory debate, discourse, dialogue, or what the compromise and tensions of democracy look and feel like. The Trump-Musk-DOGE fraternity has been rattling off dictates of firings, downsizing, policy, and name changes so rapidly that it is hard to pivot fast enough in response, let alone being able to act instead of reacting. This is a tactic to keep us off balance. But our challenge is to engage, question, and resist and not be wearied by the avalanche of the various decrees, Executive Orders, or the whiplash of on and off again policies.
In the 1960s and 70s many of us wore buttons that read "Question Authority." It was a statement of independent thinking, not falling into line simply to fall into line, and to remind ourselves and governments that we are only governed by our consent. We sought to remind ourselves of the authority of average citizens and not the absolute power of government. This mentality needs to be reborn. We need to question, act, and challenge all things and everything that comes from this royal fiefdom.
They may not be wrong in everything they do, but we know that unless we exercise the discipline of questioning authority, challenging policies, and making the administration prove every single assertion we will certainly lose all forms of democratic order. After all we really don't want or need a king, but we truly want a government that is of, for, and by the people. This however will require that we exercise the muscles of messy democracy before they completely atrophy.
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Making America Powerless Again: How Trump Is Robbing America of Its Greatest Strengths
While Trump fixates on the symbols of 19th-century power, he systematically dismantles the infrastructure of 21st-century American influence.
Mar 11, 2025
Donald Trump fundamentally misunderstands power. He is not playing chess; he is playing a reckless game of Jenga with the foundational components that actually made America great. With each ill-conceived move, he pulls out another critical block from our national structure, destabilizing the entire edifice while claiming to strengthen it. His vision for American greatness is anchored in a historically dishonest version of
the Gilded Age—a period he explicitly admires, when he believes "we were at our richest." It's no coincidence that this era represented the apex of white supremacist control following Reconstruction, when newly enfranchised Black Americans were systematically stripped of their voting rights and democratic participation.
"We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country," Trump has declared, revealing his nostalgia for an America where oligarchs accumulated vast wealth while the masses struggled in poverty, where women couldn't vote, and where Jim Crow laws ensured white supremacy remained intact.
This conception of power is devastatingly wrong and dangerous. In Trump's worldview, might is measured solely through domination: tariffs, walls, military threats, economic leverage, and the unchecked authority of the executive branch. His fantasies about seizing Panama or purchasing Greenland reveal a colonial mindset where sovereign nations exist merely as potential American acquisitions—trophies for his ego and extensions of a twisted imperial vision. This approach not only reflects a backward 19th-century understanding of power but abandons the very sources of American influence that have made us a genuine global leader for generations.
True Power Lies in Innovation and Academic Freedom
While Trump fixates on the symbols of 19th-century power, he systematically dismantles the infrastructure of 21st-century American influence. For the first time in modern history, China has edged past the United States in producing the most frequently cited scientific papers—a critical measure of research impact and intellectual leadership. Research tells us what is true, research shapes reality, and research determines which voices hold authority. The United States for decades led in research and therefore was positioned to determine truth and shape worlds. This position of power is now being deliberately eroded as Trump attacks universities, academic freedom—a necessity for innovation and discovery—and withdraws vital funding.
History demonstrates that America's greatest achievements often came from embracing the persecuted and marginalized whose lives were threatened by authoritarian, white supremacist regimes.
The power of the United States has never stemmed primarily from military might or economic leverage; it has flowed from our leadership in knowledge creation. Researchers worldwide have looked to institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for guidance. The articles published in American journals have become foundational concepts within disciplines, allowing the U.S. to lead in virtually every intellectual field. When federal agencies generate data and analyses that become the global standard, America exercises an influence far more profound than any military operation could achieve.
When Trump attacks universities that dare to uphold academic freedom, cutting their federal funding and threatening scholars with deportation, he isn't demonstrating strength—he's surrendering intellectual authority. The recent arrest of Palestinian academic Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder detained by ICE "in support of President Trump's executive orders"—reveals how quickly academic freedom can collapse under authoritarian pressure. This is not projection of power; it is its destruction. Trump is making the United States powerless and weak.
America's Power has Come from Welcoming the Persecuted
Trump's vision of American greatness is narrowly nativist, focused on exclusion and ideas of racial purity that have ties to eugenic projects that have historically ended in atrocities like the Holocaust. Yet history demonstrates that America's greatest achievements often came from embracing the persecuted and marginalized whose lives were threatened by authoritarian, white supremacist regimes.
When Hitler's Nazi regime drove Jewish academics and intellectuals from Europe in the 1930s, America's willingness to welcome these refugees transformed our scientific and cultural landscape. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and countless others fled persecution and found new homes in American universities and laboratories. Their contributions to the Manhattan Project and beyond revolutionized physics, mathematics, and engineering—laying the groundwork for America's technological supremacy in the latter half of the 20th century.
True power comes not from building walls and criminalizing free speech but from recognizing talent regardless of origin or wealth. Trump's methodical dismantling of immigration pathways and his demonization of foreigners don't make America stronger—they deprive us of the next generation of brilliant minds who might otherwise choose our universities, our laboratories, our companies, and our communities. Our greatest resource has never been the oligarchs who were invited to buy a "gold card" but the persecuted who found that this country welcomed them and supported their work.
The Gilded Age's True Legacy
Trump's romanticization of the Gilded Age is an admission of his true aim: the systematic dismantling of American democracy in service of white supremacy—a defining feature of those years he aims to recreate through his brutal agenda attacking diversity initiatives, public service workers, universities, and fundamental human rights.
Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 former Confederate states reformed their constitutions and electoral laws to disenfranchise African Americans. Though these efforts couldn't explicitly mention race, they introduced ostensibly neutral poll taxes, property requirements, and complex literacy tests designed to prevent Black citizens from accessing the ballot box. In South Carolina, these measures reduced Black voter turnout from 96% in 1876 to just 11% in 1898. Across the South, Black turnout plummeted from 61% in 1880 to a mere 2% by 1912.
This is a legacy of the Gilded Age—a retreat from democratic principles that locked in white supremacy for nearly a century. The era Trump celebrates as America's peak was precisely when our democracy was most severely compromised.
The Choice Before Us
Trump's conception of power represents a devastating miscalculation. By fixating on the trappings of 19th-century dominance—tariffs, military posturing, white supremacy and misogyny, and oligarchic wealth—he surrenders the very sources of influence that have made America genuinely powerful: our intellectual leadership, academic freedom, diverse talent pool, democratic institutions, and moral authority.
The question isn't whether Trump makes America powerful—it's whether his understanding of power belongs in a modern world. When he severs relationships with allies, seeing cooperation as "weakness," he doesn't demonstrate strength but reveals a profound failure to understand how international influence operates in the 21st century.
True power has always resided in our democratic values, our intellectual leadership, and our willingness to embrace the full spectrum of human talent and possibility.
When he dismantles the Department of Education and undermines scientific research, he isn't eliminating waste—he's surrendering our most significant competitive advantage. How do we measure the loss of a great mind who might have contributed to our understanding of climate science, identified cures for devastating diseases, or developed technologies to preserve our democratic systems? The cost of his destruction is beyond measurement.
Trump is indeed making America powerless even in ways that he should be able to understand through his myopic worldview—after all, he is making America bow to the richest man on earth and embracing dictators who destroy democracy. But he is abandoning the very sources of American power that have made us exceptional: our commitment to knowledge, our embrace of talent regardless of origin, our democratic institutions, and our capacity for moral leadership. The world could once rely on the United States, that is no more.
The gilded America he envisions—where oligarchs extract immense wealth from land and labor, where white supremacy reigns unchallenged, and where democratic participation is systematically suppressed—isn't a vision of American strength. It's a return to a time when our nation's power was narrowly concentrated among the few at the expense of the many. That is no power. That is a monarchy. That is death to democracy.
True power has always resided in our democratic values, our intellectual leadership, and our willingness to embrace the full spectrum of human talent and possibility. By abandoning these principles, Trump isn't making America great again—he's making America powerless in the ways that truly matter.
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Working-Class Unity Key to Defeating Oligarchy, Says Sanders in Response to Trump SOTU
"We can win. We will win," said the senator. "Let's go forward together."
Mar 05, 2025
If working-class people in the United States were wondering why President Donald Trump had "very little to say about the REAL crises facing the working class of this country" in his State of the Union address, said U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders Tuesday night, they need look no further than the people Trump surrounded himself with at his inauguration in January.
"Standing right behind him were the three wealthiest men in the country," said the Vermont Independent senator, naming billionaire mogul and "special government employee" Elon Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "And standing behind THEM were 13 other billionaires who Trump had nominated to head major government agencies. Many of these same billionaires—including Musk—were there tonight."
Despite Trump's repeated campaign promises to address the rising cost of living for working people, said Sanders, the State of the Union address offered the latest proof that "the Trump administration IS a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, and for the billionaire class."
Watch Sanders' address in full:
LIVE: President Trump’s Congressional Address needs a response. Here’s mine. https://t.co/O9yN04isIw
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 5, 2025
Sanders amplified the message he has sent on his National Tour to Fight Oligarchy—which he is scheduled to continue this week with stops in Warren, Michigan on Saturday and Kenosha, Wisconsin on Friday.
The senator called on working people of all racial identities, religions, and sexual orientations to join together to fight Trump's agenda and the billionaires who would benefit from his tax cuts, slashes to essential public services like Medicaid and food assistance, and efforts to divide people by demonizing immigrants, transgender people, and people of color.
"Yes, the oligarchs ARE enormously powerful. They have endless amounts of money. They control our economy. They own much of the media. They have enormous influence over our political system," said Sanders. "But, from the bottom of my heart, I am convinced that they can be beaten."
"If we stand together and not let them divide us up by the color of our skin or where we were born or our religion or sexual orientation; if we bring our people together around an agenda that works for the many and not the few—there is nothing in the world that can stop us," he said.
In his address, Sanders remained laser-focused on issues that impact working people—raising the federal minimum wage of just $7.25 per hour to a living wage of $17 per hour, repealing the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling to end corporate influence over elections, and Trump's desire to pass a "big, beautiful" budget that would cut Medicaid by $880 billion, leaving up to 36 million Americans, including millions of children, without health insurance.
His response to the State of the Union address contrasted sharply with parts of the Democratic Party's official response given by Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who spoke out against the "unprecedented giveaway" Trump wants to give "to his billionaire friends" but also signaled the party leadership's disinterest in focusing primarily on issues that impact working people when she spoke positively about former Republican President Ronald Reagan.
"After the spectacle that just took place in the Oval Office last week, Reagan must be rolling over in his grave," Slotkin said, referring to Trump and Vice President JD Vance's attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. "As a Cold War kid, I'm thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s."
Historian Moshik Temkin wondered why the Democratic Party chose to hold up Reagan as a positive example of a president—considering his deregulatory, anti-taxation policies and promotion of so-called "trickle-down economics" that helped pave the way for rising economic inequality and the decimation of the middle class—instead of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who introduced Social Security, reformed the financial system, and provided relief to people who were suffering due to the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression.
"Who was this for?" asked historian Michael Brenes of Slotkin's address. "You don't rebuild the New Deal coalition with Cold War nostalgia and deference to Ronald Reagan. A better message: national security begins with economic security."
In contrast, Sanders' response, said former journalist and author Paul Handley, "is how you respond to Trump and define him for the American people."
Sanders ended his address by acknowledging the challenge of fighting against a political system increasingly controlled by billionaires, but warned, "despair is not an option."
"Giving up is not acceptable," said Sanders. "And none of us have the privilege of hiding under the covers. The stakes are just too high. Let us never forget. Real change only occurs when ordinary people stand up against oppression and injustice—and fight back."
"We can win. We will win," he concluded. "Let's go forward together."
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