Tuesday, June 02, 2026
Roman Emperors Provided Bread And Circuses - Trump's Providing The Circus But No Bread
The following is just part of an excellent post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
The June 24 event will be Trump in front of a crowd at the National Mall, hand-picked artists who didn’t pull out, and a brand of “patriotism” carefully scrubbed of anyone who might complicate the picture.
The “State Fair” will run sixteen days. Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida are still on the bill. Behind it all, Trump is preparing to host a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4, the actual anniversary, with up to twenty-five thousand spectators watching men beat each other senseless in a cage on the same grounds where Lincoln walked. Dana White is producing. Ivanka is helping organize.
The Roman emperors understood the deal they were making with the public: bread and circuses, panem et circenses, the cheap grain and the gladiator games delivered together, because if you fed them and entertained them they wouldn’t ask awkward questions about the empire. Trump has inverted the formula. He’s keeping the circus and taking away the bread.
On July 4, 2025 — exactly one year before this 250th celebration he’s calling a birthday party — Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will cut at the end of this year federal Medicaid spending by roughly $911 billion, along with $186 billion in cuts to SNAP, to fund their tax cuts.
— The American Medical Association estimates that 11.8 million people will directly lose health coverage.
— The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that up to 14.9 million peoplecould be put at risk by the byzantine work requirements alone.
— The Joint Economic Committee found that under the proposed cuts, 10 million children could lose their health insurance, one in eight kids in this country.
— At least two million children are estimated to lose food assistance under the SNAP changes.
All to pay for another massive tax cut for Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet.
Set those numbers against what Trump’s spending on the spectacle. The ballroom built atop the rubble of the East Wing has now climbed to $300 to $400 million and Republicans in Congress are trying to appropriate a billion dollars for it, presumably so Trump can keep all those “donations.”
The “Independence Arch” — what Washington has already nicknamed the “Arc de Trump,” planted at Memorial Bridge to block the view of the Arlington National Cemetery where American soldiers are buried — is projected at around $100 million, with $15 million of that already pulled from a taxpayer-funded endowment through the Office of Management and Budget.
The pool job is at least $2 million. The UFC fight on the South Lawn is whatever it costs to host twenty-five thousand people for a brutal cage match at the President’s residence.
We’re talking, conservatively, half a billion dollars or more in personal vanity projects from a president who just stripped a trillion dollars from the medical care of poor Americans and a couple hundred billion more from their food. All to glorify himself.
— At the end of this year, a single father in Ohio is going to watch his SNAP benefits drop by an average of $146 a month so Trump can paint a memorial pool the color of a Mar-a-Lago hot tub.
— A grandmother in Kentucky will lose Medicaid coverage so Trump can build a French-style triumphal arch with his name nicknamed onto it.
— A kid in Louisiana — one of the states hardest hit by the Medicaid cuts — will lose her health insurance so Dana White can promote a cage fight on the White House lawn.
Panem et circenses without the panem. Just the circus, paid for by the bread he ripped out of their hands.
The Founders fought a war to be done with this sort of obscenity. They fought to be done with kings who put their names on buildings, with sovereigns who treated national wealth as personal decoration, with rulers who staged spectacles to glorify themselves while the poor lined up at almshouses.
The whole point of the experiment that began two hundred fifty years ago this summer was that we wouldn’t have a man who lived in a palace and stamped his initials on the country.
The arch wasn’t supposed to happen. The ballroom wasn’t supposed to happen. The triumphal procession down a repainted Mall, with the music acts replaced by the leader himself in front of a hand-picked crowd, wasn’t supposed to happen.
Monday, June 01, 2026
It's Labor Vs. Capital (And Labor Is Losing)
The following post is by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:
It’s impossible to understand American politics without also understanding the American economy (and vice versa). Politics and economics may be different disciplines, but they’re two sides of the same coin.
This came home to me again when I saw Thursday’s report on the U.S. gross domestic product.
Numbers can be pretty boring, but bear with me. Worker compensation — wages and benefits — grew 0.8 percent from the fourth quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026. Corporate profits grew 2.7 percent.
When you adjust for inflation, hourly wages have risen 3 percent since the end of 2019. Corporate profits have risen 50 percent.
Workers’ share of the nation’s income has now dropped to the lowest it’s been since records began in 1947. Profits’ share is the highest since 1950.
Most people who depend on wages for a living are struggling, while a small minority at the top who own most shares of stock and private equity — that is, people who rely on capital gains — have never had it as good.
The trend toward lower wages and higher profits began in the 1980s, increased in the 2000s, picked up speed after the pandemic, and is about to explode as Artificial Intelligence takes over.
In coming months, three companies centered on AI will go public — SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic — with expected valuations of around $1 trillion each (reflecting the gargantuan profits investors expect). But what about workers?
This is not just morally wrong. “Income from capital risks replacing income from labor,” Pope Leo wrote in Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical letter devoted to the effects of AI, released this week.
It also threatens the future stability of our economic and political system.
What accounts for the increasing shift of the American economy from wages to profits, even before AI?
One big reason is monopolization. The economy has become concentrated in a few giant corporations with the power both to raise prices and keep wages down.
Sure, there are still lots of small businesses and mom-and-pop operations. But the gravitational center of the U.S. economy is now Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Kroger, United Health, Cigna, CVS, AT&T, Verizon, ExxonMobil, Chevron, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Vanguard, Fidelity, Blackstone, Apollo, and KKR.
These giants control large swathes of the economy. They also exert significant political power. They’re like black holes in space, sucking in vast sums of money.
Their political power makes it impossible to know whether government policy is based on the public interest or private gain.
Consider Trump’s war in Iran and its resulting surge in energy prices. The energy-price rise has caused after-tax disposable income to drop and the profits of energy companies to soar. Did Trump decide to go to war because he thought it necessary, or because Big Oil nudged him into it?
Workers, meanwhile, no longer have any countervailing power. In the 1950s, over a third of workers in the private sector were unionized. That gave them enough bargaining power to claim a significant share of the total economy. Now, only 6 percent of workers are unionized. Their bargaining power has been further eroded by their easy replacement by lower-wage workers in Asia and by software. AI will further erode it.
This trend is not sustainable. It feeds growing anger at the system, which demagogues like Trump exploit for their own ends.
What should be done? Let me list five steps (I’ll go into each in greater detail in coming months).
1. For one thing, we’re going to need a new era of antitrust. Giant corporations will have to be busted up.
2. We’ll also need to tax those at the top, especially on the value of their ownership of capital. (California voters will likely be asked to vote on a billionaire tax in November.)
3. We’ll need to regulate AI and simultaneously provide a universal basic income to cushion those who lose their jobs because of it.
4. Universal health care will be a necessity (perhaps via Medicare for all) along with subsidized childcare and eldercare.
5. Finally, we’ll need to distribute capital far more widely, so that the broad American public has a palpable stake in the rip-roaring stock market and the AI tsunami.
None of these fixes will be easy. Even if all are implemented, they may still be insufficient.
But, my friends, we have no choice but to try. We’ve already witnessed what mass anger can do to America, in the form of Trump. Unless we act soon, we’re likely to have Trumps, or worse, as far as the eye can see.
The Destruction Of The Once Respected DOJ
The following post is by Hayes Brown at MS NOW:
The Justice Department’s lawyers were once considered the gold standard for prosecutors, with an appointment as U.S. attorney considered a pinnacle of many careers. But over the past year and a half, the bar has been dropping considerably. With an unprecedented spate of grand jury rejections and judicial admonishments, the DOJ’s credibility has eroded to the point that courts should no longer trust the men and women who are meant to speak on behalf of the United States at trials.
We’re witnessing a downward spiral precipitated by the Trump administration prioritizing loyalty to the MAGA agenda over hiring and retaining qualified legal candidates. Many of the lawyers who are now serving under acting Attorney General Todd Blanche have little to no courtroom experience under their belts. As a result, even what is normally considered the easiest part of a criminal case has become a minefield of uncertainty and hotbed of misconduct.
Federal prosecutors hoping to convince a jury to convict must provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty. Obtaining an indictment from a grand jury, on the other hand, merely requires convincing a panel of citizens that there’s enough evidence for a prosecution to proceed to trial. While President Donald Trump has pushed for more politicized prosecutions from the DOJ, a growing number of grand juries have refused to accept the charges presented to them — and some federal lawyers are now willing to do whatever it takes to move their prosecutions forward.
Last week, a federal judge in Chicago threw out charges against four Democratic activists, the last remaining members of the so-called Broadview Six arrested last year during a protest outside an immigration detention center. The feds had already dropped a felony charge of conspiracy to impede a federal agent, leaving only a misdemeanor charge of simple assault of a federal officer.
Days before the trial was to begin, as The New York Times reported, the judge called in the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros, to call him to task:
The blunders shocked the judge, April M. Perry, who recounted from the bench on Thursday how prosecutors had spoken to grand jurors outside the grand jury room — a major breach of protocol — and had improperly coached them that the evidence they had presented was particularly strong.
The prosecutors also stacked the deck in their own favor by removing from the panel some grand jurors who had voted against them when considering an earlier version of the charges. Making matters even worse, they tried to hide these maneuvers by redacting the grand jury transcripts — that is, until Judge Perry ordered them to give her the full copies.
The situation was even worse in Wyoming, where a panel of three federal judges tossed nine indictments from U.S. Attorney Darin Smith, who had never held a prosecutorial role before his appointment last August. As their ruling noted, Smith told grand jurors before presenting any evidence that the people he was charging were all “‘bad guys,’ ‘murderers,’ ‘bad people’ and ‘not run of the mill criminals seen in state court” — but only one of the defendants was indicted for murder. During a break, Smith then handed out his business card and, according to his own court filing, “invited the grand jury panel members to reach out to him.”
It’s the kind of basic foolishness that even an attorney in their first year out of law school should know to avoid. But then again, the Justice Department did recently open the door to hiring freshly minted lawyers in response to the dwindling pool of more qualified candidates. According to Bloomberg Law, the department’s Civil Division has even resorted to offering $25,000 signing bonuses for lawyers “investigating youth transgender treatments and litigating the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.” The division, which is responsible for defending the government in court against lawsuits, is also reportedly handing out a “retention incentive allowance” to keep what staffers it still has from jumping ship.
In some ways, the struggle the DOJ is facing is unsurprising — and can still be plenty harmful. When autocracies purge experienced leaders and experts, the vacuum is mostly likely to be filled with mediocrity. New research from German political scientists Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel examined the motivations for government officials during Argentina’s “Dirty War” in the 1970s and ’80s. Their work illustrates how many of the midlevel figures carrying out the regime’s orders weren’t extremists or victims but instead, as The New York Times’ Amanda Taub framed it, “middling workers trying to get ahead.”
The embarrassing level of mediocracy on display at the Justice Department feels apt in that context. Few of the lawyers still defending the government’s mass detention program are likely to be as zealous as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
Instead, more are most likely akin to Robert Keenan, who is currently acting deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s Civil Rights Division, one of the top roles in a storied office. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled Keenan, describing him as someone “passed over for promotions repeatedly in his 24-year career” and “still handling low-level cases typically reserved for first-year federal prosecutors” before his meteoric rise under Trump. He’s presented as typical of a group that has “been rewarded with more power and responsibility by an administration that increasingly prizes loyalty above legal pedigree.”
It’s troubling that several judges have already told federal lawyers that they have lost the “presumption of regularity,” the assumption that the government is telling the truth in court. It is likewise concerning that grand juries can no longer accept that they are being told the truth when presented with evidence of a crime. While there’s some bit of hope — not to mention schadenfreude — that comes from seeing this Justice Department fall on its face, each failure on its part helps erode faith in the legal system. It will be a long, hard road to rebuilding the trust that the Trump administration has squandered with its reckless, baseless persecutions.
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