Saturday, August 01, 2026
Fox News Poll Has Talarico Leading Paxton (And Gov Race Within A Point)
The charts above reflect the results of the Fox News Poll -- done between July 23rd and 27th of a sample of 1,006 registered voters in Texas. The poll's margin of error is 3 points.
The U.S. Labor Force Is Shrinking (And That's Not Good)
Robert Reich comments on our shrinking labor force:
This month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the labor participation rate — the percentage of people of working age who are working or actively looking for work — is now down to 61.5 percent. That’s 0.6 percentage points lower than it was at the first of the year.
In other words, the U.S. economy has lost 1 million workers since January.
It’s the lowest level of labor participation in 50 years outside the pandemic.
The official unemployment rate is 4.2 percent, which is considered relatively good. But don’t be fooled. That’s 4.2 percent of people who are working or actively seeking work. If you add in all the people who are no longer working or seeking work, the official rate would be far higher.
What accounts for the disappearance of so many workers? Some baby boomers have taken early retirement. Some workers have been caught up in Trump’s undocumented dragnet.
But the biggest reason is the scarcity of stable, well-paying jobs.
Lots of people have concluded it’s not worth it. The cost commuting to — or paying for childcare in order to hold down — a shitty and insecure job has led them to give up on paid work altogether. They’re living more simply, moving in with parents or friends or adult children, or just doing without.
The best measure of how America is doing isn’t the unemployment rate, or the stock market, or the rate of economic growth, or the inflation rate, or the average wage.
It’s how well most Americans are living. The reality is that most Americans are struggling.
Our History Is Too Important To Let The Trump Regime Rewrite It
The following is part of an excellent article by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
— George Orwell, 1984
It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, DC warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released without fanfare on the 4th of July.
The Council itself was packed with Trump with leftovers from rightwing think tanks and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, and Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute.
It claims that the American Museum of American History has displays that cover the fights for women’s and civil rights and to end slavery along with the positive role immigrants, women, and queer people have played in our country, which it finds deplorable and un-American. It wrote that Smithsonian leadership and museum curators:
“…have directed the museum’s mission away from historical education and scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated, and toward extreme political activism, rooted in Marxism, to divide, dispirit and discourage Americans. … [And have] denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians and Americans” while focusing on “race in areas where it has little to no historical relevance.”
Wild, over-the-top bullshit complaints that our museums are accurately portraying American history notwithstanding, this is far more sinister and dire than it seems.
Pretty much every dictator in history, both ancient and modern, has rewritten his nation’s history because, as Orwell noted, those who control the past can use it to reprogram the future.
Dictators and wannabe dictators rewrite the past to legitimize their rule, typically portraying themselves as representing the inevitable culmination of history, as the nation’s savior (“I, alone, can fix it!”), and as the rightful heir to a mythical glorious tradition like Trump is doing by trying to reinvent America as an exclusively white Christian nation.
In the process, they typically erase their rivals (Trump has replaced Biden’s picture in the White House with a photo of an autopen), reframe negatively their political opponents (ditto), and use the threat of erasure from history as a weapon against their own allies to keep them bowing and scraping (ditto). . . .
The simple reality is that in democracies it’s historians, journalists, courts, archives, universities, and scholars who write history and can challenge official narratives. Debate is expected, and interpretations can change as new evidence comes to light, like we saw here recently with the 1619 Project.
In dictatorships, on the other hand, the state typically monopolizes education, media, and archives, suppresses competing interpretations of history, and punishes those who publicly contradict the official version.
All of which is why it’s so important that we don’t treat the efforts by Trump and his neofascist lickspittles to rewrite America’s history into a sanitized white male supremacist mold as if it’s just some sort of aberration or sick joke.
This is serious stuff, and serious people within this administration are dedicated to destroying our and — particularly — our children’s understanding of the truly revolutionary and progressive history of this nation.
They’re trying to induce a national amnesia, stretching back through the history of the Klan, the Civil War, and even the American Revolution.
We must push back against them boldly and loudly, and when they’re gone we’re going to have a huge job cleaning up the fascist mess they’re making.
Friday, July 31, 2026
Public Says Trump Not Paying Enough Attention To The Most Important Problems
The chart above reflects the results of the CNN / SSRS Poll -- done between July 23rd and 27th of a nationwide sample of 1,225 adults, with a 3.2 point margin of error.
Trump's Job Approval Is Underwater In Every Poll
The chart above is from RealClearPolling.com. Every July poll shows Trump to be underwater. The RCP average of all polls has him at 39.7% approval and 58.1% disapproval.
Corporations Are Using Trump's Tariffs To Make Exorbitant Profits From Consumers
There's a reason why corporations have been silent about Trump's tariffs lately. It's because they are using the tariffs as an excuse to raise prices and make exorbitant profits. Robert Reich explains:
As Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran drive up prices of everything from oil to steel, you’d think big American corporations would be screaming bloody hell. Presumably, Trump’s tariffs and war are squeezing their profits just as they’re squeezing the wallets of average Americans.
To the contrary, corporate America is quietly encouraging both Trump’s war and Trump’s tariffs. Why?
One possibility is they’re raking in money off the war as defense contractors and suppliers.
Some surely are, but this can’t account for the acquiescence if not outright support by most big American corporations that have nothing to do with the defense-industrial complex.
Another possibility is they don’t want to piss off Trump, fearing his retaliation.
But if they were really concerned about the negative effects of Trump’s war and his tariffs on their bottom lines, surely they’d be using their armies of lobbyists and piles of campaign contributions to stop his war and his tariffs. After all, that’s what the armies and piles are for.
There’s a much simpler explanation for corporate America’s silence if not encouragement. In point of fact, both Trump’s war and Trump’s tariffs are helping their bottom lines.
Trump’s war and his tariffs are allowing domestic U.S. producers to raise their prices to match the elevated prices of imports. And those who aren’t directly affected are using the higher import costs as excuses to raise their prices, too.
Presto! — corporate profits have exploded, and their stock prices have soared.
But American consumers are getting shafted. Both Trump’s war and his tariffs are pushing up prices for a vast range of goods and services. The result is a massive redistribution of income and wealth from American consumers to big American corporations.
This is the story of the American political economy under Trump that’s rarely if ever told, but it’s critical to understanding why Trump has been getting away with his war in Iran and his tariffs without much political opposition.
Start with oil.
Brent crude is now selling for $90.05 a barrel. If the war drags on it could push crude prices much higher, especially if it further depletes oil inventories, and spreads to Houthi militants starting a naval blockade in the Red Sea and to other Gulf states.
Oil prices are set globally. As global supplies dwindle, oil prices rise across the board — including prices charged by domestic U.S. producers. They’re enjoying a huge windfall.
With crude oil prices averaging $95 a barrel between March and June — up from about $66 before the war — ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Occidental Petroleum have collectively raked in some $31 billion in earnings for the second quarter of this year, according to FactSet estimates.
That’s up from about $12 billion for the same period last year.
These windfall profits have helped boost Big Oil’s stock prices. Big Oil’s investors and executives (who are paid partly in shares of stock) have done wonderfully well.
But American consumers are bearing the burden, as gas prices once again soar past $4 a gallon, a dollar more than they were before Trump started his war on February 28.
So is it any wonder that Big Oil isn’t criticizing Trump’s war, and is quietly rooting it on?
Or consider steel. Trump imposed steel tariffs of 50 percent in March and June 2025. These tariffs have driven up steel prices in the United States.
The tariffs have been a boon to American steelmakers, who have raised the prices they charge their American customers to match the higher prices now charged for steel from abroad.
As a result, leading American steel producers like Nucor and Steel Dynamics report significant year-over-year earnings increases.
Nucor’s profits in the second quarter of 2026 were $1.16 billion, up from $603 million a year earlier. Steel Dynamics has reported a second-quarter income of $534.1 million, nearly double its net income compared to the same period last year. A third U.S. producer, Cleveland-Cliffs, earned $97 million in the second quarter of this year (before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), compared to a loss of $213 million last year, and the firm anticipates doubling earnings next quarter.
Who’s bearing these higher costs? American consumers of steel — in the prices of everything we buy that contains steel (such as cars and appliances).
The Producer Price Index (a widely used proxy for input costs) for steel mill products is now sitting at its highest point since May 2023.
American-based producers that utilize oil and steel have been able to pass those costs on to their customers without harming their profit margins. Some corporations that don’t depend on oil or steel have used the higher import costs as excuses to raise their prices, too.
Hence, Trump’s war and Trump’s tariffs are wins for corporate America. Profit margins are up, the value of shares on the stock market are up. Shareholders are happy.
Big corporations aren’t raising a fuss about the war or tariffs because they like what’s happening.
But American consumers are getting shafted. Their wages aren’t keeping up with the price increases. Yet they have no alternative but to pay the higher costs for energy and steel and everything else — which is the whole point.
As the inflationary effects of Trump’s war and his tariffs (taxes) on imports spread throughout the economy, they’re hiding what’s really occurring: an upward redistribution from consumers to big American corporations.
American consumers need to know the truth: Two of the major reasons why everything is less affordable are Trump’s war and his tariffs.
Consumers may not have armies of lobbyists and piles of campaign contributions to do their bidding, but they do have a way to express their disapproval. They can vote out Trump Republicans on November 3.
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